Fishing Bridge is the only campground inside Yellowstone National Park that offers full hookups. As you would imagine, it is very difficult to make reservations there because that campground fills up very quickly.
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| Yellowstone National Park |
To make matters worse, there is a major road construction project on the road leading to the campground plus the campground will close later this year for a complete renovation. No, we were not successful getting in this campground and ended up having to camp outside the north entrance to Yellowstone.
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| Heading into Yellowstone |
That was a shame because I remember camping in Yellowstone with my parents when I was probably 11 years old and my mental pictures of camping there are cherished memories.
If you know Yellowstone, the north entrance is in Montana. There are several private campgrounds there that are close to the park and offer full hookups, something that makes camping a better experience for us.
Driving from the Tetons, we drove through Yellowstone on the western loop. This allowed us to stop at Old Faithful and several other well known attractions along the way. There was plenty of parking around Old Faithful for our truck and Rosie, our 25 foot Airstream trailer. The other attractions we visited didn’t have parking lots big enough to accommodate Rosie. That meant one of us had to circle the parking loop with Rosie in tow while the other ran along the path to the attraction. As awkward as that sounds, it worked out okay and allowed us to see the places we did not want to miss.
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| Old Faithful |
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| The Paint Pots |
This path also took us across about a dozen miles of roadwork. Make that a dozen miles of single-lane washboard dirt/mud road that covered Rosie with caked-on mud. A scary comment we heard on the radio we used to talk with the other Airstreamers in our group was that this section of road was similar to some of the roads traveled on the WBCCI Alaskan Caravan. The exception is that the washboard dirt road in Alaska is more than 100 miles long. I would hate to see Rosie after being on that road!
We exited the park and drove through the Rockefeller Arch. Our campground was about a mile from the arch. The park’s entrance was up a steep hill. As we arrived in a group, we ended up having to wait for the Airstreamers in front of us to get their parking assignments. That turned out to be a problem because there was some loose gravel on the road and that caused us to slip some as we tried to resume heading up hill after being stopped for a few minutes.
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| Rockefeller Arch |
Our site was in the upper loop. The campground host didn’t have to tell us twice to have some speed to make it up the hill to the top loop. Our entrance into the park was enough to convince us that we needed to be aggressive when climbing gravel roads.
The campground is in a great location for visiting Yellowstone National Park. We went on a wildlife tour bus looking for grizzly bears, black bears, moose, elk, bison, deer, mountain goats, coyotes, sheep and wolves. We were successful with all except for wolves.
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| Grizzly bear in Yellowstone |
Here are some specifics about this campground:
- Our site was gravel and very close to being level
- Our site had 20, 30 and 50 amp electrical service
- Our site had a water connection
- Our site had a sewer connection
- Our site was closer to our campground neighbors than we are used to in most campgrounds
- The park had clean restrooms and showers
- The park provided basic cable TV service
- AT&T placed a weak 3G signal over our site. It was good enough for voice but too slow for data
- The park provided a slow WiFi service that was more irritating than effective
- There was a good laundry facility in the campground
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