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Glacier Hiking At Wrangell-St.Elias National Park
One of the things that Michael wanted to do most in Alaska was to walk on a glacier and I think that the Root Glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park might be the only place to do that without a tour. WSE is the largest National Park in the US, the size of 6 Yellowstones, and has 9 of the 16 highest peaks in North America. It’s the most remote place that we’ll be visiting in Alaska and getting there was part of the fun! First, we drove to the town of Chitina, a few hours from anywhere you’ve ever heard of. Then we traveled one of the most infamous…
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Heading South: Lexington, KY & New River Gorge National Park, WV
Even though we’ve been parked in NC for over a month now, our blog is still stuck in Chicago. Back in November on our way home, we stopped in Kentucky for horses and bourbon and in West Virginia to visit the country’s newest National Park. In Lexington, we spent a week at the Kentucky Horse Park, which is an “equine theme park” owned by the state of Kentucky. They were already in their winter season which meant less was happening with the horses, but we paid cheaper fees and also had Christmas decorations in our campsite! We spent a morning exploring the horse park’s barns and museums. And then spent…
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Return To The San Juans, Colorado
I had been planning to earn 7 more state stickers for the map on the side of our RV as we zigzagged across the middle of the country back to NC but Michael just wanted to stay in Colorado. We compromised and stayed until mid-October. Much later there could be snow on the high mountain passes. We should still be able to earn 5 stickers, visiting 2 states for the first time. Ridgway State Park gave us easy access to the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. There are multiple campgrounds and I was able to get us a full hookup site at Pa-Ca-Chu-Puk on the Uncompaghre River. Ridgway was…
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Rocky Mountain National Park
A few months ago we were lamenting our mistake of skipping over Rocky Mountain National Park, all because of one closed campground that we wanted to stay at. From Taos, NM to Jasper, AB, this has been the year of the Rocky Mountains and we didn’t even visit the namesake National Park. So, we returned to Colorado and stayed at Lavern M. Johnson Park during the last week of September. This city park is in the teeny tiny town of Lyons, about 30 minutes east of Rocky. The small campground was just a parking lot but it had full hookups and was within walking distance of everything the adorable town…
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South Dakota’s Badlands & Black Hills
We had two great weeks in South Dakota. The weather has a huge effect on how much we like an area and it was absolutely beautiful when we visited in mid-September. We started out in the town of Deadwood in the northern Black Hills, dry camping Saturday night in the Days of ’76 museum parking lot which was not free but was within walking distance of all the action. Deadwood is an old mining town notorious for its lawlessness and is still packed with bars and casinos. We watched an entertaining show at Saloon No. 10, where Wild Bill was gambling the night he was killed. The show ended with…
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Theodore Roosevelt National Park
We’re slowly working on visiting all National Parks and RVing in every state. But a stop at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and nearby Dickinson, North Dakota was special for me because it’s where my Grandpa was born and raised. We had a dry campsite at Cottonwood Campground inside the park booked for the week of Labor Day. Luckily as soon as we arrived and dropped the trailer, we drove the scenic loop, visited some overlooks, and saw a lot of animals because a few hours later an apocalyptic amount of wildfire smoke showed up and settled in for several days. We only spent one night dry-camping before moving to an…
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Banff, Canada
I don’t have too many photos to share of our 2 weeks in the town of Banff. The best thing to do is visit Moraine Lake and Lake Louise, and we’d been there the week before. There were a few days of smoke and/or rain and Michael took a work trip out of Calgary. Banff is the main food/lodging hub for Banff National Park visitors. The Tunnel Mountain campgrounds have over 1000 RV/tent campsites and are so popular that our entire Canadian Rockies route was planned around the 2 weeks I was able to book at the end of our trip only after school was back in session. The Trailer…
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Lake Louise, Banff National Park
Our 6th week in the Canadian Rockies was a vacation week for Michael. We were in Lake Louise, the most iconic and most popular area of Banff National Park. Lake Louise is a teeny tiny village with a huge campground, a ski resort, and a stunning turquoise lake with a resort-style hotel. There is an even more stunning lake named Moraine Lake (cover photo) nearby that is one of the most photographed sites in all of Canada. We stayed at the Lake Louise Hardsided Campground, which has been our least favorite of the amazing Parks Canada campgrounds we’ve stayed on this trip. It’s an electric-only campground and 99% of the…
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Jasper National Park
Weeks 4 and 5 of our Canadian Rockies road trip were spent at Jasper National Park. We felt like we’d won the campground lottery getting a 2 week reservation in a full hookup site at the recently renovated Whistlers Campground in Jasper. A lot of trees in this area have been wiped out by pine beetles, but the openness of the campground gave us mountain views and a great Starlink signal. The campground was a 5-minute drive from the cute mountain town also named Jasper. And there were seemingly endless beautiful sites close by that we could visit in the afternoons after work. Jasper NP is huge and we ventured…
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Icefields Parkway
We spent our third week in the Canadian Rockies on the Icefields Parkway, the very scenic 144 miles of Alberta Highway 93 that links Lake Louise in Banff National Park to Jasper National Park. It’s known as one of the most stunning drives in the world, lined with mountain peaks, glaciers, and glacier-fed lakes and rivers. We’ve wanted to visit this area for a long time and it is just jaw-droppingly beautiful. We stayed at Silverhorn Creek campground. There were no hookups, no water source, no dump station, and no cell service. But our solar panels and Dishy worked great with the open sky. And we had views of glaciers!!…
