Badlands Goes Dark, Buc-ee's Won't Let You Stay, and One Very Cranky Bison

Good morning! It's Wednesday, July 29 — a photographer shot the whole country out one camper window, Badlands became South Dakota's first certified dark sky, and Buc-ee's still won't let you stay the night.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

> Sarah Silbiger spent seven years photographing power: Capitol Hill, the White House lawn, the same podium, the same motorcade, one square mile of America making decisions about all the rest of it. Then she took a year off, moved into a camper, and went to look at the part being argued over. She shot the whole trip through the camper window. A 12-foot tall, 700-pound inflatable lobster atop a Maine restaurant. An oil derrick planted in the middle of a vineyard. A giant fiberglass cow in Mancos, Colorado. Twin Lakes going soft at dusk. "I really just kind of wanted to see the country and see the place we debate about all the time," she said.

None of it is a highlight reel. No Delicate Arch, no Old Faithful. Just the rest of the country, the parts nobody puts on a poster, and after a few thousand miles those are the ones you actually remember. People are arriving at this at other speeds too: one writer walked the full length of Route 66 at three miles an hour just to see the in-between, and Oregon's Highway 101 gives you a week where the stops matter less than the driving between them. Ask anybody back from a long haul what they saw, then watch how fast they go straight to the cow.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

> This week we got both kinds of bison: cranky and extremely chill. The cranky one was in Yellowstone, where he popped the front tire of someone who now has the best tire blowout story of any of us. The chill one strolled up behind an angler in the Lamar, and was like, hey, can you fish somewhere else? Only one of them stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. (More)

> Pull up the fire map before you book anything west. The country hit preparedness level 5 this week, top of the scale, which is the federal way of saying the crews are all spoken for. More fires are burning than any summer in a decade, and a new one can sit for hours before anybody gets to it. Your route can close while you're driving toward it, so have the backup campground picked. (More)

> Badlands spent eight years working toward having nothing. Every light fixture in the park, swapped out one at a time, and on July 17 it became South Dakota's first International Dark Sky Park. That puts it among roughly 40 park-service sites whose darkness is officially protected, and the park's own campground sits directly under it, which makes your picnic table the observatory. (More)

> National parks are finally getting the technology everybody assumes they already have. Ten million dollars of it across 21 sites: satellite internet and fiber at five, and real-time traffic and parking sensors at eight more. So next summer the lot at Yosemite could tell you it's full before you haul all the way up there and start circling it. (More)

> Some wildfires now make their own weather, which feels like cheating. Get one big enough and it grows a thunderstorm on top of itself, then throws lightning down miles past the containment line and starts fresh fires out there. Arson, committed by a fire. Which is how a fire nowhere near your route becomes a fire on your route. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

> Buc-ee's doesn't allow overnight parking, and never has. Not at any of its 50-plus locations, not with a fuel purchase, not if you ask nicely, because there's no manager discretion to ask for. That's the opposite of plenty of truck stops, which quietly tolerate a few hours if you're not setting up camp. Worth filing away now instead of at 11 p.m., 90 minutes short of your reservation, when a lit-up travel center starts looking suspiciously like a bed. Know which stops on your route actually permit an overnight, and keep a free public-land option in your back pocket for the night the math goes sideways.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

> Rhino USA tire repair kit — No, this would not have saved the tourist whose tire met a bison horn up above. But the nail you pick up on a forest service road is exactly what it fixes, and plugging it yourself at the pullout beats three hours waiting on a tow truck.

> Digital cooler thermometer — The cooler rides in the tow vehicle all day while you hike, and the inside of a parked car in July has no interest in your plans. A max/min readout tells you whether your chicken salad is lunch or trash.

> EVERLIT 72-hour emergency kit — Flash floods have been this summer's quiet headline, and they're the emergency that gives you minutes, not hours, to be gone. So this is the grab-and-go you actually want in the car: a bag nobody has to pack in a panic, and three days of supplies already in it in case things go sideways.

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

> California's Dog-Friendly Lakes — California's beaches are mostly a long list of things your dog isn't allowed to do. The lakes are the opposite. Bass, Convict, June, Tahoe, Big Bear, Sonoma, and Berryessa all welcome dogs, though leash and swim rules shift lake by lake, so check the one you want before you let everybody out. Then you finally get to say it out loud: Whosagoodboy, who wants to go swimmies.

