How to do the great American road trip: Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks

The officious clerk in the check-in office for Fishing Bridge RV Park in Yellowstone National Park, USA, pushed a piece of paper towards us, and insisted: “We expect you to read this.”

Glancing down the “Do’s and Don’ts” for the campground was the standout item: Be Bear Aware. This included no food to be stored outside our RV, all trash to be disposed of in bear-proof receptacles and, if we were going hiking, we should carry bear spray.

Bear Spray? Bear-proof receptacles? Were they serious? Deadly serious, as it turned out. Grizzly and black bears roam Yellowstone freely, and visitors need to act accordingly. Even the dog’s food could not stay in the RV’s storage bay; it had to be inside the rig.

That sobering info wasn’t going to dent our enthusiasm for piloting our RV, Indefatigable (or Fati for short), into the heart of America’s first National Park, though. Bookings for Fishing Bridge – the only RV park inside Yellowstone offering full hook-ups of electric, water and sewer – are hard to get and we had needed to be online at 12.01am a year in advance to snag one.

In truth, most of our route planning to this point, two months and 3,743 miles into our year-long trip, had been predicated on arriving in north-west Wyoming in mid-July for the exact day of our Fishing Bridge booking.

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From a short visit eight years ago, we thought we knew what to expect from this immense tableau of wildlife and geology – 3,472 square miles of untamed wilderness and one of the world’s most extreme environments. As it turned out, we had barely scratched the surface. With our RV, we were immersed in Yellowstone at its most beguiling, from the coyotes yipping at night to the constant backdrop of mountains that reach 11,000ft, still dusted with snow in places.

The main plateau is where the herds of bison roam in summer, interspersed with pronghorn, elk, deer, wolves and bears. We revelled in this kaleidoscopic wildlife parade, using a newly acquired spotting scope to zoom in on a grizzly with two cubs, a wolf feasting on a bison carcass and a young black bear munching its way across a hillside of wild flowers.

With so little evidence of anything man-made, it was easy…