Lake Mead Hits Its Lowest Level Ever, a $95,000 RV Side Hustle, and the 1948 Bus from a Robin Williams Movie

Good morning! It's Wednesday, August 12 — a mountain lion in the neighborhood turns out to be good news for your windshield, two pilots cleared $95,000 renting out their RVs before a frozen pipe took $16,000 back, and there's a partial eclipse overhead this afternoon.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

> Half of you did school pickup yesterday. The other half still has a month of pool time and zero interest in hearing the word autumn. Both camps get to be right, and both camps still need to look at this today, because the 2026 fall color forecast just went live and the October RV sites worth having get taken by the people who start looking now. That's the only reason anyone is talking about fall in the second week of August.

The peak-color prediction map gives you a week-by-week read on when your region turns, which is the part most people eyeball and then hope for the best on. Hold your travel window up against it before you open a single reservation page.

The harder question is where. The marquee fall destinations will be a booking scramble by mid-September. New River Gorge will not. America's youngest national park, designated in 2020, charges no entrance fee and runs no timed entry, and its color peaks late October into early November, a week or two behind Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge. So you get the late color after the crowd has already come and gone, in a park nobody made you book in January. Our three days in New River Gorge has the campgrounds, the bridge overlooks and the drive times already sorted.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

> Lake Mead set the record nobody wanted. The country's largest reservoir hit its lowest ever level, beating its own 2022 mark. If your fall route runs anywhere past Hoover Dam, the lake you have in your head sits a long way below the one in the brochure photos. (More)

> Forty-plus large fires are still burning out west. Thousands are out of their homes in Nevada and a Utah fire has passed 100,000 acres in a drought year. Check the smoke map before you book, because a reserved site and a breathable one are two different things. (More)

> Somebody two sites over is using the bear box as a dumpster. A writer spent days at Yosemite watching them fill with trash and dog waste. That's how one lazy RV campsite loop trains a bear, and the whole campground pays the tuition. (More)

> Here's a reason to hope there are mountain lions lurking nearby. Five years of Olympic data found deer-vehicle collisions 67% less likely where mountain lions ranged, because hunted deer move in daylight instead of walking into your headlights at dusk. (More)

> Timeshare math has reached the luxury motorcoach. A quarter share buys ten guaranteed weeks a year from about $250,000 used, plus $1,500 a month in fees. You get the coach and somebody else gets the storage lot, the insurance and the winterizing. (More)

> Two airline pilots cleared $95,000 renting out nine RVs. Then they handed $16,000 of it back when a winterizing job didn't hold and the pipes froze. Passive income, right up until it isn't. (More)

> You love RVing in Idaho, and turns out you might love living there, too. Idaho just took the top spot for livability across 51 metrics, in case you're trying to figure out where to permanently park. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

> A partial solar eclipse crosses the northern half of the country this afternoon, and the U.S. gets the thin end of it: about 9% coverage in New York City, while Iceland, Greenland and Spain get the real thing. Being parked somewhere with open sky is an advantage nobody at an office window has today. Just know that several of the things you'd instinctively reach for are not eye protection, and at least two of them are probably in your RV right now.

> Need help figuring out what to pack for your next national park trip? Here's what should definitely be on your list.

> Eleven foragers outside Yellowstone ended up in the hospital last week, which is why we're sharing this article this week. There are six wild mushrooms worth learning on sight. Everything else behind your site stays in the woods.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

> Ninja SLUSHi MAX frozen drink maker — Summer is still very much here and nobody has ever turned down a slushie. A 150-ounce vessel and 12-plus servings means it lives on the picnic table all afternoon, which is the fastest way to meet the people three sites over.

> DEWALT 20V MAX cordless shop fan — Dog-days relief: 650 CFM, up to 4.5 hours, running on the same battery you already packed for the tire inflator, the mini blower, and the drill for your stabilizers.

> Solo Stove Yukon 2.0 smokeless fire pit and stand — Long evenings around the fire are the whole reason a lot of us do this, right up until you climb into bed smelling like one. 27 inches of stainless steel, 360-degree airflow, and an ash pan that lifts right out.

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

> The Adirondacks, New York — Six million acres, more than 300 lakes, and a camping menu that refuses to pick a lane. Free roadside sites in the Moose River Plains, paddle-in islands on Saranac Lake, reserved sites from $18 a night, all inside the same Forever Wild boundary. Choose your own difficulty. Our five-day Ausable Chasm and Lake Champlain route runs the set-up-once version.

> Amarillo, Texas — Fifteen vintage trailers and motorhomes from the 1930s through the '70s, motorcycles going back to 1918, and the actual cherry-red 1948 bus that starred opposite Robin Williams in RV. It's free, it's off I-27, and it's open Thursday through Saturday only, which is the detail that decides which day your Palo Duro leg lands on. Here's what's in there.

> Downstate New York — Anyone in the Northeast trying to squeeze one more real adventure out of this summer should be looking at the Hudson Valley, where the ziplines, cave tours and water slides are still running and it's inside a day's drive of most of you. And if New York City is anywhere on your fall map, leave the RV parked and take the ferry, because the boat to Liberty Island is the easy part and the crown is what sells out months before anybody thinks to ask.

> Montana — Run the same route in June and you get wildflowers. Run it in August and you get smoke and a line of cars at every trailhead. Run it in late September and you can have the mountains very nearly to yourself, and almost nobody does. Here's the read that talks you out of August.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

> If you've ever driven four hours past the last streetlight for a sky like that, a new camera the size of a small car just went and got 650,000 galaxies in one frame.

> Every acorn you've stepped on at a fall RV site is technically food. Technically. They "generally only have two flavors (horrible and bland)," but here's how to eat them if you've never tried one.

> Hudson Valley sunflower fields are peaking right now and several farms will let you walk straight into them, which beats the third scenic overlook of the day.

> Michael Irvin's production company is turning a custom-themed RV into a film set. Fetching Fletchers follows Linda Fletcher to every single game her son plays for Miami this season, from the road. Every single game, the whole season, because the RV makes it possible. Hard to think of a better reason to own one.

The Dump Station A national-park ranger crime drama premiered Friday, pulled from the 19 novels a mystery writer set in the parks. Reviews agree the scenery badly outperforms the plot, but we'll probably watch it anyway.

The Odometer 3,700 miles, the Great American Rail-Trail, which just logged its first known thru-hike: one man walked from the Capitol in March to the Pacific on August 3, on a corridor still only about half finished trail. He walked the gaps anyway. Someday you'll bike it.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

> Elwood Mead, who Lake Mead is named after, spent fifty years deciding who got water and how much of it. He wrote Wyoming's first water laws as state engineer, spent eight years running Victoria's water commission in Australia, then took over the Bureau of Reclamation in 1924 and steered Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee and Owyhee through construction. He died in office in January 1936, and the reservoir filling in behind Hoover Dam took his name later that same year. Ninety years on, the irrigation engineer whose entire career was the arithmetic of a finite river has his name on the one number nobody in the Southwest wants to look at.

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