Our First RV Boondocking Experience in the Grand Teton National Park | RV Living

And this is the view out our bedroom window tonight. I don't think you can beat it. I suppose this is why people get hooked on boondocking. Yeah, for sure. Just finding stuff like this for free. What's up guys? It's Christine and Aaron from Irene Iron Fitness and today we are gonna do our first boondocking experience. So today we're gonna try our first boondocking experience at a little spot we found off of Campendium and it's right off a grassy lake road, I think it is. And it's a half hour south of the southern Yellowstone entrance. And it's not very adventurous. It's kind of, I think there's like 20 primitive sites. There's actually a vault toilet and numbered sites. So it's not like it's out in the middle of nowhere. But for us, it'll be our first boondocking experience. It'll be a good transitional. Yeah, and that'll be night one and then night two we are gonna go to like the lower and upper Teton area, which is also free camping. Also found on Campendium. It is Labor Day today, by the way. And people are actually like flooding in to Yellowstone to get camping. We were surprised. It seems more busy, but that maybe is because people are like crisscrossing. Yeah, which we're gonna go experience more stuff at Yellowstone today. But I don't know, we've just been kind of cooped up here and we gotta keep moving. Road seems pretty decent so far. Little washboard-ish. It'll take us a day to get to Idaho at this rate. Pretty. Yeah, it is pretty down here, isn't it? That guy's playing guitar down by the river. Is he? Yeah. That's sweet. First I thought he was fishing, but he's playing the guitar. All right, so we'll have to check out leather spots, I guess. Like keep going down this road? Yeah. Here's camp two. Can you see back there? One, two. Two rigs back there. Two of two. I think that they would put more back there. So I've seen six campsites. What do we want? Maybe like a mile? I haven't been tracking. I didn't track it, but it's painfully slow. Yeah, it is slow. It is really beautiful back here though. Looks like this moves around. Yeah. Very narrow road. Pretty tough to get two vehicles by. Two big rigs would be extremely difficult. What's this say? There's a piece of paper on this one. Full. Campsite full. They didn't want anybody messing with their spot. Let's just go up to the next one and turn around. Maybe it'll be a better turnaround. We're maybe two miles in and we're not having much luck. But it is really, really pretty. Well, that was a big fail so far at the grassy lake road campsites. Along the grassy Yeah, we made it as far as Glad Creek trailhead and it's probably a couple miles up the road. I think we made it to campsites five or six. It was kind of weird. The very first one had four sites and then after that they'd have like two or one. It's just kind of weird. In the middle of nowhere there's a toilet, garbage cans, and then one campsite. So they went through all the effort to make it a nice campsite but for just one person and it's huge. So I mean that'd be pretty sweet for that one person but I just don't get it. So I don't know. It probably took us a half hour or more to get up the road. It's really just bumpy and windy. Really bumpy, really windy, really slow. Beautiful. Yeah, yep. So we're gonna I guess head back down the hill and keep going to the lower and upper Teton areas and see if there's anything there. It is absolutely breathtaking here. I was not expecting this. Well we left the boondocking spot and we're headed into the Tetons here and we found this beautiful little lake. Jackson Lake. Jackson Lake Overlook. And it's pretty amazing. It's amazing. That water is turquoise. The giant mountains behind us. Incredible. Yeah, super windy and I don't know. It feels like the ocean right now. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Takes all your cares away. Yep, but we are going to keep heading into town I guess. We're gonna hit the little grocery store and... Yeah, let's hit the grocery store so we don't have to eat canned salmon for the next three days. Yeah. It was pretty nice. It was cute. Like almost touristy and they had a decent selection. A small selection of a wide variety of things. So like I got some chicken. Five bucks a pound. Way better than the eight bucks a pound at Yellowstone. Pretty view. So this is attempt number two at boondocking for the day and we're at the lower Teton site in the National Forest right across from the Tetons. Toppings Lake it says. Overnight vehicle camping allowed only in designated sites next five miles. I have a feeling we're gonna get lucky. Maybe if it was earlier. It's almost four in the afternoon now. I'd say the road is pretty spotty. I mean you can easily take it in a car or SUV but the big rigs you got to drive really slow so you don't lose all your contents in your cupboards. So we just stopped and talked to some a