Those were the days

Bob297

Yep, I remember when....We would go to our local NP and it would be empty. The quiet, peaceful, beauty, no humans and no aircraft, no cellphones, no towers.....no thieves. Park the camper and head to the backcountry for 1-2 weeks at a time—Priceless. The time of knowing when to go when empty are over Still looking for land as it is a priority. Still waiting on my new Dexter axle for my T@G—been 7 weeks or so.

LuckyJ

Yep, that time when many peoples would not want to leave the confort of their house, now they bring their house to the parks with all it's confort and still do not realy enjoy the park.

Instead of giving more and more space to large RVs, maybe they should reduce the size and limit the size that can camp for the night.

And 25 miles hike for those short legs, wow! 👍

HellFish

I knew that 500,000 new RVs a year was eventually gonna have an impact, and boy has it! In 2014 it was easy to put a trip together with state/national park campsite reservations. I've been looking at TX, FL, NM parks for the May timeframe. BOOKED UP! Admittedly, I'm getting a very late start for a variety of reasons, but time was you'd still find something. I wonder if post-covid folks who decided to "camp" because they had nothing else to do will lose interest.

LuckyJ

@HellFish said:
.........I wonder if post-covid folks who decided to "camp" because they had nothing else to do will lose interest.

I do think that some will. Up here, nortg of tge snowy border, las summer was also crazy, with all the vanlife craze and shows, boundock wave and border closure, many of tge folks that would usually travel in your country or other provinces were stuck here in quebec and Ontario. All the typical places like New-brunswick, nova scotia were also close to travel and plane travel was not well seen either. So many started investing in theire house, cottage or any kind of RVs to get out of tge cities.

It got ugly real fast with garbage and lack of respect. Some even left their van back seat on beaches with garbage bags and tents.

Once travel will be again possible, things should get back to normal in a few years. But again, since you and us like it, we could see more outhere.

rich67

A lot of the problem with NP overcrowding comes from the internet. Just my 2 cents. People who normally wouldn't venture out to some of these places are heading out in droves in search of the perfect Instagram shot. They do little hiking, they head to the nearest viewpoint and snap pictures. If you want to get away from them, you have to find more obscure parks, and hike on trails the average Instagram traveler won't or can't handle. I remember going to Yosemite when it was relatively empty, and also to the Grand Canyon before the throngs of tour buses arrived at the South Rim to shuttle people the viewpoints so they could stand in line and snap an iPad photo for Facebook. Yep, those were the days.

beaky

go to Great Basin, deserted