Yellowstone's 20,100 Pieces of Trash, Free Park Gates, and 59 People Who Tried to Delete Moab

Good morning! It's Wednesday, September 16 — the country's biggest RV show opens today into its softest market in years, the national parks are free tomorrow, and Wyoming wants you certified before you tow over Teton Pass.

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— OK WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING —

> America's largest RV show opens to the public today in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with nearly 1,500 units parked in and around the Giant Center, and it opens into the softest market the industry has seen in years. Shipments are projected at 314,000 units for 2026, down 8.2 percent from 2025. July alone fell 11.9 percent. The turnstiles have been slipping too, and this week's count doesn't exist yet: 47,879 people came through the gates in 2024, and 45,813 last year.

If you're selling, that's grim. If you're shopping, it's the most leverage you've had at a dealer since the lots went empty in 2021.

It's also making the top of the market strange. One Florida outfit now sells quarter shares of luxury motorcoaches, starting near $250,000 for a pre-owned share and about ten weeks of use a year, which is either a timeshare or a yacht club depending on your mood. Meanwhile a 1966 Streamline Travel Home just surfaced with 58,000 miles on it, one of perhaps eighty ever built, by a company an Oklahoma businessman bought on the spot after complaining about his.

The show runs through Sunday, and the crowd that will walk it has changed. The median RV owner is four years younger than in 2021, and better than a third are first-time owners.

— OK BUT A LOT MORE HAPPENED —

> Wyoming wants you certified before you tow over Teton Pass. WYDOT is standing up an online course on steep grades and brake fade for RVs, trailers, and anything over 10,000 pounds, possibly by October. No certificate, no pass. (More)

> The gates are free tomorrow and the campsite still isn't. Thursday is Constitution Day, so every national park that charges admission waives it. Entrance fees only, though: camping, timed entry and tour fees cost exactly what they cost today. (More)

> Somewhere in Alaska a bear is eating his way from 700 to 1,200 pounds, and there's a bracket for it. Fat Bear Week runs September 22 to 29, the seeding drops Friday, and the cams run free all day. (More)

> Leave the RV in Moab and ride into Arches. A $3 million pilot runs four town stops to Delicate Arch and The Windows every 15 minutes, free with a park pass, first come first served. It ends October 31. (More)

> Crews pulled 20,100 pieces of trash out of Yellowstone's thermal features this summer. More than 280 hats, a World Cup cap, and eighteen dollars in foreign coins. Morning Glory Pool's color was changed by the ones nobody could reach. (More)

> Colorado's aspens are peaking this week, the earliest window on the map. A meteorologist charted twelve leaf-peeping regions, from Maroon Bells now to the Great Smokies in early November. Miss one window and eleven more are coming behind it. (More)

> Five planets are naked-eye visible this month, and your campsite already has the sky for it. Just not on one night. Two come out after sunset, two before dawn, and the fifth spends the 26th beside the Harvest Moon. (More)

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS —

> If you're routing through southwest Colorado this fall and the sky goes brown, that's the plan. Crews are burning roughly 2,500 acres between now and November. Small fires used to clear the dead wood. A century of stopping them let it pile up, and now it burns hot enough to take the soil with it. Lighting one on purpose thins that fuel out first, on a day crews pick instead of a day the wind does. Smoke sinks into low ground overnight, so camp the high side of a valley and shut the roof vents before bed. The dates are soft, too: weather decides, and burns get pushed or scrapped.

— OK NOW HERE'S SOME RETAIL THERAPY —

> TrailScrubber RV step covers — A bristled scrubber mat that wraps each entry step, so the mud, pine needles and beach sand come off your boots at the door instead of on the floor you swept an hour ago. For families at a lakefront or beach site, where the sand finds its way back inside four times before lunch.
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> Motion-activated magnetic step lights — Battery-powered, magnetic, and they switch on when something moves. For weekend campers in state-park loops where nobody is paying to light your site, and where the 2 a.m. walk to the bathhouse is otherwise a trust exercise. Also handy for identifying whatever else decided your bottom step was a nice place to sit.
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> FXW RV step grid — Because the dog has discovered that the space under the stairs is a tunnel to the neighbor's dinner. This panels off the area under and around your steps, fits stairs up to 32 inches wide, and gives you back your evenings.
Buy on Amazon

— OK BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO HERE —

> New England, for the 250th — Skip the three scenic overlooks where everyone else will be idling in line. Instead, pick a few places with actual stories: Concord's North Bridge, with the maples blazing overhead, or Castine, Maine, where a 1779 British fort still watches over a harbor that looks almost too pretty to have a history. The foliage moves south over six weeks, so choose your stops based on where the color is happening when you arrive. Here are the places to put on your list.

> The Enchanted Circle, New Mexico — Eighty-four miles out of Taos, with Wheeler Peak rising to 13,161 feet and aspen turning the mountains the color of a struck match. You'll pull over for the first view, then discover there are about forty more. The catch for RVers: there are two serious climbs, so check the brakes before you go chasing fall light. Forest Service campgrounds close September 30, leaving Eagle Nest Lake State Park at 8,200 feet, first come, first served into November. No dump station, so arrive with empty tanks. Here's the drive, and here's when the color peaks where you're headed.

— OK BUT DID YOU SEE THIS —

> September has a wildflower that looks like it escaped from a ghost story. It's bone white, hangs its head toward the ground, and contains no chlorophyll whatsoever.

> A guy outside Houston has quietly built a shrine to roadside Americana: 4,500 neon signs, two dozen muscle cars, and one very good reason to get off I-10. See what's inside.

> Some state parks are basically national parks without the timed entry, lottery or existential parking situation. These are the ones to know.

> Louisiana's fall color waits until almost everyone has given up looking. One bayou park still takes RVs up to 60 feet. Worth the late-season detour.

The Dump Station An emergency physician graded your odds on the Oregon Trail: dysentery was never the game being cruel, it was four hundred people and one creek, and your version of that creek is whatever you last filled the tank from.

The Odometer Five named storms in, well past the September 10 peak of the season, and the Atlantic still has not produced a single hurricane. It's the longest the basin has gone without one since 2002.

— OK BUT WHO EVEN IS THIS PERSON —

> Moab got its name from a farmer who did a little dentistry on the side. Ten years later, 59 of his neighbors decided the name had to go.

In 1880, when a mail route opened between Salina, Utah, and Ouray, Colorado, the settlement needed a name for its new post office. William Pierce suggested Moab, the biblical country east of the Jordan, and promptly became the first postmaster.

Then the locals read up on Moab.

In 1890, 59 residents petitioned the brand-new Grand County court to change the name, calling Moab's biblical namesake an "incestuous and idolatrous community" and asking for something "more appropriate, significant, or expressive of moral decency and manly dignity."

Their replacement name? Vina, after the grapes.

The petition failed for lack of votes. So the next time you roll into Moab eating grapes in a 35-foot motorhome, remember: you're driving into town under a name that 59 people once found so scandalous they tried to delete it.

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