Every summer my three good pals and I plan a road trip out to the mountains of the American west camping and living out of our car. This year we left our home in Cleveland, Ohio and headed for the Badlands, the Black Hills, Bighorn Canyon, Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. We conquered 6,000 miles of open road and put over 100 hours of driving behind us; this is our story…

Day 1

We finished packing our bags and loaded up the rental car. We had 16 hours to drive until we reached the Badlands, so we headed west and began chasing the sun, from Ohio to South Dakota. Johnny drove the whole day and through the whole night. We constantly played loud music to keep us from drifting to sleep. Joey and Macy gave up on the battle, but I refused to let my eyes shut, afraid that Johnny might fall asleep at the wheel and kill us all. I became the co-pilot checking the map every so often to see all the states that we had put behind us, first Ohio then Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota; nothing to look at but windmills and the endless horizon.

Day 2

I drifted in and out of sleep. My head filled with strange dreams of rest stops, semi trucks, and cornfields. When I awoke the sun was rising and a dense layer of fog surrounded us, we drove through the cloud and were swallowed by the mist. I have always loved the fog and as I stared out the car window a deep longing came over me. The morning light roused Macy and Joey so we stopped at a gas station to get coffee and to refill our water bottles. When I stepped outside the car the sweet summery smell of morning dew brought me back to my senses. Suddenly we were all feeling very giddy and began to run around in the streets, climbing statues with no shoes on. It was 5:30 in the morning and we had made it to South Dakota.

We stopped and got breakfast inside an old passenger train come restaurant and we watched as the sun climbed higher and everything became hot and dry once again.

My first thought as we drove through the Badlands was that it looked like we were on Mars. Red striped mounds that were vacant of trees, water or any visible life. We stopped at the park office to get permit so we could camp in the back-country for the night. We loaded our backpacks and headed into the desert-like tundra. We hiked for about a mile, and then set up camp between two giant red hills. Soon the light raindrops turn into a downpour and the downpour turned into one of the craziest thunderstorms I’ve experienced in my entire life. The strikes of lightning echoed through the hills like giants were having a great battle all around us. We were the perfect target for a lightning strike. I was convinced that this would be the night that I would die.

We lived to see it another day.

Day 5

We spent the next few days exploring the Badlands and the rocky and rugged, pine tree covered, black hills. We hiked eight miles to a stone lookout tower at the top of Harney Peak. In Keystone we became friends with a seven foot tall mountain man who shot off his shotgun in the middle of the street. We also meet a friendly donkey named “Donk”. Then we stopped at the Devils Tower where we camped out next to the giant sacred monument.

Finally we had reached Wyoming. Our first stop was Bighorn Canyon on the Wyoming/Montana border. This park is a hidden gem that most people pass up on the way to Yellowstone. We saw a herd of wild horses in the Pryor Mountain range and stopped at the Devils Overlook, which is like a mini Grand Canyon. Before we hiked to our campsite for the night we were warned by two local fishermen that they had just seen a nest of baby rattlesnakes’ right where we are headed a few days before. We spent the night drinking as much whiskey as we could in order to forget about the rattlesnakes surrounding us. In the morning we all took a bath in the Bighorn River to wash off the dirt and grit from the past four days of travel. When we returned to the car we took a spontaneous group vote to drive eight hours to the Montana/Canada border to visit Glacier National Park…

We drove the entire day from the bottom to the top of Montana. Everyone kept farting so Joey rolled down the windows and locked them. The highway was surrounded with never-ending fields of wildflowers; Macy made Johnny pull over so we could run through the meadows. When we reached the park it was about 9:00 pm, night had already fallen so we found a campsite on the outskirts of the park.

Day 6

Glacier National Park is one of the most pristine and untouched places that I’ve ever seen or felt. We spent the day driving down “Going to the Sun Road”. We stopped at Logan Pass and hiked to Hidden Lake. On the hike we made friends with a mountain goat that we named “Giovanni” and a Ram we named “Roger”. Although it was the middle of July, the whole hike up we trudged through slippery snow, afraid we would fall down the side of the mountain. That night we did a short two mile hike to camp on the shores of McDonald Lake. The water was Titanic-cold and so clear that if you stood in the water and looked to your feet, it was as if it were only air. I couldn’t even tell that I was in water.

Day 7

In the misty morning I watched on in amusement as Joey and Johnny attempted to wash themselves in the freezing cold waters. We explored the park for the rest of the day and as the sun set we stopped in a little hostel community at the end of a long dirt road on the outskirts of the park called Polebridge. There was a tee-pee and a few small cabins surrounded by the mountains. Inside they sold coffee, bakery goods and local artwork. We camped down the road at Kintla Lake. As we sat around the fire cooking dinner we heard howling coming around us from all directions. We were convinced that we were surrounded by a pack of wolves so we grabbed logs and knives to try and protect ourselves from the oncoming attack. As we shined out headlights into the surrounding woods, we soon realized that the howling was not coming from the ground but from the trees. In the morning, after speaking with a friendly park ranger we learned that what we heard was a group of barred owls. We all felt pretty silly.