truck camper that was coming down the opposite way and they said that there's a couple spots up there. Yeah. And the road's really rough so that's kind of scary coming from a four by four pickup truck and he had like a pop-top camper so wasn't even a tall one it was a pretty low profile truck camper. But at least hopefully we'll have a spot to stay for the night. Well unless we lose our spot to that guy. Yeah he's showing us who's boss. So we'll check back in when we get to the top. Yeah in like a year. Yeah. So the first spots on the left there's quite a bit of big rigs look like mostly class A's. 30 footers plus. Look at that view they get. Yeah it's pretty beautiful. This is only about maybe a half mile up the road. So this road is absolutely horrible. It's super narrow but I mean if you drive really slow it's... It actually stresses me out. It's fine it's just it's just a little... Watch out for that big bump we don't want to hit our bottom. Very steep. Very narrow. Very windy. But road seems to get a little better up top there. Yeah I feel like that stretch we just went through was hopefully the worst. That was pretty pretty big ruts. I was uh white knuckling it like Minnesota Blizzard. Momentum fifth wheel up there. Geez. Can you imagine pulling that thing up here? Is that KYB up there? Yeah the road definitely gets a little bit better once you get up the steep part and as long as you go slow like... Three miles an hour. Three miles per hour you're fine. And just stay steady. Yeah. Is that 8 through 16? I think that's 8 through 16. Okay why don't we go up there that looks like where they're going. And that's 17 that's just one spot. Yeah. Is there a car behind me? Yes. Oh my god. This is incredible. There's an airstream out there. So that's 8 through 11. This is totally a spot right? It's gotta be. Wow. Looks like we're getting wi-fi right? I'm gonna go check our level. Well we found our spot on top of the mountain. Chris is already cooking dinner. It's actually lunch or lunch. Yeah we got four o'clock lunch. Classic. And it's breathtaking here. I I have never experienced anything like this and it will be a memory that I remember forever. I don't know how else to say it. Our first BLM land. Our first. Our first. It's awesome. I'm glad we didn't get into the first spot because this spot is better. Yeah I read that the parking lot down at the bottom is where the the not so adventurous people go and then if you keep going up the hill it's well rewarded. Yeah well worth it. Well worth the drive. We spent like I don't know three hours three and a half hours from start to finish to get to this point. And well we spent like an hour on that first site and this this road was worse but it was shorter. Yeah way shorter. Yeah I'd say we drove up this road for 10 minutes. Right. And the first road we drove up for like a half hour at Grassy Lake. Yeah it's awesome here. Like so we're gonna eat lunch. It's really hot up here. The sun is intense. I'm standing here and just getting like a sunburn on my legs. I do want to get a workout in here though. So we're gonna eat, let that settle, get a workout in, set up our chairs, watch the sunset and just see what happens up here. A couple big rigs coming in. A fifth wheel and a big 30-foot travel trailer. Chop chop chop. There goes the neighborhood. All hell's gonna break loose out there. What you making? I'm gonna make some dirty rice. I'm gonna make dirty rice and I'm gonna cut up a bunch of chicken and make some chicken. Sounds good. Doesn't that just sound great? Sounds good. Do you want some celery? I just ate a piece of celery. Do you want more? Oh he's like a little lap dog. That's the cutest little fox. Did you see him just sit down like a little dog? Yeah. Wish I had my telephoto zoom lens. Well we made it to our very first BLM dispersed camping spot and what a great one for our very first one. We absolutely fell in love when we came to the top of this spot here and saw the mountain views. It's been a great evening so far. It's been a great day. It's been a great year. It's been a great year. But today it was in particularly special. Yeah. Our neighbors are super nice too. Like they've come over a couple times and you just can't beat this RV community. Everybody it's like-minded people enjoying life and living life to its fullest. Yeah absolutely and we had lunch up here already. We just got done working out which was great and yeah this mountain weather is making us shift to p.m workouts which is different for us because the mornings are like 41 degrees and I'm under 16 blankets. Yeah and during the day it was like 80. Yeah it was super hot. So it was a good day all in all. Make sure you hit that subscribe button to tune in next week and see where our adventure takes us after this. I think we're gonna be sticking around the Tetons here for a couple days and then we're gonna be heading up to the Seattle area. Washington state. Washington state.