THE BTNF’S CAMPGROUND DATA SHOWS A 44 PERCENT INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE AND A 58 PERCENT INCREASE IN AVERAGE CAMPSITE OCCUPANCY BETWEEN 2016 AND 2020.
This boom in outdoor recreation and public land visitation is not limited to Jackson Hole. According to the Outdoor Foundation’s 2021 Outdoor Participation Trends Report, in 2020, 7.1 million more Americans participated in some form of outdoor recreation than in 2019 (for a total of about 200 million Americans doing something outdoors). Fifty-three percent of Americans ages six and over participated in outdoor recreation at least once in 2020, which is the highest participation rate on record. While these numbers do not speak to car camping itself, they coincide with a spike in the sales of recreational vehicles, from traditional RVs to fifth wheels, campers, or a van like the Mercedes Benz Sprinter. In 2021, approximately 576,065 of these were sold, more than 140,000 more than in 2020. (And 2020 sales were 6 percent higher than 2019’s, despite a nearly two-month shutdown due to Covid in that year.)
While many of these vehicles are used recreationally, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated in 2019 that more than 140,000 people were living full-time in vans or recreational vehicles; this is a 38 percent increase from three years before.
According to thewanderingrv.com, about 1 million people are living in recreational vehicles in 2022.
Dave Anderson, a guide, writer, and photographer who lived in his van, Magic, with his wife for five years before settling in Las Vegas, says vanlife was appealing because it offered the ability to roam. “The biggest thing we love about Magic is the freedom to work wherever we happen to be parked, live comfortably, and pursue our passion of climbing,” he told Adventure Journal. Anderson is not alone. A recent Google search for “vanlife” yielded 18 million results, and there are more than 12 million Instagram posts tagged #vanlife.
The BTNF’s campground data shows a 44 percent increase in the number of people and a 58 percent increase in average campsite occupancy between 2016 and 2020. The data is less robust for its dispersed-camping areas (see sidebar for definition), but monitoring records maintained by onsite ambassadors indicate that the designated dispersed sites at Shadow Mountain, Toppings, and Curtis Canyon were usually full early in the day during the core summer months. “There has been a seismic shift in the volume of people we
are seeing utilizing the forest,” says Scott Kosiba, the executive director of Friends of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, a nonprofit that supports the BTNF. “People are drawn here by the parks, and it never occurs to them that they might have to plan ahead. We get a lot of people arriving here at 7 p.m. expecting to find a campsite. We are trying to get the message on how to recreate responsibly out, but how do you reach people who are not already seeking that information? How do you get to people when you don’t have entrance gates? Our ambassadors are our last line of defense before someone burns the forest down or leaves out food and attracts a grizzly bear.”
Kosiba says he’s seen a change in the type of camper looking for a site in the BTNF. There’s more diversity in experience—specifically more people who are new to car camping and don’t yet know how to minimize their impact on the land and other users. Last year, visitors in a 30-foot converted military vehicle tried to drive to the BTNF’s Curtis Canyon Campground. On the road to the campground, the driver passed a sign stating the road was not appropriate for rigs of that length. The campers never made it to the campground; they got stuck when their vehicle fell off the side of the road, which switchbacks up a steep hillside. Merigliano says the rescue effort was involved and dangerous, and indicative of the challenges she, her staff, and the volunteer ambassadors who patrol the BTNF to educate visitors, face as they try to mitigate the impacts of increased visitation.
Merigliano says that last summer, the BTNF used three metrics to determine if the season was a success: “We couldn’t have an escaped campfire. We couldn’t have a habituated bear, and everyone had to survive the season. And we achieved that. I’m really proud of everyone pulling together.” Based on these three things, which many land managers would agree are pretty basic, the BTNF’s summer last year was successful. But BTNF employees and ambassadors still extinguished 44 hot campfires, cleaned 686 fire rings, and issued 150 designated-site-requirement violations and 103 food-storage violations.
