This group was very helpful to me as we planned  over the past 12 months for
a trip in the mountain areas of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho (that is
actually redundant as Idaho is almost ALL mountains). Therefore I thought I
would make a contribution rather than ask questions.

We rented a small 22' class C in Salt Lake City and spent 4 weeks in these
three states. We were gone from June 1 to June 28. I won't go into all the
travelogue as others have done that in the past and I don't have a lot to
contribute beyond a few observations about Glacier National Park.

First was internet access. I was worried that I would have to do a lot of
dialup but I never did it once. Sure there were one or two and even a 3 day
period when we had no internet access but we were always able to find wifi
somewhere. Mostly we camped in national parks or forest service managed
areas and there was no internet access there but when travelling through
some town we would poach on the wireless from a hotel by either sitting in
the parking lot or the lobby. We found small coffee shops that offered wifi.
One time we just parked in a residential neighborhood and found 4 networks
and used one of them. So all of my fussing about dialup was pointless.

This was our first real RV trip after a one week experiment a year ago to
make sure we were going to like this. We had done a lot of tent camping in
the past and expected to find private campgrounds but there is so much state
and national public land managed by a blizzard of different agencies that we
really only found two kinds of places to stop - RV parks or public land. We
did not care for the RV parks as they were usually beside busy highways and
we were cheek to jowl with other RVs so we chose to find campgrounds in the
woods. The forest service has some wonderful spots and they will usually
just  let you camp anywhere you want unless you are in some kind of national
park where you must use designated campgrounds (there are LOTs of those so
it wasn't any hardship). Our favorite camping spot on the whole trip was a
random forest service road in the Big Horn mountains. We drove about 1/2
mile and found a beautiful spot right at the foot of a meadow of
wildflowers. Someone had camped there before and had built a fire ring out
of rocks so we were in business. The only  downside of camping in these
areas is that many did not have dump stations so we had to scramble around
when our tanks were full to dump sewage and find fresh water to refill our
fresh water tank.

We absolutely loved Glacier even though part of the Going to the Sun road
was closed due to landslides caused by heavy rain in the first part of June.
That meant that we had to drive around the  bottom to get to the east
entrance which was a hassle. There are wonderful hikes there though the
hikes at Logan pass were closed due to snow. If you are trying to decide
which entrance to take, the scenery is spectacular when entering from the
east side. If you enter in the morning, the sun will be at your back so you
can take great pictures. Our favorite place for hiking was the Many Glacier
area. Unfortunately, two of our hikes were cut short by Grizzly bears
(mother and 2 cubs on one day and three bears on the other). It was the
middle of June and they were probably after berries. After our first
experience we bought one of the bear pepper sprays (do not plan to use the
kind that work on humans). Fortunately we did not have to use it but it made
our hiking experience the more enjoyable knowing that we had some kind of
defense other than the confusing and often time conflicting information from
the park service about what to do when confronted by a black bear (which can
be brown too) versus a Grizzly.

If you don't have a huge rig and you are going to go to Yellowstone you just
MUST enter or exit the park from the NorthEast entrance by going over
Beartooth highway. The views were spectacular.

Thanks again to all of you who helped us with our planning. I leave this
post for someone like me who has very little experience and lots of
questions.

Dick Snyder