The MOST talked about RV Boondocking Spot in the Country

On the last episode we began our first full day of RVing in Grand Teton National Park. We started out early in the dark and caught an epic sunrise at Elk Flats Turnout. Today we're going to show you the rest of the 42 mile scenic drive before heading to one of the most talked about free boondocking spots in the entire country. Our main destination is Jenny Lake but our first stop is a spot that should be on every visitor's list, Jackson Lake Lodge. Yeah that's pretty spectacular. What a view. It's great to be in this really beautiful large warm lodge. The only thing that would top it off is if there were some wildlife walking around out there. We'll see some. At some point today. Yeah this is grand. Almost speechless out here. Wow. When you first step outside everybody's very quiet just keeping the peace out here and not disturbing it. So this lens will never pick them up but we've seen our first wildlife viewing. Yeah yeah that's that's exciting and you know when you're in a national park you always hope to see some wildlife but it doesn't always happen. So when it does it's very exciting and it's like okay the check mark has started now we need to keep this momentum going throughout the day. I think the elk we saw in the Grand Canyon, remember them feeding on the lower tree limbs? Yeah that was the coolest we've ever seen. Yeah that was awesome. Super up close. Yeah. Now that I'm an elk master I see tons of elk out there like everywhere. I can count like 20 elk out there right now and I can see their little butts moving all around. About 20 minutes 15 miles from the Jackson Lake Lodge is Jenny Lake which I've heard is one of the most beautiful spots in all of the national park including one of the best hikes and you can get on a boat and take a little ferry. Lots to do and see. Excited to get there. I think that's where we'll have breakfast. We'll take the dogs out again and be ready to roll. Sweet. We can see how busy this spot is here at Jenny Lake already. I think there was just one or two RV spots. So we can take the last one. RV only. Yeah should we take it? There was one up in the but might as well take this one huh? Not bad. Not bad. Now we get to sit relax have lunch walk the dogs and spend like a few hours here at Jenny Lake and just be super comfortable. Yes. Tight little turn back here. Almost twisted an ankle. Cool huh? Yeah. Yeah I parallel parked it. Good job. It is busy. This is the place to be right now. Yeah. At 9 a.m. What do they do inside? Uh it's just it's a visitor center. Okay. And then this is where the most popular hikes are as well as that boat ferry. There's a lot of options. I'm sure there's some water sports you could do with paddle boarding and I don't know what else. Okay. This was the original entrance station hut. And then they relocated it? Yeah. Wow. So they obviously don't use it anymore but how cool is that? Yeah. That's historic. Yeah. I can only imagine like the people that stood inside of there and all the transactions of conversations that took place in there. They are. The sand dunes are very hard to train. They're just too smart. They're too smart but they are these ones are really good natured. Been up for five hours. No breakfast. We got so lucky with our parking spot here today. When we got back from walking the dogs immediately somebody came up and said are you moving in another RV? Because they're all taken. They wanted this spot. They saw us walk into it. So if you want RV parking here at Jenny Lake you better get here before nine. Before nine. We got here at 8 45. There were two spots left. By nine it was closed. But we got to get some steps in. We didn't really walk enough with the dogs today although we took them on two minis. They're pooped. Yeah. They're pooped out but we're gonna do the Jenny. We're not pooped out. We are not. We're gonna do the Jenny Lake to Hidden Falls Trail which is about a six mile loop. We're gonna add on the Inspiration Point and I think we're gonna see all the good stuff here at Jenny Lake. Well I'm excited. The National Park Service says Jenny Lake is one of the most visited areas in the entire park. One of the big reasons is because not only does it cater to those who want to get out and explore on foot but also those that want to take in the beauty by boat. Or you can even do both. They also have kayaks and canoes you can rent to get out of the water on a slower pace. But for us Hidden Falls hike and then adding on Inspiration Point was the perfect fit. I hear the waterfall. It sounds very refreshing. Yeah it's starting to heat up a little bit. 2.4 miles in. There it is. It's like a ground waterfall. Yeah you could say this is a pretty popular thing to do around here. From the waterfall you can then start the hike up to It's a pretty steep climb that goes up and up to a fall summit and then it goes up some more before you