Denali's Road Reopens, Record Gas Prices, and a First Lady With a Revolver

Good morning! It's Wednesday, September 9 — the First Lady once drove up Mount Mansfield with a revolver in the glove box, Denali's far end is reachable again after five years cut off, and a gray wolf has turned up in a California forest that hasn't seen one in about a century.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

> For five years the best part of Denali has been unreachable. A landslide at Pretty Rocks ate the park's only road at mile 45 in August 2021 and took everything west of it: Wonder Lake, Kantishna, the reflection shot people fly 3,000 miles to get. Nobody has seen the far end of that park since. The Park Service finished the bridge across it last week, 475 feet of steel truss on 23 devices whose only job is keeping the ground underneath it frozen.

So it's game on again, because Alaska is not the place to wake up in June and decide to wing it. Buses are expected to run the full road for the 2027 season, which sounds far off right until you realize ferries, campgrounds and rentals are often booked a year out. This is the fall to start.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

> Every fill-up on the way home from Labor Day cost a little more than usual. The national average hit $4.15 Monday, the first time it has crossed $4 on that holiday and a full dollar above the old 2012 record. If you spent the weekend towing, you already know what that looks like on the credit-card statement. (More)

> Colorado's berry and acorn crop failed, and the bears are feeling it. The state has euthanized 294 bears this year, more than triple last year's count. Which makes the rule simple: don't give a hungry bear a reason to remember your campsite. The bear may be cute. Your shredded patio rug will not be. (More)

> There's a gray wolf in the Mendocino National Forest, and it hasn't been seen there in about a century. Wildlife officials confirmed a lone animal hundreds of miles southwest of the established packs. For anyone who likes to pull off the pavement and disappear into Northern California, that's a pretty remarkable neighbor to have wandering around out there. (More)

> A brand-new BLM campground just opened outside Vernal, Utah, and ten of its 23 sites can handle big RVs. It's seven miles southwest of town, next to 35 miles of single-track, and 25 minutes from the dinosaur quarry that put Vernal on the map in the first place. Park the RV, unhook, and go find a trail instead of spending half the morning figuring out how to get to one. (More)

> Americans spent the summer finding ways to travel without spending quite as much. Bank of America found more than half stayed closer to home, while 22 percent cut lodging and food spending to make room for fuel. The industry has names for it now, micro-vacations and travel stacking, but if you own an RV, you've just been calling it "RVing" all these years. (More)

> The trailer on your shortlist may be sold under another name. Or two. Or three. Some manufacturers put essentially the same floorplan on the same frame and sell it under different badges, sometimes changing little beyond the decals. Which matters for a buyer: searching one model name for reviews can mean missing reviews of the exact same trailer wearing a different badge. (More)

> Tailgating has always been an RV sport, and this college football season will be epic. Twenty stops, ten sports, from the Rose Bowl and Army-Navy to a track festival at Penn that's been running since 1895. Proof an RV doesn't have to be a national-park machine. Sometimes the destination is a stadium, the uniform is a bare chest and warpaint, and the packing list is mostly foam fingers. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

> Fall pushes everybody uphill, and altitude sickness doesn't care how fit you are. It can start around 8,000 feet, which is below plenty of Colorado trailheads. Here's the advantage nobody flying in gets: you're already sleeping in your transportation. Park lower, spend a night, move up, let your body do the work while you make coffee. There's one symptom that means turn around instead of push through, and it's the one people are best at talking themselves out of.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

> UNPLUG Ultimate Adventure waterproof bag — 155 liters of 1680D waterproof duffel in a shade of orange nobody is going to lose in the basement bay. This is the bag for the gear you really don't want inside the RV after a wet day: waders, tow ropes, muddy shoes, whatever just happened at the fire ring.
Buy on Amazon

> Kubb Yard Game Set — Viking chess, except the pieces are made for throwing and the objective is knocking over your opponent's blocks before you get to their king. It's exactly the sort of campground game that gets pulled out after dinner and somehow keeps everybody outside another hour. Also: no batteries, no Wi-Fi, no assembly instructions that require a tutorial.
Buy on Amazon

> Big Agnes King Solomon doublewide sleeping bag — One bag, two people, zero fitted sheets. For weekenders and quick getaways where the fifteen minutes you spend making the bed feels suspiciously close to the amount of time you had to pack. It's also a nice answer to those shoulder-season nights when the RV is chilly but firing up the furnace feels like a negotiation with the propane tank.
Buy on Amazon

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

> Mount Mansfield, Vermont
In July 1933 the First Lady drove up the Mount Mansfield toll road with a revolver in the glove compartment. Eleanor Roosevelt had refused the security detail the Secret Service wanted on her after the attempt on her husband that February, and took the gun as the compromise. She kept it unloaded, which tells you how seriously she took the arrangement. The road is still there, Smugglers Notch still squeezes to one lane between the boulders, and Vermont's color usually arrives the last week of September. Base camp under the mountain, leave the RV parked, spend the day on one of the best mountain roads in New England. Here's the trip she took, and here's how to base an RV under that mountain.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

> Three generations of Katmai bears have apparently decided the best way to fish is to walk straight in.

Park marmots have gone from the cutest thing on the mountain to full-blown wanted criminals.

It isn't the shot glass and it isn't the tiny spoon. What travel pros actually bring home is cheaper than both.

Venus is about to vanish from the evening sky, which raises real questions about where women are from.

There's a giant gator beside I-10 in Beaumont with its jaws permanently open, and it has a name and a following.

You can drive the entire Pony Express route across eight states, which is a lot of monument for an outfit that lasted nineteen months.

Newest podcast obsession alert: A reporter's daughter ran off to ride freight trains, so the reporter went after her with a microphone. Ten episodes, or roughly four states.

The Dump Station Bethenny Frankel took a luxury RV to Burning Man, which means the playa now has an outfit-change segment.

The Odometer 4,231 percent. That's three years of growth for a Nevada company building all-electric living space on a gas van chassis, which is a pretty loud signal from the RV market.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

> Mount Mansfield is named after a town that doesn't exist anymore, and the mountain is what killed it.

Mansfield, Vermont was chartered in 1783, and settlers discovered fairly quickly that having the tallest mountain in the state sitting in the middle of your town makes the town almost impossible to run. Getting from one side to the other meant going around. Eventually they gave up, dissolved Mansfield, and split the remains between Underhill and Stowe.

The name itself came secondhand. Several of the original grantees were from Mansfield, Connecticut, which was named for Moses Mansfield, a landowner there. So Vermont's highest peak is named for a Connecticut man who almost certainly never saw it, by way of a town it drove out of business.

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