Sometimes, a tiny spark of an idea can illuminate some pretty cool things. When I came up with the plan for my daughter and I to camp our way through British Columbia this summer with an electric vehicle, I knew I had to find a trailer that was small and lightweight enough that it wouldn’t be a massive drain on range. What I didn’t know, though, was whether such a thing was out there. (To be fair, I also didn’t know if the zero-emission camping trip I envisioned was possible at all without some serious headaches. It turns out it was; you can read about our adventure here.
I soon found out the answer was already waiting for us in B.C. Northern Teardrop Trailers, a small and independent trailer manufacturer based in the Kootenays, is the brainchild of Dale Olinyk. He hand-builds every tiny trailer himself, maxing out at 25 per year. Though he didn’t know it as he set up shop, Olinyk’s small and lightweight trailers are keeping outdoor adventure accessible as we transition to EVs and sustainable travel.
Olinyk met us himself in Canmore, Alberta, to hand over one of his 970-pound Squaredrop trailers as we started our adventure. Over the next three weeks, the Squaredrop accompanied us from Banff through B.C.’s four Rocky Mountain national parks, through the Okanagan Valley, into the Lower Mainland, and across Vancouver Island. We’ve been road tripping across Canada for more than a decade, and this trailer played a big part in making this one of our most memorable journeys yet.
Camping trailers hand-built in B.C.’s Kootenay Rockies
Olinyk came up with the idea to start building teardrop trailers when he and his wife first went shopping for one themselves.
“We needed a little trailer and we were looking to buy, and then we discovered that we could build these trailers ourselves with a whole bunch of different skills gathered over the years like plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and business,” Olinyk says. “We went for it, and it took off immediately.”
Northern Teardrop offers four different models. There are two with the traditional teardrop shape, but Olinyk says his Squaredrop design is his most popular. It’s lighter than the original teardrop models, and its boxier frame offers more vertical interior space. There’s also a Squaredrop Overland version with a heavier-duty axle, insulated floor, additional cabinets, and other features for venturing further off the beaten path. With a 114.3-centimetre (45-inch) ceiling and a 148.5 by 202-centimetre (58.5 by 79.5-inch) interior floor, two adults can sleep or lounge in the Squaredrop comfortably.
Plenty of thoughtful details in the trailer
Olinyk regularly camps in his own trailers himself, which shows through in the attention to detail in his products. A powerful extractor fan moves air quickly on even the most stagnant of nights. Two USB-As and a 12-volt port run off a battery, and you can easily monitor its charge via the digital display inside the cabin. If you have a 7-pin connector on your tow vehicle, it will recharge the battery as you’re driving. Our Hyundai Ioniq 5 had a 4-pin connector, so we had to keep an eye on the charge level. We were prepared to boost it manually, but we never needed to during our entire three-week trip.
An optional household plug can connect from inside the trailer to campsite power through an external power point, meaning you can run and charge a wide variety of modern devices. There’s plenty of lighting, including interior switches for exterior lights on each side that let you investigate bumps in the night without having to head outside. Even the small storage shelves in the trailer’s interior front corners have a small lip so tiny items don’t slip and go missing.
To keep the overall footprint small, the interior cabinets share storage space with the kitchen area, which is accessible through a lift-up hatch at the back of the trailer. This has a tray at the bottom that pulls out to act as a preparation area, while a separate pop-up tray at the side of the trailer can support a propane stove. Since the trailer has a long tongue and liftgates or tailgates can open above it with ease, we decided to keep the cabinets as a dedicated kitchen area and store our clothes and other belongings in the car for the duration of our trip, which worked out perfectly.
One of the most damaging issues that can strike trailers is water leaks. Olinyk puts an enormous amount of attention into ensuring water doesn’t intrude behind the walls or into his cabins. We had several days of torrential rain and never spotted a single issue.
“Water can get into the tiniest little places when you’re hurtling down the road,” Olinyk says. “We’ve got a wonderful sealing system. The walls and the roof, the doors, everything is all sealed together. We’re nice and watertight.”
Better yet, Olinyk is continuously mapping out improvements. He says next year’s design will have a slide-out storage tray instead of the cargo box seen on our test unit. He’s also adding stronger magnets to the cabinet doors and installing more shelving.
A trailer that’s easy to get around
Most of my towing experience is with 16- to 20-foot trailers, so nothing enormous. But smaller trailers have a reputation for being more difficult to get around than larger ones in certain situations. On the contrary, I’d say: traveling with the Squaredrop trailer was my most pleasant and low-stress towing experience yet.
With a weight below 1,000 pounds, you can get by without trailer brakes. In fact, once you get up to around 60 kilometres per hour, you’ll hardly notice the trailer is there at all. Visibility is great just using the side mirrors, and I had no trouble at all maneuvering in tighter spaces such as while boarding ferries or skimming past trees around corners in campgrounds. The only time I struggled in the least was while backing up, which is common with smaller trailers since they’re more sensitive to steering angles. But the Squaredrop is so light that I gave up on backing into campsites at all after a while and started just disconnecting the trailer and rolling it into place. There was one hill that took both my teenager and I to get over, but the rest of the time I was able to handle this myself. It’s so much easier than see-sawing back and forth.
For the way we travel, a tiny trailer like this is very helpful. We don’t tend to stay in one place for more than a couple of nights at most, so we set up and tear down campsites frequently. With this trailer, the tear-down checklist is very short:
- Shut off and close the fan
- Close and lock the windows
- Turn off the master power
- Lock the doors
- Remove the wheel chocks
- Plug back into the two vehicles, and you’re ready to hit the road.
Two points to bear in mind
There are a couple of things worth noting about the Squaredrop. One is that this and all Northern Teardrop trailers don’t have built-in water, so you’ll need to handle your hygiene needs entirely separately. Another is that the load floor is quite high, which can make it more challenging to climb into for less limber folk. I would have appreciated a step stool for climbing in and a bit of padding on the door sill to minimize the bruising on the backs of my thighs. But these are easy problems to fix for long-term owners and didn’t dampen my enjoyment of the trailer in the least.
Love tent camping but don’t love dealing with tents anymore? It’s time for a teardrop
I couldn’t be happier that I stumbled across Northern Teardrop for this road trip. For one thing, the trip literally would not have been possible without it. Many campgrounds in western Canada allow hard-sided camping trailers only due to active wildlife such as bears. Between that and needing a very light trailer to tow with an EV, the Squaredrop was just the ticket. In fact, I might have considered buying this trailer for myself: at $20,995 before options for the upcoming 2025 model, it’s a great value for EV drivers and adventurous empty nesters. But by the time we dropped the trailer back off to Olinyk three weeks after picking it up, another customer had already bought it out from under us.
The most valuable lesson I learned in our three weeks on the road is this: a transition to electric driving doesn’t need to spell the end of outdoor adventure.
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