“It’s a challenge,” Merigliano says. “We’re constantly trying to adjust. There’s a lot more pressure on staff, and we’ve got to ramp up enforcement capabilities. Also there needs to be more conversations happening in the community,” she says. “We need everyone to be an ambassador. If you hear someone is coming to Jackson, ask them if they have a plan. If you see something that looks weird, call us and let us know.”
In an attempt to handle the crowds and limit the impact, the BTNF and GTNP have made changes in their camping policies. Last summer GTNP implemented a reservation-only system for all campgrounds in the park through the website recreation.gov. According to GTNP public information officer CJ Adams, this change was a success. “If you look back at the summer of 2019, we had long lines at the campgrounds,” Adams says. “People were showing up early in the morning, hoping to get a site when someone left. That resulted in a lot of traffic congestion. The reservation system improves the visitor experience by streamlining the camping process and giving visitors the ability to plan ahead.”
Plan ahead is right. Sites in GTNP can be reserved up to six months in advance. A quick scan of recreaton.gov in February showed the park’s Jenny Lake campground, which has 51 drive-to, tent-only sites and 10 sites for walk-in camping, was already fully booked during its six-month reservation window.
The Bridger-Teton operates 12 fee campgrounds in the Jackson Ranger District on a first-come, firstserved basis and has mapped roughly 400 dispersed sites in the district. Around Jackson, however, in 2020 the BTNF did away with the free-for-all, campanywhere-you-can-get-off-the-road system that had been the norm for decades. Now, “boondockers”— people looking for free camping—have to be in one of 150 designated-dispersed sites if they want to camp at Shadow Mountain, Curtis Canyon, Pacific Creek, or Toppings Lake and Spread Creek. These sites are still free—and still considered part of the total number of 400 dispersed sites—but they are clearly identified as campsites, and are meant to concentrate use on hardened, previously impacted areas and prevent further degradation of the landscape by people creating their own pullouts and camping sites by driving off the road wherever they see a flat spot.
Finally, last summer the Forest Service created two new dispersed-camping areas—Moran Vista and Blackrock Meadows. Moran Vista was formerly a gravel pit; in the winter, Blackrock Meadows is a snowmobile parking area. Now the former has plenty of space for big-rig RVs as well as vans; there are also porta potties on site. The BTNF charges a $10 fee for these sites to help cover its costs, and the sites are available on a first-come, first served basis. Most important, Merigliano says they rarely fill to capacity and that these new areas are much better than they sound and have been popular with people who just want a place to park overnight.
A campendium.com reviewer who stayed at Moran Vistas last July gave their site five stars and wrote, “We stayed here because all of the Spread Creek spots were full. It is a large gravel parking lot, so rigs of any size can fit…. Can’t beat the views and proximity to all that Grand Teton has to offer. Everyone was quiet and respectful. We would definitely stay again.”
In addition to designating camping areas, the BTNF and Friends of the Bridger-Teton ambassadors have amped up their education efforts. Call the BTNF, and you’ll get an automated phone message with camping information. Walk past the BTNF office in downtown Jackson, and you’ll see a signboard indicating where you might find a camping area to spend the night.
Kosiba says he’s trying to get real-time occupancy data online so visitors can check an app on their phone to see if there are campsites available before they start driving up a rough road in search of an open spot. In the meantime, he often sends campers south or east of Jackson Hole; the entire BTNF is seeing increasing use, but the pressure is not as acute in the campgrounds in the Snake River Canyon (East Table, Station Creek, Little Cottonwood Group Campground, and Wolf Creek), up the Hoback River (Granite Creek, Kozy, and Hoback Campgrounds) around Pinedale and Cora, or on the Shoshone National Forest on the eastern side of the Continental Divide, as it is in Jackson Hole.
“Our key message is that you have to plan ahead,” says Merigliano. “Just because it’s a national forest doesn’t mean it’s wide open, and there’s no one there. This place is super popular. It could well be full. We’ve been working with Friends of the B-T, Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism, the chamber of commerce, and local businesses to get the word out that people have to be prepared, and you may have to be flexible.” JH