Honda Ridgeline Camping Guide: The Unibody Truck With a Trunk

Here's the spec that reframes the whole Honda Ridgeline camping conversation, and it's the one the lazy comparisons get wrong: it is a unibody, not a body-on-frame truck. It shares its bones with the Honda Pilot and Passport, runs standard all-wheel drive and an independent rear suspension, and as a result it rides, steers and parks like a comfortable SUV that happens to have an open bed bolted on the back. That's not an insult — it's the entire point.

So this guide refuses to treat the Ridgeline like a junior Tacoma. The Tacoma sells trail capability and a hybrid that powers your camp; the Colorado sells off-road hardware per dollar. The Ridgeline sells something neither can: a livable daily SUV that camps, with two genuinely unique party tricks — a lockable, weatherproof trunk built into the bed and a dual-action tailgate that swings down or sideways like a door. Those are real, useful, segment-exclusive camping features, and they deserve the lead.

I trust the spec sheet over the badge, so the honesty cuts both ways. The Ridgeline has no low-range transfer case and modest ground clearance, which means it is a graded-road and overlanding-lite truck, not a rock-crawler — ask it to do hardcore trails and it will disappoint. Match it to where you actually camp, though, and it's one of the most pleasant rigs in the class. Everything below is built on Honda's published specs and reviewer consensus, not a rig I'm pretending I wheeled across a desert — and the honesty about its limits is exactly what lets me be enthusiastic about its real strengths, which most rivals genuinely cannot match. For the wider field, our camping-vehicle comparison sets the scene.

Start with the Ridgeline's signature, because nothing else in the segment offers it. Beneath the bed floor is a lockable, weather-sealed trunk of roughly 7 cubic feet — a real compartment with a lid, a latch and a drain plug. For a camper, that single feature solves problems other trucks fight with bins and bungee cords.

What it actually does for you at camp is the interesting part:

• Secure, dry storage for the gear you don't want stolen or rained on — the power station, tools, valuables — locked under the bed, out of sight, while a topper or rooftop tent handles the sleeping.
• A cooler or wash basin: the drain plug means you can fill it with ice and drinks, then pull the plug to empty it, or use it as a deep sink for dishes. Owners genuinely do this; it's not a gimmick.
• Below-floor capacity that frees the bed surface above for a sleeping platform or a rooftop-tent rack, so your storage and your bed don't fight for the same space.

The dual-action tailgate is the trunk's natural partner: swing it sideways like a door and you can reach into the trunk and load the bed without leaning over a dropped gate. Together they make the Ridgeline's load area genuinely cleverer than a conventional pickup's, which is exactly the kind of livability advantage a unibody truck is supposed to deliver.

There's a security angle worth dwelling on, because it changes how you camp. On an open-bed truck, anything left at an unattended site is either visible and stealable or buried in a soft bag; the lockable trunk gives the Ridgeline a genuine safe. Stash the power station, the laptop and the keys-and-wallet there while you hike, and you don't spend the day worrying about the truck. Pair that with the composite bed's resistance to scratches and you have a load area you can treat roughly and trust completely — the kind of quiet practicality that doesn't show up in a horsepower figure but matters every single trip.

The bed itself is short and made of composite rather than steel, and both facts matter for camping. It runs about 64 inches (5'4") long, stretching to roughly 84 inches with the tailgate down, is about 50 inches wide between the wheel wells — wide enough to lay four-foot material flat — and roughly 17 inches deep. That 64 inches is shorter than most adults are tall, so sleeping flat means dropping the tailgate and using the full 84 inches, building a platform, or going up top in a rooftop tent.

The composite construction is a quiet camping win the steel-bed trucks don't have. It won't rust, it shrugs off dents and scratches from gear, and it's quieter and warmer to the touch than a steel bed on a cold morning. It also takes anchor points and tie-downs well. To turn the length into a sleeping plan, our mattress-sizing guide and our DIY platform guide both apply directly — just build the platform low, because the 17 inches of depth is your headroom budget under any cap.

The 50-inch width between the wheel wells is the underrated number here. It's wide enough to lay a sheet of plywood or a sleeping platform flat without notching around the wells, which makes the Ridgeline's bed unusually easy to build in — a rectangle you don't have to fight. For two people sleeping crossways on a tailgate-down setup, that width also matters more than the length, since you're using the 84-inch dimension front-to-back and the 50-plus inches side-to-side. It's a small thing the spec sheet lists and nobody talks about, but it's why a Ridgeline build tends to come together faster and cleaner than the same build in a narrower-welled rival.

