Fat Bear Week Begins, $96 Yellowstone Rent, and a Vermont Drive That's Mostly Cheese

Good morning! It's Wednesday, September 23 — the fattest bear in Alaska defends his title today and you get a vote, a 26-year-old is paying $96 a month to live in Yellowstone, and Vermont's best fall drive is mostly cheese.

First time reading? This is your five-minute catch-up on everything that happened in the RV and outdoor world this week — timely, useful, and a little brighter than the rest of your inbox. Join us and sign up here.

Know someone who'd love this? Forward it. Thoughts on this issue? Hit reply (we read every one), or email [email protected].

— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

> Somewhere on Alaska's Brooks River right now a brown bear has no idea today is the biggest day of his year. Fat Bear Week is March Madness for bears. Every fall, Katmai National Park puts its chubbiest brown bears into a head-to-head bracket, and the internet votes for the bear who packed on the most salmon before hibernation. Fat is the whole point: a bear that nearly doubles its weight by October is set up for a long winter nap, so the trophy goes to the best eater, not the best athlete. Bear 32, Chunk, took the title last fall with a broken jaw. This morning he opens his defense against 164 Bucky, a big male with a dark muzzle stripe and a reputation as an ace fisherman. Polls are open noon to 9 p.m. Eastern through September 29, with one vote per email address.

And this year, the field is bigger than ever: 16 bears, up from 12, including five mothers competing with their cubs, a blond-eared female named Marshmallow, and a bear named Gully who sits like Eeyore. Last year, more than 1.7 million votes came in from over 100 countries. The contest started in 2014 with just 1,700.

Katmai has no road in, so nobody is towing to Brooks Camp, which makes this the rare national park event where the best seat is your dinette and the cams run free all day. The bears who didn't make the bracket are the ones in your campground, and they'd appreciate the door staying shut while the bacon is on.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

> The Grand Canyon still can't put you up for the night, more than three weeks after the flood. The August 29 flash flood that killed three men also broke the South Rim's water pipe, so the lodges are closed and water is rationed. A rafting party 500 yards above Phantom Ranch is alive because of an alert system that didn't exist three years ago. (More)

> Two helicopter crew members died Sunday fighting the Dome Fire in Yosemite, and it's only 15 percent contained. The park is open, but everything east of Highway 41 between Wawona and Chinquapin is closed, and Wawona's air goes unhealthy after dark. Coming in on 41 this week? Plan on smoke. (More)

> Utah's fire season is winding down. The campground closures are just getting started. A new study finds burned areas keep losing visitors for five years afterward, and southern Utah's Pine Valley campground, burned in 2025 and then buried by the debris flow that followed, is the picture of it. Before you book red-rock country for spring, make sure the campground still exists. (More)

> A nor'easter is lining up for the Northeast just as the leaves start turning. The wind arrives first, the wet part peaks late in the week, several inches of rain are possible, and the coast from the Chesapeake north could flood. The models still disagree on the track. Coastal site booked this weekend? Watch the awning and the forecast, in that order. (More)

> America's Largest RV Show wrapped up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, last weekend with 43,148 people through the gates. It's the biggest RV show in the country, so the turnstile count doubles as the industry's annual pulse check on who's still buying, and it came in just under last year's 45,813. One manufacturer reported its best fifth-wheel sales since before the pandemic, in the same story where a dealer called this "the slowest year I've seen." Both are true at once, and that's the market you're walking into. (More)

> She pays $96 a month to live in Yellowstone. The elk are the catch. A 26-year-old left a $75,000 engineering job in Chicago to sew uniforms in Mammoth for $19.25 an hour, in a shared dorm room with a 3 a.m. elk bugle for an alarm clock. Her visiting friends stay in the park for $5 a night, which is less than you paid for firewood. (More)

> West Virginia's national park just outdrew Arches. New River Gorge logged 1.96 million visits in 2025, its most ever and up 64 percent since 2019, landing at No. 17 among U.S. and Canadian national parks, about 9,000 visits behind Bryce Canyon. If Bridge Day weekend is on your list, October 17, the campsite is already the hard part. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

> If you're shopping for an RV to winter in, the words "four-season" on the brochure are a vibe, not a standard. Nobody regulates the label: it usually means thicker insulation, an enclosed and heated underbelly, double-pane windows and a furnace that keeps the tanks from freezing, but no agency checks any of it. Ask for the numbers. It matters more this year, because California faces a 75 percent chance of the strongest El Niño since 1950, which for anyone snowbirding through Southern California means a wet, sloppy winter with debris flows off the burn scars. Whatever you drive or tow, here's how to get an RV through a cold night without cracking a pipe.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

