#49 – September 2018 – WY, UT, ID, OR
We are finally slowing down; just four states and ten
campgrounds this month.
We don’t do much detailed planning anymore. We used to, but after a
couple of years we got pretty cavalier about making reservations more than one
campground ahead. This summer, though, we have been quite surprised at the
number of new RV’ers on the road. Lots of other geezers have decided to buy a
trailer or motorhome and (queue Steppenwolf) “head out on the highway, looking
for adventure.” RV sales are at record levels, but there are few new camp sites
being added anywhere, so the competition for space is getting pretty intense,
especially for major attractions like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone,
etc.
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| Wind River Canyon has several miles like this |
We had intended to continue across
Montana
to
Glacier National Park, but fires closed the park.
Despite what I just said, we decided to try to visit Yellowstone and then
Grand Teton on short notice, instead. None of the
campgrounds that are actually within Yellowstone have sites long enough for
Ripley, so I started looking at parks near
Cody and the east
entrance to
Yellowstone. We finally found a
site at
Buffalo Bill State Park
just west of Cody, but had a few days to fill before we could get in. For no
particular reason we chose
Boysen State
Park’s Tough Creek Campground in
Shoshoni just to slooowww down for a bit, and to see that part of Wyoming.
Tough Creek
Campground
is on a peninsula jutting out into the Boysen Reservoir, which is formed by the
Wind River. We almost had the place to
ourselves, and picked a beautiful shaded site right on the shore of the lake.
The dogs had the run of the shoreline around the whole campground off-leash, a
real treat for them. The only negative were the swarms of bugs drawn to our
lights. The screens just couldn’t keep them all out.
The drive from Thermopolis to Tough Creek Campground on US
20 through the Wind River canyon is very
scenic. Boysen Reservoir is very large and surrounded by rolling ranch land
that was pretty brown at this time of year. I’ll bet it’s spectacular in the
spring and early summer. This area is pretty remote and fuel and food need to
be planned. Thermopolis is the only big town around and it’s about 30 miles
from the campground.
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| Searching for the perfect taco |
It seems like everything within 50 miles of Cody is named “Buffalo
Bill
<fill in the blank>”. We were
underwhelmed with the state park at first, but it became one of our favorite
places this trip. Despite what the reservation system claimed, the lake shore
site we had reserved was too small for us and obstructed by trees that would have
added even more scratches to Ripley’s battle-scarred flanks.
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| North Fork Campground |
As we were trying
to figure out what our options were, the park manager showed up, quickly agreed that we wouldn’t fit and sent us a few miles down the road to the park's
North Fork Campground first-come-first-serve section. It
turned out to be one of the best places we’ve stayed this year. The site was
huge, surrounded by grass in a park-like setting along a river with pretty
spectacular cliffs on two sides. No utilities, but we loved it and so did the
dogs.
Cody is clearly a tourist town, and to be fair, it seems to
do a good job at that. It is big enough to have all the services you need, a
good thing because Lucy needed to see a vet. Stephanie White, DVM at
Cody Veterinary Hospital was able to see us
right away and prescribed some medications to treat her problem and to make the
old girl more comfortable. If you need a vet in Cody, go see Dr. White.
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| Bubble, bubble, etc. |
I should have spent more time looking at the map, because
using Cody as a base to explore
Yellowstone is
sub-optimal, at best. Most of the popular sites within the park are much closer
to
the west side than the east. It’s 100
miles from
Buffalo Bill State Park to
Old Faithful, all of it two-lane road. Two major road
construction projects added significantly to the slow pace of the many gawkers
who seemed to have no particular place to go and all year to get there. Despite
being mid-September,
Yellowstone looked full
to me but I was assured that what I considered
crowds were nothing like what they had been
before Labor Day. I can easily foresee the day when you’ll need to make
reservations just to enter this park.
Old
Faithful lived up to our expectations. It is really neat to see steam and
boiling hot water come billowing up out of the ground, especially on a schedule.
Kids of all ages were excited by the show. The visitor center has a pretty
interesting movie about the geyser and the park that is worth seeing. We did see a moose, a long way off, but still, clearly a moose. No buffalo, but we had seen enough of them in
South Dakota.
The bears must have been taking a break after the busy summer season because we didn’t see any of them, either.
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| Colter Bay |
If I’d spent more time planning and map reading, I’d have
realized that Old Faithful is just 40 miles from the Colter Bay RV Park in
Grand Teton National Park, our
next stop. We had planned to stay at Gros Ventre Campground near
Jackson, about 30 miles south of
Colter Bay.
The National Park Service website claimed that space was readily available at Gros Ventre after
Labor Day. That site needs to be revised, because when we arrived on Wednesday
afternoon two weeks after the holiday, there were no sites left for anything
over 30’. Did I mention that RV sales to retirees had exploded? They may be
sold out until the snow falls. We immediately got on the phone
and got the last spot at Colter Bay RV Park for
three times what we planned to pay at Gros Ventre.