actually reach Inspiration Point with all of its amazing views of Jenny Lake. Oh and we saw our first moose too on the way back down. 0.6 miles. What a great hike. Took us two hours 45 minutes. Did a little bit of lolligagging but we also kept a pretty good pace. It was absolutely beautiful. So we have one last stop before we head back to the boondocking the Upper Teton View and that stop is Dornan's. Dornan's? I keep wanting to say Dorians. Dornan's. Dornan's. They got gift shops. They got restaurants. This is like uh this is where you go to get food, gas. This is where you go after you exhaust yourself exploring all day. You go to refuel your body and your vehicle and your groceries and you it's like a one-stop shop. Parking was pretty tough on the very close to it. There was no RV parking. You gotta park on the side of the road and it's actually pretty slanty out there. I was a little nervous for a second but we made it. Not too bad. It feels worse inside than it actually is on the outside. Look at this table. It's like the best seat in the house. It's really pretty here. I can see why it's a popular place because you have such an incredible view. It's been great today to see all the various viewpoints. It changes you know every place you go and the view is a little bit different and your proximity is a little bit different. So this is another cool one. Yeah. One more spot to soak it in. Yeah and surprise surprise we went with a build your own sausage and mushroom. We went with the thin crust. You do have the option here to get thin crust or traditional and the crust is delicious. It's like perfectly thin almost like flaky and buttery but crispy like perfectly crispy like they have the cook time down to a science. Yeah they know what they're doing. They probably do a lot of pizzas every single day. And it came pretty quick. We didn't have to wait long. How much was it? I did leave a five dollar tip. With the tip it was like 36 bucks for a pizza and a small salad. We got a small salad that we shared. Okay. Not too bad. Not too bad. National park prices. No and you know for the flavor and the quality it's good. Like if I were to rate this I'd give it a solid eight. Eight sounds good to me. Yeah. All right next up boondocking. All right. So we're gonna try our luck going up to the top. This road has definitely been graded compared to what it was before. It's a little bumpy but last time it was like shaking the van ruts and bumps. This is completely different. Our first time going up this we were so new that it seemed like it was crazy. It was actually traumatizing for me. It was our it was our very first boondocking day ever. Yeah. And prior to this road we went on a different road for like an hour at going four miles per hour over washboard. I was tired. I was hungry. I was nervous. So yeah by the time we got here and we were crawling up at a third of the speed. Yeah this is actually not not very bad at all. Not as bad as it used to be and I do think that they graded the road a little bit. Oh they definitely filled it in. Yeah. This stretch right here was the worst. I think the question is will we get any spot because Thursday at four o'clock no guarantees. I think they've even widened it babe. It's wider. You can see where they've graded it and pushed push the the rock and cement out there. Rock and gravel. It's a totally different experience. Yeah. We got a motorhome coming out. Why don't you stop babe? Or was that the way we're going? You can go through this way I think too if you want to go up here. Well good we got lucky on that. Yeah. Literally seconds away from coming head on with that guy. Yeah him going down. Yeah. Yeah I mean there's a spot right there. That one. Number five. And there's something on the left right there. So yeah there's a couple spots up here. So is that five all for that one person or? No those are two spots pretty sure. 14a. Yeah we could like swoop in there if we wanted it. Well you can probably see right away why this is one of the most talked about boondocking spots in the country. The view says it all. But is it really worth it? You'll have to determine that for yourself but I think it's something you should at least try. You'll know right away whether you love it or hate it. It's a little bumpy coming up but almost any size rig can make it up here and you really can't beat this view. But it's certainly not what I would call a private spot. Although some are more private than others, one of the biggest problems is this area has designated campsites but people just park wherever they want to. In a normal boondocking spot that's not a big deal but here in a small spot like this it gets really tight when it's jam-packed with RVs, vans, cars, truck campers and everything else. We thought this corner spot here would be nice but it was just too tight with people parking all over the roads. We were almost worried we'd wake up in the middle of