The Grand Canyon Closes Its Campgrounds, 23 Million People Book October, and Hooters Gets an Origin-Story Movie

Good morning! It's Wednesday, September 2 — 23 million people are planning a fall RV trip, Highway 1 through Big Sur is closed, and apparently you can sleep at a Pilot travel center if you're in an RV, but not if you're in a car.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

> Twenty-three million Americans are planning an RV trip this fall, and everyone wants the same three-to-seven-hour radius you do. The RV Industry Association's new survey says more than 90 percent of those trips will stay close to home, 11 million people are heading out over Labor Day, and another 9.4 million people who don't own an RV are planning to rent or borrow one. Seventy-one percent are bringing the dog, because naturally.

Then there's the part that should change how you think about October: national parks and scenic destinations have officially outranked beaches as the top fall-trip choice. The Northeast and Southeast are the two most popular regions. So if you were hoping everyone else would go to the beach while you had the mountains to yourself, bad news. They had the same idea.

The good news? The crowds don't stick around. Yellowstone logged more than 1.1 million visitors last July and roughly 420,000 in October. Same park. A whole lot less elbow-to-elbow. Our planning guide for RVing the national parks covers which reservation windows actually matter, and Forbes went through twelve parks that are better in fall than in summer for reasons that mostly aren't the leaves.

If you'd rather skip the marquee names altogether, these are the ones that are easier to get into.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

> Highway 1 through Big Sur is closed in two places, and the fire is still barely contained. The Plaskett Fire went from roughly 140 acres on Thursday to nearly 27,000 by Tuesday, at 1 percent containment, with the Timber Fire forcing a second closure to the north. Everything between the two is local traffic only, and the Forest Service has shut the Monterey Ranger District behind it. If California's coast was your September plan, this is your sign to redraw it. (More)

> The Grand Canyon just became a much harder place to spend the night. At the time of this writing, the August 29 flash flood above Bright Angel Canyon has taken out nearly every footbridge on the creek and damaged roughly 40 percent of the pipeline that supplies water to the South Rim. Stage 4 water restrictions kicked in Monday at noon: Trailer Village and all in-park lodging are closed to overnight guests, while Mather Campground remains open for dry camping with campground spigots turned off and no campfires or charcoal. Day visits are still fine, and Tusayan sits outside the park boundary if you need a place to sleep. Phantom Ranch, Bright Angel Campground and the North Kaibab Trail are closed indefinitely. Two people have died and one remains missing. Conditions are changing quickly, so check the park's latest updates before you go. (More)

> The wolves at Isle Royale have developed a taste for camping gear. Packs, sleeping pads, whatever happens to be inside the tent. The park closed 13 tent sites and eight group sites across four campgrounds this week, and at two of them staff had already put in a cage so campers could lock up their backpacks. Because apparently "keep your food secured" wasn't enough anymore. (More)

> The satellites are winning the night sky. Stargazing guides in Yellowstone say their groups spot one within minutes of looking up, and first-timers keep mistaking them for shooting stars. What's coming after Starlink is worse for dark-sky parks, and it involves mirrors. (More)

> Billions of birds are about to fly over Texas, and you could be standing underneath them. Fall migration runs into November down the Central Flyway, and Texas leads the country with 639 species, more than two thirds of them just passing through. The Rio Grande Valley is where it concentrates, and it stays birdy long after the crowds thin out. (More)

> Fourteen thousand acres of Northern California are about to become public land. The Wildlands Conservancy is buying the AP Ranch in Siskiyou County, 14,177 acres in the Klamath Mountains with eight miles of the East Fork Scott River running through it, and the plan includes camping. The deal closes October 30. File this under: places you want to know about before everybody else does. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

> Overnight parking at a Pilot or Flying J is fine in an RV and not allowed in a car, which is the kind of oddly specific rule you don't discover until you really need a place to sleep. The chain says its passenger lots are for short stops only. RVs get the extended-parking treatment plus propane, dump stations, and reservable spots with showers. It also isn't free: rates run about $15 to $22 and vary by location, so check before you count on it as the cheap night. If you're chasing genuinely free ones instead, here's how the RVers who never pay for a campsite find their spots.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