> Door County, Wisconsin — Spend a week driving the Cape Cod of the Midwest: five state parks, 300 miles of shoreline, cherry orchards, and a lighthouse count that turns silly. It's a coastal vacation without the coastal haul, which is the whole reason the Midwest keeps it in rotation.

> Chattanooga, Tennessee — The first city in North America named a National Park City, and still the only one. The title comes from a London charity rather than the Park Service, so no rangers were consulted, just a committee with very good tea. The substance holds up anyway: hiking the Tennessee River gorge, mountain biking and caving at Raccoon Mountain, and rafting the Ocoee's Olympic whitewater an hour out. Base here and the outdoors is inside the city limits.

> The Black Hills, South Dakota — Everyone stops at Mount Rushmore, takes the photo, and leaves, which is exactly how the good part stays uncrowded. Custer State Park's Wildlife Loop, Crazy Horse, a dinosaur park, and a drive-through wildlife preserve are all inside an easy radius of one campsite, so you set up once. And the bison herd on the Wildlife Loop will hold your car up for twenty minutes, which is the photo you'll actually show people.

> Boone, North Carolina — August in the Southeast is a heat advisory with occasional breaks, unless you're a few thousand feet above it. Boone sits high in the Blue Ridge with Parkway access in both directions, and you can have as much adrenaline or zen as you want in a weekend: the Mile-High Swinging Bridge on Grandfather Mountain and the jump lines at Rocky Knob, or a lazy tube down the New River and 25 miles of carriage trails at Moses Cone.

> Seneca Lake, New York — Base on one lake and you get three trips: the gorge trail at Watkins Glen, roughly 30 wineries along the shore, and 618 feet of water that keeps the Finger Lakes cooler than the rest of the state in August. It's about 90 minutes from New York City, and we mapped the five-day version from a campsite, including which shore to park on.

> Walnut Creek Lake, Omaha, Nebraska — A morning walking the lake loop with a fishing pole, an afternoon at one of the best zoos in the country, a steak dinner in Omaha, and you never once move the RV. Nebraska gets written off as the part you drive through, which is why nobody's fighting you for a site here.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

> Off Cape Cod, a jellyfish with tentacles longer than two buses is out there right now.

> Also off Cape Cod, five rescued sea turtles to love named after fonts.

> And one more Cape Cod mention that isn't hydrangeas: it's Shark Week, and here's where you can watch Jaws and friends.

> Jimothy the raccoon is the trash panda we've all been rooting for.

> A seed that orbited the Moon is now a tree in Manhattan.

> The best fast food on a road trip, ranked by region.

> Five road-trip books worth the glovebox space.

The Dump Station Sharks can't smile, it turns out, because the jaw is calcified and the feelings aren't there.

The Odometer 27%, the share of Acadia search-and-rescue reports from 2022 and 2023 that contain the word "ankle." Locals call it the Acadia Ankle, the granite is wet more often than it's dry, and it gets more people carried out than actual falls do.

— OK BUT THE RV DOESN'T PAY FOR ITSELF —

> Campground Manager — Branson, MO. A brand-new campground in Branson is hiring an experienced manager to open the place and then run it, in the office and out in the field both, full-time and year-round. The trade is a free full-hookup site, a competitive salary, and every hour you work actually paid, which is rarer in this line of work than it should be. Immediate opening, and they want someone who has managed a campground or RV resort before. Resumes to bnewcomb@ivee.com.
Spotted in the Workampers group on Facebook.

> Campground Staff — Northeast & Midwest — If you have been putting off workamping because it means going without health insurance, this is the one to look at. Adventure Bound runs 19 family-owned resorts from Cape Cod down to Gatlinburg, and year-round staff get a 401k, insurance, and PTO on top of the full-hookup site and paid hours. They also say the owners work the parks themselves, which tends to show up in how a season goes.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

> Daniel Boone never lived in Boone. He didn't build a cabin here, didn't found the town, and never imagined a mountain community would end up wearing his name. What he did was hunt these ridges starting around 1760, when they were still the edge of Britain's American colonies. Fifteen years later he led a crew of axmen through the Cumberland Gap to help carve the Wilderness Road into Kentucky, and something like 200,000 settlers followed it west over the next few decades. Then a wildly popular 1784 book, written as though Boone were telling it himself, turned his exploits into legend and made him America's first frontier celebrity. So when Watauga County set up its new county seat in 1849, the settlement formerly known as Councill's Store took the name Boone instead. He camped here. It turned out that was enough.

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