The cost aside,
Colter
Bay turned out to be a
neat place to stay and a good base for exploring the area.
Colter Village
is on the
shore of
Jackson Lake,
surrounded by forests and possessing a terrific view of the mountains that
everyone flocks here to see. The general store/deli/gift shop/laundromat/shower
house was also the local Wifi hotspot, so lots of people (including us)
congregated there throughout the day.
It turned out to be possible to get sensory overload in a
place like this and to finally become blasé about the next spectacular pile of rock
or pristine mountain lake that crops up. It takes awhile, but it happens. Judy
Powell (Hi, Judy!) told us that the view from the deck of the restaurant at the
Jackson Lake Lodge
was the best in the park. She’s right, especially when accompanied by a
martini. If I didn’t have to drive, we would have had a couple of martinis
because that view really is special and the drinks were pretty good, too. Unfortunately, smoke from the fires to the west made it hard to get decent pictures.
Michelle Shober had recommended we visit the
National Museum of Wildlife
Art just outside of Jackson. We were very impressed by what we found. If you come to this area, be sure to
add at least a couple of hours to visit this museum. It is filled with an
extensive collection of important, predominantly American wildlife paintings,
drawings and
sculpture that spans at least two centuries. The museum building
itself is pretty interesting and the exhibits are well organized and curated.
We really enjoyed ourselves. There is a café in the museum that has a good
rating, too.
The town of Jackson
reminded me of Cody but on a smaller scale. It exists as a tourist center, but it isn’t tacky at all. Traffic and parking will certainly be an issue during the
summer but wasn't a problem when we visited. Unfortunately, the road to Moose and Teton Village from the north was closed for bridge repair and the other route to those towns would have meant a 50 mile
detour, so we didn’t get to see them this trip. One
tip: Don’t buy fuel at the Chevron station at the north end of Jackson. It’s way, way more expensive than
any other station I saw.
On the way to Jackson we hit a large antelope at about 60 mph. I saw it cross in front of us, but I didn’t see it reverse direction because it was obscured by the side mirror. It hit squarely in the middle of the coach, killing it instantly. I didn’t have time to hit the brakes, but I wouldn’t have been able to avoid it even if I had been able to see it. Most of the damage was to the generator bay cover. I’ll be able to fix most of it when we get to Benson this winter. We also have an air leak that we need to get looked at. Apparently it hit something as it passed under the coach.
We were feeling a little pressure to keep moving west to
make our date to camp host on the Oregon
coast, but we decided to detour through Salt Lake City to see Liesa for a couple of days so it was time to leave.
SLC is just under 300 miles from Colter
Bay, a full day’s run. We
planned a route that minimized interstates and were rewarded by great scenery
for most of the day. We have stayed in North Salt Lake on our other visits, but
decided to try the Salt Lake KOA this time because it is less than two miles from Liesa’s new apartment. It also backs up to the city park that contains one of
our favorite dog parks. Like every KOA we have stayed in the sites are fairly
close together, it's a little expensive and seems overrun with kids. It’s ok
for a couple of nights but we’ll stay at Pony Express RV Park when we return for two weeks around
Thanksgiving.
Kayeanne had flown out from Boston in June to see Liesa, but I hadn’t seen her since Xmas, and neither of us had seen
her new apartment. She looked great. She’s done a "grownup" job on the apartment,
it is nicely decorated and feels quite homey and comfortable. This is her first
time living alone and it seems to be agreeing with her. I’m glad we decided to
make the detour.
We decided to stop at Twin
Falls, Idaho to have
a shop we know there look for an air leak that had occurred when we hit the
antelope. While not a problem, it did need to be attended to. At the same time
I asked them to take a look at the chassis air conditioning. This trip we
decided to try the RV park at the Twin Falls Fairground. The RV park is right
next to the barns and corrals used during the county’s annual farm and livestock
events. The space we got was certainly long enough and it had some shade, but it
was very close to the adjoining site. Luckily, it wasn’t taken during our stay.
They had just built a new shower house, one of the nicest I can remember in
quite a while.
Twin Falls Truck Repair fixed an air leak, but not the major one. We’ll try to get by until we can take it to Kaiser
Brake and Alignment in Eugene.
The air conditioning problem looks like a dead compressor. I’m not sure what to
do about that yet. I can change it, but I don’t have access to the equipment to
evacuate and recharge the Freon in the system. I've got time to procrastinate, it’s
getting cooler now.