The 64-inch bed gives you the same three honest options every short-bed truck does, with a Ridgeline twist. Drop the dual-action tailgate and the bed opens to about 84 inches, enough for most adults to stretch out with a pad bridging the gate — the simplest setup, and the dual-action gate makes climbing in and out easier than a conventional drop gate. Build a platform over the bed and you get a flat, full-width sleeping deck with the in-bed trunk still accessible below for storage. Or mount a rooftop tent on a bed rack for an off-ground, full-length bed that frees the bed floor entirely.

The unibody ride pays off here in a way trail trucks don't advertise: because the Ridgeline drives like an SUV, a rooftop tent's weight up high hurts its manners less on pavement than it would on a tall body-on-frame truck, and the comfortable ride means you arrive at camp less beaten up. A solo camper is usually happiest with a topper-and-platform build, sealing the bed into a dry room with the trunk as a bonus locker; two people may prefer the rooftop tent's full length. Pick the surface itself with our sleeping-pad guide.

Whichever you choose, the in-bed trunk quietly improves the setup, because it absorbs the storage that otherwise competes with your sleeping space. On a conventional truck, a platform build forces a constant trade between bed for sleeping and bed for gear; on the Ridgeline, the gear drops below the floor and the whole surface stays yours. That's the unibody-and-trunk combination paying off in a way that's hard to appreciate until you've lived with a less clever truck and spent a weekend shuffling bins to get to the mattress.

Two places the Ridgeline asks you to be realistic, and a spec-first guide owes you both straight. First, power: where equipped, the in-bed outlet is a small one (on the order of 150 to 400 watts) — fine for charging and lights, nowhere near the Tacoma hybrid's 2400-watt bed inverter. As with the Colorado, the fix is a portable power station, which runs a fridge for days and lives nicely in that lockable in-bed trunk — a tidy pairing the steel-bed trucks can't quite match.

Second, the trail limit, because this is where the unibody truth bites. The Ridgeline has no low-range transfer case, modest ground clearance and street-biased tires, so it is built for graded forest roads, gravel, snow and light dirt — the standard AWD and independent suspension handle those confidently and comfortably. What it is not is a rock-crawler: deep ruts, big ledges and technical climbs that a Colorado ZR2 eats will stop a Ridgeline. That's not a flaw, it's a design choice — just buy it knowing the truck you're getting, and pick your sites to match.

Here's the part the trail snobs miss, though: the vast majority of camping happens on exactly the roads the Ridgeline is built for. National-forest gravel, washboard county roads, snowy approaches and packed dirt to a dispersed site are well within standard AWD and good all-season or all-terrain tires, and on those surfaces the Ridgeline's comfortable ride and confident handling beat a stiff, body-on-frame truck that punishes you for the miles. The honest framing isn't 'the Ridgeline is weak off-road' — it's 'the Ridgeline is matched to where most people actually go,' and it's the rare buyer whose real camping demands more than it offers. Be that buyer honestly, not aspirationally, and you'll pick the right truck.

The Ridgeline's storage story is its strongest suit, so use it. The in-bed trunk holds the secure and the messy-but-sealed; the bed above takes the platform or rooftop tent; and the wide, flat composite floor handles bins and a drawer system if you want a permanent galley. The dual-action tailgate, swung sideways, turns the back of the truck into an easy-access work zone for cooking and loading.

A tote-based kitchen suits the Ridgeline particularly well: keep the stove and cookware in one bin and the food in another, cook at the open tailgate at waist height, and drop the whole kit into the in-bed trunk when you're done — sealed, locked and out of the weather, which no open-bed rival can do. The unbreakable rule still applies: never run a stove or any combustion inside an enclosed topper, because the carbon-monoxide and fire risk is real. Cook at the open tailgate, and let the trunk do the storing.

A workflow the Ridgeline enables that no other truck quite does: keep the trunk as your 'wet and dirty' zone and the bed platform as your 'clean and dry' zone. Muddy boots, the camp shower bag, the dish basin, the cooler that drips — all of it goes in the sealed, drainable trunk where a hose-out at the end of the trip cleans the whole compartment. Meanwhile the sleeping deck above stays clean, and the in-cab space stays civilized because the truck rides like an SUV and you're not tracking grit into a work-truck interior. That clean/dirty separation is exactly the kind of livability that makes people who camp often, rather than occasionally, fall for the Ridgeline.

A topper-enclosed Ridgeline bed fogs exactly like any sealed sleeping space — the composite walls don't breathe any better than steel, so two people overnight will dampen bedding unless you set up airflow on purpose. The fix is the same everywhere: crack windows on opposite sides for cross-flow, add a small USB fan, and use a roof vent where fitted to exhaust the warm, moist air that rises.

