BOONDOCKING
Boondocking is when you wander off the roads and just set up camp. Both the National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management encourage this. Park services generally frown on it. They want you contained in their campsite and to pay the $23 fee. Our first two experiences left us with mixed feelings.
PLENTY OF SPACE TO SHARE
We had planned on staying at the Hanna national campground but when we arrived it was full. We ran into a guy there(Grizzly Adams) though that was boondocking up on Forest Road 209 and he suggested that it might be a good place to camp as long we were not smokers – he did not like people who smoked. We headed up FR209 and found a little spot on the other side of the lake from where he was staying. Drove up on our levelers, set up our stove and dinner by a beautiful lake. Our friend from across the way came over to fill us in on some of the trails we could hike and that there was a beaver dam nearby. We talked for a while and then he continued on his evening walk.
We left fairly early the following morning after waving to Mr. Grizzly while drinking our coffee in the sunshine across the pond. We went out to breakfast at a nearby restaurant.
Our view
Beaver Dam
Our Campsite
THIS HERE IS MY SPOT
Our second boondocking experience was less inviting. We had rolled in to an area not too far from Rt 16 in the Big Horn Mountains and set up camp. We are sitting by the fire when we hear someone else rumbling in. He stopped not too far from us and came over to say he had stayed in this site before and he came up every year and was planning on staying 2 weeks and did we plan on staying long because it was his spot. He noted a few times how he was a local from Buffalo WY. He asked if he could park his trailer off to the side of our site and parked it nearby but did not stay. Though we liked the spot we had chosen and might have liked to stay a couple of days we felt it might not be safe to remain more than one night. Bears and humans can be territorial.