We can make the trip across Oregon
to the coast in two days if we have to, but we decided to slow down a little
and take a look at Klamath Falls and Medford, two cities that
we have wanted to see for some time. We also wanted to see the logging museum at
Collier Memorial State Park
in Chiloquin. We had committed to camp host there last year but had to cancel
when Liesa was injured.
We’d been through Burns, Oregon a few times on the way to someplace
else but hadn’t stopped. Burns RV Park sounded like a good place to stay for
the night and it certainly was everything we had hoped, but they were full! On
a weekday in mid-September! Did I mention the record RV sales? The owners
couldn’t have been more accommodating and they set us up with a space that
wasn’t on their park map. They said that they had been full every night since
they opened for the season on May 1. Burns is not a destination, it’s just
the intersection of US 20 and US 395. Sheesh.
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| Old iron junkies will love this place |
We couldn’t get a space at
Collier State Park
either, but Sportsman’s Retreat RV Park nearby had an opening. I think we were
the only non-residents in the place. It was ok, just lacking the ambiance we
like to see.
The
Collier
Logging Museum
was very interesting. People have been logging commercially in the Northwest
since the 1850’s on an ever increasing scale until the 1980’s when it became
clear to everyone, including the wood products companies, that the methods and
practices needed to change. The museum is predominantly about the equipment and
techniques used by the timber harvesters and how that has evolved over time. There
is an interesting section that focuses on the lives of the loggers when most of
them lived in camps that moved frequently to cut fresh timber.
Klamath
Falls is large enough to have all needed services but it didn’t look like
it was thriving. I think it was in its hey-day when the timber industry was
booming. It doesn’t seem to be going downhill, but I got a sense that people are
marking time, waiting for the next economic wave. Luckily it did have a large
tire store because we needed two new ones in a hurry. We forgot to release the
car’s parking brake when we loaded it onto the tow dolly and dragged big holes
in the rear tires as soon as we started down the road. Two flat tires caused a
logistics challenge but three hours later we were on our way, poorer but
wiser.
We have wanted to explore
Medford, Oregon for
some time, and we also wanted to see more of the areas around
Grants Pass, so the
Valley
of the Rogue State Park was ideally situated roughly halfway between them.
And, it is right across the river from the
Del Rio winery, one of many good
ones in the area. Aside from the noise from I5, Valley of the Rogue is a great
park. The sites are spacious and there are fields and trails for the dogs to
enjoy.
Medford
is a real city, complete with Trader Joe’s and Costco, two of the hallmarks of
civilized living. We didn’t spend a lot of time looking around, but our overall
impression was positive. Several of the towns on the back road route from Medford to Grants
Pass were quite attractive and small wineries seem to have
sprung up everywhere.
We always look forward to coming to
Eugene. We’ve been here
so often it feels sort of homey.
Eugene
has all the services and amenities including (Trader Joe’s and Costco, of
course), but is still pretty easy to get around. Traffic can get heavy but it
never seems to get so clogged up that you can’t get where you want to go. I
couldn’t get an appointment at Kaiser on short notice, so we had lots of spare
time at
Richardson
County Park, just west of
Eugene
to catch up on laundry, cleaning and coach upkeep. The dogs really like it
here, too. We’ve stayed at this park before and it's quite nice aside from the
annoying lack of cell service. For some reason it is a dead zone for AT&T. We
got an end site with lots of space and no close neighbors. We even got PBS on
the antenna and watched Antiques Roadshow for the first time in months.
On September 30 we rolled into
Nehalem
Bay State Park for the fourth time in five years to camp host through October.
More soon.
When the office opened and we got the keys, the interior was
a bit of a letdown. It needs more work than we expected, not because it is in
bad shape, but because it wasn’t finished very carefully. The carpentry is solid
but the craftsmanship is kind of slapdash, to put it kindly. Lots of
refinishing, replacing trim, adding base boards, paint, probably wall paper,
certainly carpet, etc. I am finding that my enthusiasm for this kind of work
has waned a little, but none of it has
As I have described before, “Co-op” means that everyone
volunteers to share all of the work needed to keep a place like this running
smoothly. Think of it like a small town. There are groups and committees that
take care of the extensive common areas throughout the park, maintain the structures
and infrastructure, review architectural requests for modifications to casitas,
plan entertainment, help take care of folks when they get sick, plan and run a
very busy entertainment schedule, write bylaws, install, maintain and
troubleshoot a good wifi system, operate the office, run two private tv
channels, plan budgets and run community charity events (the Co-op is the
largest charitable contributor in the town). We both jumped right into the
thick of it: I rejoined the Landscape and Facilities groups, and Kayeanne started
back up with Bingo, Helping Hands, Beading and Polymer Clay. Kayeanne is now
one of the regular callers at Bingo, and I got talked into managing disposing
of all the brush and cactus waste that we generate. All in all, we certainly don’t
get bored.
