The hazardous, fast-moving rivers of Wyoming

and a recommended bike ride into Grand Teton National Park

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Photo by Michael Kirsh on Unsplash

Using a phone app that tracks smoke/air quality, we drew a line heading west from Flaming Gorge, Utah, toward Oregon. Heading homeward, we planned to try and avoid the worst of the fires and smoke as we made for the West Coast. 

As time had gone by on the road trip, Mike and I found the routine of navigating to a new area, searching for a campsite (and sometimes having to really work to get one) set-up and tear-down, finding food and supplies, using strange bathrooms and dealing with strangers (and their dogs!) increasingly wearisome. 

Necessary activities, such as dumping, gassing up, resupplying, and cleaning the rig, had assumed a disproportionate aversiveness.

What was wrong with us? Why weren’t we having fun anymore on our “dream trip?”

We found ourselves setting up less and less of our available comforts when we pulled into a new site: no more sun tent, outdoor barbecue, beach chairs or carpets. Everything we put out had to later be torn down, cleaned, and put away, and we were just plain tired of it.

Even once-pleasant activities like dining out filled us with ennui: how many truck stop bacon-and-eggs breakfasts could a person eat?

We asked other camping travelers along the way how they were doing their trips–and found that the “long-termers” stopped and stayed in one place a lot more than we were doing–often, spending up to a month at a time in one location.

Perhaps we were tired because of too many transitions–but that’s what we’d wanted to do–see ALL of the USA! 

We’d hardly done half of it at this point, and were ready to call it quits.

“It’s called travel burnout,” our long-distance hiker son Caleb said, when I called him and described the pattern we’d been developing. “It happens to hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail, too. People who used to set up little camps and tents and stoves each night are sleeping in the dirt on the side of the path by the end, not even brushing their teeth. Nothing seems fun anymore, and you just go on because you’re stuck and can’t get home easily.”

That was exactly the situation we found ourselves in. 

Even if we wanted to pull the plug and return home immediately, we couldn’t for another month–because we’d rented out our house to help defray costs.

We seemed to get more travel-weary the more often we transitioned from campsite to campsite, so for this return leg, we decided to spend two nights at each stop to try to minimize the burnout. 

This meant that a fair amount of research needed to go into each destination, because we didn’t have reservations anymore. Finding campgrounds with two nights in a row available was challenging, even at the end of the season. 

Mike and I hunched over the Rand McNally Road Atlas and discussed the “big picture” route, as well as consulting the totally necessary fire-tracking app on a daily basis. Once we’d used those to chart a general direction, we searched for specific, reasonably-reachable camping using Google Maps, then made the actual bookings.

This method seemed to work, keeping us both involved with the process while not getting too bogged down in indecision, one of the elements of burnout. With weather and fire conditions so uncertain, safety and sanity had to rule the day for the remainder of our trip.

All that said, after Flaming Gorge we packed up and drove toward Grand Teton National Park—but couldn’t get any reservations due to the beginning of a holiday weekend going on. We arrived late in the day and began looking near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, hoping to find something.  

All of the campgrounds surrounding Grand Teton and Jackson Hole were mobbed with people. The venerable and turbulent Snake River was a freight train of gleefully-shrieking tourists white-water rafting and drift boats of all types loaded with hopeful fishermen.

After driving up and down the highway searching multiple campgrounds for an opening, we finally nabbed a site at a quiet, well-maintained private campground on the nearby, and not nearly as popular, Hoback River in Wyoming.

Both of us gave a sigh of relief as we dropped the trailer off its hitch and tossed out our rubber mat at the bottom of the fold-down stairs, the extent of our outdoor set-up these days.

The site’s best feature was a small pocket of shortgrass meadow surrounded by hedge-like wild rosebushes still in bloom. Koa loved the open space and being off leash. He frolicked in the grass while I lay on my back, staring up at a clear blue sky, counting the clouds, grateful for fresh air.

Clean air is no longer a given in these climate change times.

Mike rented an inflatable kayak and used that to drift fish the Snake River the next morning, while I spent quiet, restorative hours catching up on my writing and exploring nearby wilderness along the Hoback River with Koa. 

The two of us had a small adventure hiking a rugged an overgrown footpath beside the river. I found caches of late-season huckleberries and blackberries, and amused myself picking the purple gems and taking pictures of unknown plants to identify with my botany app. 

And then Koa, playfully rolling in the grass, fell into the fast-running Hoback River.