Planning the Journey to Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park

We began our year 2022 with some big plans ahead of us.

One of them is venturing to Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park at the beginning of June. Following the Fernweh was created to inspire adventure to new places and to inspire folks to experience life and the outdoors to the fullest. This year Following the Fernweh will do just that!

We began our planning in December 2021. Many national parks allow for reservations in their campgrounds up to six months before the date. After careful search and consideration between campgrounds in both national parks, we chose to make reservations for six nights in two different campgrounds (three in each campground) for our stay in Yellowstone and two nights at Jenny Lake in Grand Teton.

Yellowstone has twelve campgrounds with over 2,000 campsites total. Only five of the twelve campgrounds accept reservations through concessioners. We chose to stay at Bridge Bay Campground and Madison Campground. The remaining seven campgrounds are first-come, first-serve. We recommend securing a place to stay the night while staying in one of the busiest national parks. If we find that a nice campsite is open at another campground, we will probably forfeit our reserved site to stay in the first-come, first-serve areas.

Grand Teton National Park offers visitors seven campgrounds that are all reservable. We chose Jenny Lake because of the beautiful scenery! We decided to stay in Grand Teton National Park for two nights.

We built in a three-night cushion at the end of our trip in case we wanted to stay on national forest land on the Bridger Teton National Forest that borders Grand Teton National Park.

All of the campsites are booked for us! The anticipation of a trip is the longest part of any trip experience you will get. Planning makes us so excited to explore and see what happens as we journey out west.

Biggest Tips for this trip so far:

1. Plan ahead. We made these reservations as soon as we could and there were barely any spots left in Yellowstone and Grand Teton. I haven't checked since early January when we booked, but I guarantee that you need to book as soon as you can!

2. Book a place to stay each night. You need a safe place secured to stay each night. You do not want to get caught sleeping somewhere you shouldn't be and have a park ranger get on to you!

3. Create an itinerary for your trip. We have NOT done this yet. But it is coming soon. Yellowstone and Grand Teton are huge parks. You have to prioritize what you want to see so that you can hit all of those places.

4. Create a packing list! We have begun this process (maybe we can share that too?).

5. Test out your gear before your trip. We plan on testing out our new camping setup as soon as we can! We purchased a rooftop tent for the truck to camp in. Once we get it on top of the truck, we will take it on its maiden voyage. We do not recommend trying out new gear on a multi-week trip. You want to be sure your gear is good so that you do not get hurt.

Do you have any tips to give us? We embark on this exciting journey soon! We would love to hear if you have any "must-see" or "must-do" things in the area that you have to share with us.

As always, be inspired and go!

- Following the Fernweh