> Collapsible prep tubs — Two lidded tubs that hold a marinade or a whole night's worth of chopped everything, then flatten to nothing when you're done. For anyone who has tried to butterfly a chicken on eleven inches of RV counter, or who preps at home so day four of the trip isn't sandwiches again.
Buy on Amazon - $114

> Fall picnic table cover with bench covers — A fitted 72-inch cover plus both benches, in an autumn print, which is a nicer way of saying it hides whatever the last people did to that table. For families and campground regulars: it goes on in about ten seconds and the elastic keeps it from turning into a sail.
Buy on Amazon - $19

> Wearable sherpa puffy blanket — A packable, machine-washable blanket you can walk around in, with a waterproof side for damp benches and wet grass. For shoulder-season campers who want to stay out at the fire past the point where everybody else goes inside.
Buy on Amazon - $79

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

> Salem, Massachusetts
Halloween is coming. So is Salem's 400th birthday. And October is not going to get any less crowded. Haunted Happenings runs the whole month of October and pulls more than half a million people into a town of 44,000. Camping in Essex County or over the New Hampshire line is the realistic play if you want to be close without paying October rates. Here's how to plan it.

> St. Ignace, Michigan
Fall arrives here early, which means you can get your first taste of color before most of Michigan knows what's happening. Color usually starts in early September, with peak toward the end of the month. Straits State Park sits minutes from downtown with a mile of trail above the Lake Huron shoreline and the Mackinac Bridge in the frame, and the walk down from the Cut River Bridge drops through hardwoods to Lake Michigan on 230-odd stairs. The North Country Trail runs straight through town. See the trail list.

> Rockin' River Ranch, Arizona
Arizona's newest state park has 209 acres of river, trails and wildlife. It also has one important catch: you can't camp there. Day use only, which makes it a detour rather than a destination: base in the Verde Valley, drive in, walk the short riverside trails, kayak, fish, leave. An hour below Flagstaff and 90 minutes above Phoenix, in a stretch of Arizona that stays quiet. See what's there.

> Loess Hills, Iowa
There is a 220-mile road trip in Iowa built on piles of powdered glacier. Wind piled the dust into wave-shaped ridges deep enough that geologists know of one comparable stretch on the planet, in Shaanxi, China. The byway runs Akron to the Missouri line past a 200-head bison herd, ground Lewis and Clark crossed, and hike-in campsites at Preparation Canyon. Drive the whole thing.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

> A mink showed up on a Bronx River camera trap a week after the first otter in a century, which says a lot about how clean that water finally got.

Yellowstone is poisoning a creek on purpose this week, and the fish it's saving is the one you want to catch.

Lake Erie's mayfly swarms are disgusting, they cling to the drive-thru speaker, and they mean the lake is healthy again.

Landsat photographed the national parks from orbit and they are much harder to name than you would think.

The Harvest Moon lands September 26, and it's the one full moon of the year that comes up without the usual wait.

The Dump Station The founders of Hooters are making a movie about the road trip to Clearwater Beach that accidentally built the chain.

The Odometer 145. That's how many species live in Channel Islands National Park and nowhere else on Earth, which is how a park you reach by boat out of Ventura ended up nicknamed the Galapagos of North America.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

> St. Ignace, Michigan (mentioned above) has been a settlement since 1671, but its name comes from a man who never came anywhere close to Michigan. Ignatius of Loyola was a Basque soldier who got hit by a cannonball, spent months stuck in bed, and came out of it a completely different person.

In 1521, Ignatius was defending Pamplona when a cannonball shattered one leg and wounded the other. He spent months recovering, with little to do except read the lives of the saints. He had gone into battle dreaming of military glory. Instead, his enforced boredom sent his life in an entirely different direction.

He eventually became a priest and, in 1540, founded the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. More than a century later, a Jesuit named Jacques Marquette established a mission on the north shore of the Straits of Mackinac and named it for the founder of his order. Ignace is Ignatius in French. Marquette is buried there, in a park in the middle of town, about a mile from the trailheads.

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