Cold weather rewards the same discipline. An enclosed cap holds heat reasonably, and a properly rated bag plus a foam pad to block the cold radiating up off the bed floor carries most three-season nights with no powered heat; a 12-volt electric blanket off your power station is the safe way to add warmth, never a fuel heater inside the cap. The classic mistake is sealing everything tight to trap heat — you wake up in a wet bag instead, because the trapped moisture has nowhere to go. Crack the windows even when it's cold. Our condensation explainer covers the physics, and a rooftop tent's mesh breathes far better if you camp mostly in wet country.

One Ridgeline-specific comfort note: because the cabin is SUV-quiet and well-sealed, some owners skip the bed entirely in bad weather and recline the rear or fold the seats to sleep one person inside the cab, using the topper bed for gear instead. It's not as flat or as roomy as a proper bed build, but it's a genuinely warm, dry, bug-free fallback the bed-focused trucks don't really offer, and it leans on the very car-like interior that defines the Ridgeline. Treat it as the foul-weather backup rather than the plan, but know it's there — flexibility is part of what you're buying with a truck this civilized.

Line the three midsize trucks up and the Ridgeline's pitch is unmistakable, because it's the odd one out by design. All three put you in the bed, but they camp for different people.

Versus the Tacoma and Colorado — both body-on-frame trucks with low-range and real trail hardware — the Ridgeline trades hardcore off-road capability for a smoother ride, easier daily livability, and its two exclusive tricks: the in-bed trunk and the dual-action tailgate. The Tacoma counters with its hybrid bed inverter and a long-bed option; the Colorado with its locker-equipped ZR2 and value. If your camping involves technical trails, buy one of those instead. If it's pavement, graded roads and established or lightly-dispersed sites — which is where most people actually camp — the Ridgeline is the most comfortable, most convenient truck of the three to live with every day.

The Ridgeline's distinct identity: the car-truck — an SUV-smooth unibody with a genuine bed and storage cleverness no rival offers, for the camper who wants the utility of a truck without the compromises of one. Just respect the trail limit and it over-delivers on everything else.

Picture a Ridgeline with a topper, a platform and a power station, because that's the build that leans into the truck's strengths. The platform lives in the bed and the in-bed trunk holds the power station and the valuables, locked and dry. Getting camp-ready means loading food into a bin and the cooler — or filling the drainable trunk with ice directly — and dropping a pad and bag on the deck. The comfortable AWD drive to the trailhead is itself part of the appeal.

At the site, setup is almost nothing: swing the dual-action tailgate open like a door, lift out the kitchen bin, plug the fridge into the power station in the trunk, and crack the side windows with a fan running. The bed is already a bed. In the morning it reverses just as fast — bag and pad stow, the trunk locks, the tailgate closes, and the Ridgeline drives home as the quiet, comfortable SUV-with-a-bed it always was. Plan the trip with our trip-planning guide and round out the kit with our essentials checklist.

What the routine really shows is that the Ridgeline removes friction the other trucks leave in. There's no leaning over a dropped gate, no hunting for a place to lock valuables, no jarring ride to recover from, no rust to baby on the bed. You arrive relaxed, the safe is built in, the gate opens like a door, and the truck you camped out of is the same comfortable thing you'll commute in Monday. For someone who camps a dozen weekends a year and drives the truck the other 300 days, that everyday-livability dividend is the whole argument — and it's an argument the spec-chasers who only count ground clearance never quite hear.

The Honda Ridgeline is the camping truck for people who don't really want a truck: a unibody with standard AWD that rides like an SUV, a rustproof ~64-inch composite bed, and two features no rival has — a lockable, drainable in-bed trunk and a dual-action tailgate. The honest catch is no low-range and modest clearance, so it's a graded-road and overlanding-lite truck, not a rock-crawler.

Cut through it and the Ridgeline decision is about honesty with yourself. If you camp on pavement, gravel and graded forest roads and value a comfortable daily drive plus genuinely clever storage, nothing in the class is more pleasant to live with — the in-bed trunk alone solves problems other trucks never address. If your sites require low-range and clearance, the body-on-frame Tacoma or Colorado are the right tools and the Ridgeline is the wrong one. Match the truck to your terrain and the choice makes itself.

From there the build is straightforward: a topper or rooftop tent over the composite bed, a platform with the trunk as a bonus locker beneath, a power station to cover the small bed outlet, real ventilation under the cap, and the kitchen run at the dual-action tailgate. Do that and the Ridgeline becomes the most livable basecamp of the midsize trucks — right up to the edge of the trail, where you should already have chosen a different truck. Our camping-vehicle comparison finishes the call.

Bought for the right reasons, it's the truck you'll actually want to drive home in after a long weekend — and the one that made the weekend easier in the first place.