Day 8

On the road to Yellowstone National Park, we drove all day, again in a stinky fart-filled SUV. We reached the Wyoming park borders at around 7:00 pm. We stopped at a campground, lucky enough to find a site still available and saw a grizzly bear walking down the side of the road. We set up camp expecting to have an uneventful night, until some new neighbors arrived next to us who turned out to be a group of tourists from Norway. We invited them to share our fire and ended up having a rowdy night drinking and swapping stories. We sang along to music playing from Macy’s cassette player and made plans to venture to the hot springs together in the morning.

Day 9

When we awoke in the morning the group of Norwegians had already left. Apparently they had tried to wake up Johnny in the morning but him being crabby and hung over had told them to go away.

Our first stop that afternoon was the Boiling River, a place where a thermal hot spring flows into the freezing cold Gardner River. The trick is to find the perfect medium in between the boiling hot and freezing cold water. Johnny brought some eggs and tried to boil them in the hot water to eat for dinner but his plan failed. We spent the remainder of the day checking out geysers and geothermal pools all throughout the park; with the smell of sulfur strong in the air we explored the steamy alien looking landscape.

Day 10

Our next stop was Grand Teton National Park. This park is only about half an hour drive south of Yellowstone, during the drive we saw of tons of buffalo and elk. There was a dead buffalo on the side the road with a group of tourist surrounding it with cameras, hoping that one of Yellowstone’s wolves would show up to eat the carcass. When we reached the Tetons I was amazed. Compared to the flatness of Yellowstone, the Tetons seemed like the tallest mountains in the world. We stopped at Jenny Lake to check out the views, and Joey and Johnny were brave enough to swim in the cool waters of the lake. Me and Macy relaxed on the shore and wrote some postcards to people back at home. The waters of Jenny Lake are a tropical Caribbean blue, so it was strange to see them alongside with these rocky snowy tipped mountains.

That night we camped out at the most secluded and breathtaking campsite on the shores of Jackson Lake. We set up our tents right along the beach, cracked open some beers and watched the sun sink behind the mountains. Before long another group showed up, we meet a man from Alabama, who shared our fire for a while. When it was well past dark, two more people showed up. A man and woman, who worked in the park renting out kayaks on Jackson Lake, They sat around the fire with us; we drank a lot of gin, listened to Macy’s same two cassette tapes for the 90th time, shot each other with roman candles and got a little bit rowdy. Our new friends offered to rent us kayaks for free if we came by their work the next day.

Day 11

Before we left camp, we ate breakfast by the water and relaxed while enjoying the view. I took off my travel stained clothes and took a refreshing dip in the lake. While I was in the water I heard some loud voices coming from the trees. I looked up horrified to see that an entire summer camp of children had hiked down to the beach to go for a swim. I had no choice but to run out of the lake butt-naked to grab my clothes on the beach. Two of the young boys saw me and the look on their faces was one that I will never forget.

We took our friends up on their offer for a free kayak rental and paddled out on Jackson Lake. Some wildfires from Colorado had blown smoke into the area, so the mountains were covered in a layer of misty haze. Afterwards we hiked five miles to a small pristine lake called Phelps Lake and set up camp in a field. During the night we were woken up many times by the herd of deer rustling in the tall grass around our tent.

Day 12

Before we left Phelps Lake we cooked breakfast on top of a huge jumping rock. Macy and I weren’t brave enough to jump so we watched Joey and Johnny make the plunge. Joey’s left testicle make direct contact with the surface of the water, so he waddled the five miles uphill back to the car.

We decided to do the most Wild West thing we could think of and go for a horseback ride through the mountains of Wyoming; we took a guided trip just outside of Jackson Hole. When we reached the top of the summit the views were incredible. I felt like a true mountain woman, sitting on a horse, looking down at the wilderness below. 

We ended the day by going to Kelly Warm Springs, an area where bubbles of natural heat escape from the ground into the crystal clear water making it a perfect bathwater warm. People from the area have discovered that this is a perfect environment for tropical fish, so they release store bought aquarium fish into these waters to live. Obviously this is not good as they are invasive species. But I have to admit it was pretty cool to put my goggles on and descend into a giant aquarium, Caribbean fish swimming in the waters of the American West.

Day 13

The next morning we loaded up the car and headed back home to Ohio. It felt so strange after living so freely for the past two weeks, to remember that we had jobs and responsibilities waiting for us back at home. It seemed like nothing else could exist besides the four of us living out of a car, our only decisions being where to go to next. I think that if we could have we would have just kept driving forever…

And now I lie in my bed each night, and a great longing comes over me, a longing to travel and experience the wild places left in this world. And this longing is breaking my heart every day.

Story and images by Renee Ackerman