the night to someone taking the corner a little too tight and hitting our RV. So we ended up moving spots but again it's the view that draws the people up here. So I guess I'd say we got kind of lucky. There was three legitimate spots out here that were open and we got one that's actually probably the most private site up here. It's very private. I don't know how good the view is going to be or people whipping around the corner that we're on but it's level. More level than like the past 10 campsites we've been to and it looks pretty good. Yeah I mean there's plenty of room for rigs to turn through here. Oh yeah I just meant like is it going to be annoying to have like hot rod cars, 50 people coming in and out every day. Yeah. We'll see. Not that busy. Yeah. We got lucky. Yeah and the good thing is like if it ends up being a bad spot traffic wise we can always move. Yeah we can get a better spot if we want since we're already up here. We're up here. Yeah. Yeah the plan is to stay up here for four nights and relax. You know I think it's funny how the memory works. You know sometimes like you remember something in the past and you have all these like emotions connected to it like we were talking about. That took us three minutes to get up the hill. It was so easy. It's very easy. Well perspectives change with experience and we've now have many many years of experience since then. Yeah and somebody asked us how this class c like does with bumps and things compared to a van which I thought was a really interesting question because we had a van. I felt like the van because it was narrow and tall. It's a little more topsy-turvy. It felt like it this one. This one's more stable. It's wider. I just feel like it has a wider plant to it. A hundred percent this is more stable but what I will say is like you know a lot of people ask about boondocking for the first time. There's there's boondock curious people that watch the show and it's okay to be scared. You should be scared because it's new. If you've never done it before it's it's like well you know you just show up take a spot like that seems like a very foreign concept to just show up and first come first serve. There's definitely a handful of places that are more first-time friendly than others so those would be the good word of mouth conversations to ask your friends or you know type in the comments and you know get those places suggested before trying some more complicated ones. This one's great right basically inside the national park. The lower Teton view is three parking lots that you can fit anything. Super easy. Go sightsee and then come back to here and explore the upper view. The sunsets up here are amazing. Yeah yeah and if you do have a RV like a fifth wheel or a travel trailer that you can drop and once you secure the spot it's yours you know versus being a motorhome. That's obviously a a pro of an advantage if you do want to go explore is to have your place secured to come back to and then coming in and out is a lot easier. But I never liked it inside the circus ring. It's there it's congested in there. It's literally just a big circus ring but a lot of our beers are very social and they like they like to have you know that maybe that happy hour sunset out there where they get to chit chat and make friends with their neighbors. I read one review that said every night somebody walked through their sites to go look at the sunset or parked right in front of their RV and they literally set up a tent right next to their their fire pit and they never once said like hi to them or anything. So you do run into a lot of that national park traffic where people are not just don't know the RV code. The code of conduct of just being courteous of space and hey sometimes you do have to like park right up next to somebody but just go in and saying something to them like hey is this is this okay? Are we too close? Do you want us to move? Most of the time people will be chill about it and the fact that you at least look them in the eye and have the conversation you're just going to earn respect as a neighbor right away. So there's little things you can do to just make it less awkward for people. Let's settle in. Yes. We did it. We did it. We're back. Full circle. Back to the first boondocking spot. Will this be our last boondocking spot? No. Time will tell. Not a chance. Tune in next week. No, not a chance. Ever wonder where the name Irene Iron Travels comes from? It's actually named after my online fitness and nutrition coaching business Irene Iron Fitness. I help people move better, feel better, and eat better with strength training and real food. No fad diets, no harsh restrictions, no counting calories, and absolutely no processed food in a package. If you want to get stronger and feel better at any age, check the description below for the links with my new client special or join in on our next and upcoming group challenge.