Snowplows Finally Won, Free Park Passes, and One Very Illegal Python

Good morning! It's Wednesday, June 24 — Glacier's most famous road just opened with no reservation, many of California's parks are about to be free, and today you'll learn what to do if you ever meet a mountain lion on a trail.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

The World Cup of Snow Plowing Just Ended

For most of the year, the best driving in America is buried under feet of snow. This week the plows finally won. Glacier's Going-to-the-Sun Road opened Monday over Logan Pass, and here's the part worth circling: for the first time in years, there's no timed-entry reservation to drive it. You can just go. Same story in California, where Lassen's high road opened weeks ahead of schedule on a thin snow year, and in Wyoming, where Grand Teton's Moose-Wilson Road is back open end to end. Three legendary national-park drives, three states, no permit lottery, all at once. The catch is at the bottom of the map: down in the Grand Canyon it's now hot enough that the park is telling hikers to clear out of the inner canyon from 10 to 4, where the shade is a rumor and 109 degrees is not. So the play this week is simple: chase the high country while it's cool and wide open, save the desert for dawn, and let the only hard call left be which Western park to hit first.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

Four Things Worth Two Minutes

> California parks just went free, and the clock runs out July 6. Grab the state's $50 Historian Passport for zero dollars and you're into more than 30 of its historic parks free through the end of 2026. It's the rare government freebie worth setting an alarm for, and if any California leg is on your map this year, this is your in. (More)

> Every national park flings its gates open free for the Fourth. From July 3 to 5 the entrance fee vanishes at every park that charges one, which quietly turns the busiest travel weekend of the year into the cheapest. Pair the free gate with the alpine roads finally being plowed and America's birthday becomes the best ticket in the country. (More)

> Mosquito advice from someone who has earned the right to give mosquito advice. She grew up in Alaska, where the mosquitoes are basically livestock, so this is worth two minutes before your next buggy night at camp turns your ankles into a snack platter. (More)

> Ducking into an indoor climbing gym next time the weather pins you down? Heed this first. Auto-belays, the cables that lower a climber when there's no partner on the rope, do almost everything for you except confirm you're clipped in, and that one gap has turned tragic. There's a simple habit that closes it, well worth teaching the kids before they ever leave the ground. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

Wait, Is That Orion or the Big Dipper?

If you've ever looked up from the campfire, seen a sky full of anonymous white dots, and wished you could actually name a few, June is the month to fix that. Here's the perk of RV life that never makes the brochure: you routinely park in exactly the kind of dark that city stargazers drive hours to find, and June's short, warm nights make it the easiest on-ramp there is, with no midnight wait and no bundling up. Give your eyes twenty phone-free minutes to adjust (one glance at that bright screen resets the clock), then look up and start collecting names: the Milky Way pouring out of twilight, the Summer Triangle straight overhead, Scorpius hanging low in the south. Learn three and you're suddenly the smartest person around the fire.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

Amazon Prime Day Is On, and Here Are Two RV Faves

> Dyson V8 cordless stick vacuum — It's Amazon Prime Day, and you're so over sweeping the Cheerios off your RV floor for the 12th time today. Treat yourself to the vacuum you've been wanting forever while it's on sale. It makes the Cheerios a little less maddening. (save $120!)

> Countertop ice maker — Another Amazon Prime Day steal: a portable countertop (or picnic table top!) ice maker that spits out 9 cubes in 6 minutes, which is faster than you can say cocktail in the camp chair. It cranks 26 pounds a day and quietly ends the RV ritual of driving into town for a bag of ice because the camp store is closed. (save $23!)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

Some Parks to Visit If You're Antisocial or Just Need Air

Great Basin National Park, Nevada — Picture a national park with a 13,000-foot peak, an underground marble palace, and the darkest skies in the Lower 48, where the biggest crowd you'll face is the empty parking lot. Here's the whole playbook: drive the Wheeler Peak road, tour Lehman Caves by lantern, walk among bristlecone pines that were ancient when Rome was new, and ride the after-dark Star Train. It's the rare bucket-list park you can still have almost entirely to yourself.

Montana's State Parks — You're already coming for Glacier, so don't make it the only stop. Montana quietly runs a whole string of state parks with the same glacial lakes, limestone caverns, and big-sky drama as their famous neighbor, and an easy site to book at each. They're the ideal low-stress base camp: settle in at one, day-trip the headliner, and let the parks nobody told you about steal the trip.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

Come face to face with a mountain lion on the trail and rule one is counterintuitive: do not run, because nothing flips you from hiker to prey faster than a fleeing snack.

Ever wanted to sleep in a gleaming vintage Airstream but not, you know, tow one across three states? A whole fleet of restored ones now rents by the night.

If people already say you're full of hot air, may as well make it official with a sunrise balloon over Oregon's high desert, the kind of morning you'll bring up for years.

You know that 45-minute scroll through Netflix that somehow ends in watching nothing? Save yourself on the next rainy night at camp: the free app sitting on the deepest movie library of them all is apparently Tubi.

The fastest way to wake up to an ant superhighway through your RV isn't the crumb on the floor, it's the sticky jar you put back without wiping.

Clive Davis, the legendary executive behind half the artists in your Spotify road-trip playlist, died this week at 93, just as country breakout Ella Langley, who is probably on that same playlist, piled on a fresh round of summer dates, so the soundtrack rolls on: raise a glass to one and go see the other.

Every campground has that one RV dad backing in the trailer blind, flipping the burgers, and refereeing the kids all at once, and biology says he's in elite company alongside the seahorses who do literally all of it.

For the off-season stretch when even die-hard RVers want a porch and a zip code for a while, these beach towns make a cheap home base between trips pencil out at about $1,800 a month.

The Dump Station Only in Florida does a guy wrestle a 10-foot python out of the Everglades by hand and get a ticket for it, in the one state that pays professional bounty hunters to do the exact same thing.

The Odometer 15 — that's all the minutes outdoors it takes to measurably drop your blood pressure, cortisol, and heart rate, which means the cure for a brutal week is a campsite you can back the trailer right into.

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

Get Paid to Roam

Spend the Summer in the Black Hills — Rapid City, SD — Rapid City KOA wants a dependable couple for housekeeping or the famous all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast through October 15: hourly pay, store discounts, and a minimal-fee full-hookup site a short drive from Rushmore and the Badlands. Email Carla at [email protected] or call 800-562-8504.

Summer Lodge Crew in the Tetons — Moran, WY — The company running the historic lodges inside Grand Teton is hiring cooks, housekeepers, and front-desk crew from May through October 9, and for self-contained RVers there's a limited run of free full-hookup sites right inside the park — Moose-Wilson Road and the Teton range out the door.

Summer Shop Crew in Glacier Country — West Glacier, MT — The outfit running Glacier's in-park retail is staffing its West Glacier shops through mid-October, walking distance from the park's west entrance. RVers can take a slip at the company's own West Glacier RV village right there, which basically makes the Logan Pass mountain goats your new coworkers.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

Almost Every Place You RV Is Named for Somebody

That California park whose road opened weeks ahead of schedule this spring, Lassen Volcanic, takes its name from Peter Lassen — a Danish blacksmith who came west and reinvented himself as a wilderness trail guide. The reinvention went poorly. The shortcut he talked gold-rush emigrants into taking, the "Lassen Cutoff," turned out to be roughly 200 miles longer than the routes it was supposed to beat, and the wagon trains that trusted him paid for it in the worst way. He has a 10,000-foot volcano, a national park, a national forest, and an entire county named for him anyway. History, it turns out, is generous to a man with good marketing.