> Timex National Park 40mm Watch — A field watch with a national park on the dial and a glow-in-the-dark face, for the parts of the trip where your phone is in the truck and the ranger talk starts at seven. For weekend warriors who like a little souvenir that also tells them when to flip the burgers.
Buy on Amazon

> OneTigris Blanket Poncho — A camp blanket with a hood and arm slots, so you can hold a mug, poke the fire and stay wrapped up all at once. For fall campers who know the fire ring is warm on exactly one side of you, and the other side is October.
Buy on Amazon

> Solar Camping String Lights, 39 feet — Forty feet of fairy lights that charge off the sun all day, run off a remote at night, and never touch your shore power. For families in state-park loops with no site lighting, where finding the picnic table after dark is otherwise a shin problem.
Buy on Amazon

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

> Route 100, Vermont — The state's signature fall drive is also a road trip through 150 kinds of cheese: Grafton's cheddars in the south, a Plymouth creamery still on its 1890 recipe, the actual von Trapps' farm near Waitsfield, then Cabot and Shelburne Farms' goat-milk caramel up by Lake Champlain. Hit the southern stops on the way up and base in Stowe for the rest. Across the river, New Hampshire's fall drives run from the White Mountains to the coast.

> Grand Teton, Wyoming — A writer who has been to 30 national parks calls this the fall park everyone overlooks: golden aspens and a fraction of the summer crowd. The catch is the calendar. Weather starts closing trails and the campgrounds start shutting before the color is done, so the last week of September is go time, not planning time.

> The Ozark Run, Missouri — Missouri's newest scenic byway is 78 miles of greatest hits: Elephant Rocks, Johnson's Shut-Ins and Taum Sauk, strung along Highway 21 through old lead-mining towns, with campgrounds and fishing holes the whole way. It's split into two "sprints," so you can do the whole thing in a weekend and still have time to get in the river.

> Ten state parks with a campsite — The national parks are where the leaf-peeping crowds go. These ten have the same color and somewhere to park: Custer's lakeside sites with 1,300 bison for neighbors, Palo Duro's canyon floor holding color into mid-November, Mount Magazine's 18 sites on the top of Arkansas. Read the fine print on Franconia Notch, though: 97 tent sites, no hookups, day trip only.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

> An armadillo has turned up in Ohio, and scientists say Chicago is about a decade away.

> Sonoma County has 900 animals, zebras and rhinos included, on 400 acres, and the tour truck lets you ride on the roof.

> Missouri has towns named Peculiar, Tightwad and Licking, and the last one is about a buffalo.

> North Carolina's fall color runs from the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Smokies, and these are the ten spots worth the drive.

> North Idaho's scenic route includes a 15-mile bike trail that runs through mountain tunnels.

> George Lucas opened an art museum in Los Angeles yesterday, and PCMag's reviewer spent two hours inside and wanted ten.

> Friday is 9/25, and California, Nashville and Portland have all declared it Dolly Parton Day.

The Dump Station A seven-acre corn maze in the Hudson Valley has hosted several marriage proposals. Nothing says forever like realizing neither of you knows the way out.

The Odometer 190,000 miles. That's how much road the Roman Empire had built by the year 150, now on a single digital map, and it turns out the best-connected road in Italy skips Rome entirely.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

> Every bear in this week's bracket is fishing in a river named for a man who was busy mapping the rest of Alaska.

Brooks Falls, Brooks River and Brooks Lake were all named in 1919 by Robert Griggs, the botanist leading National Geographic's expeditions into Katmai after the 1912 eruption, for Alfred Hulse Brooks, the geologist who ran the U.S. Geological Survey's Alaska work from 1903 until 1924. Brooks spent two decades on the territory's maps and worked out that the mountains across Arctic Alaska were their own range, not the tail end of the Rockies. They named those for him too, the year after he had a stroke at his desk at the Interior Department and died the next morning.

He got a mountain range, a river, a lake, a waterfall and a mineral called hulsite. The waterfall is the one with a webcam, and this week a bear named Chunk is standing in the middle of it, doing more for Alfred Brooks's name recognition than the Brooks Range ever did.

Like this? Get it free every Wednesday. Subscribe →

OK but what’s with the name Swervia? It’s everything we love about RVing, packed into one name. “Swerve” for the twists, turns, and unexpected detours that make travel – and life – worth remembering. “We RV” because, well, we do. And “Via” for the roads that actually get you somewhere.

Send us your feedback at [email protected] and help us avoid a wrong turn. We aren’t afraid to ask for directions.

Products you buy through our links may earn us a commission.

© 2026 Swervia, Inc.