As I've watched the results accumulate in the poll I started on camping style (
http://www.trailmanorowners.com/yabb...;threadid=1191), it's becoming obvious there's a pretty strong preference (like about 2 to 1) for full hookup camping (RV Park) versus boondock (e.g. NFS, NP camping). And since my opinion of about 99% of all the commercial RV Parks I've ever seen in the entire state of Colorado is "Eeek!", "Yuk!", or "Bleccch!", I'm wondering why in the heck anyone would ever choose an ugly, virtually tree-less, hardly-a-blade-of-grass, cheek-to-jowl jammed together commercial RV Park by a busy highway over a nicely forested, green, cool, spacious NFS campground by a nice stream just to have full hookups.
And then it dawned on me at that the camping situation...like so many other things...is apparently different here in the intermountain west (the roughly quarter of the nation that stretches from the eastern front of the Rockies westward to the eastern slopes of the Sierra and Cascade mountains). This is a region that is largely federally owned (IIRC, over 90% of the land in Nevada is owned by the US Government)...and more importantly, nearly 99% of all the forest and mountain areas are under some form of federal ownership (NFS, BLM, NP, etc.). It is also a region that, outside of the higher, cooler, wetter mountain areas, is downright arid and often desert or nearly so. Outside of the national forests, native trees are pretty rare and sagebrush is a heckuva lot more common.
What that means is **almost** all the nice, forested, green places for camping are on federal land...and all the campgrounds will be run by NFS, etc....but won't have hookups. And, unlike elsewhere in the nation, NFS campgrounds are incredibly plentiful...a look at the table of contents of the
Coleman National Forest Campground and Recreation Directory (
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...er#reader-link) is a big clue: 4 to 6 pages each for most states, but 58 pages for Colorado, 52 pages for Idaho, 40 pages for Montana, etc.)
The corollary is that **most** commercial campgrounds & RV Parks will be located in the much hotter, much drier and dusty, often nearly tree-less valleys. And since there is a paucity of privately own-able land anywhere near the national forests to begin with, those commerical campgrounds will tend to be very small, very crowded operations. Pricey too...expect $35 and up per night with few amenities for any campground anywhere near a forest. Certainly there are exceptions...but they're pretty rare from what I've seen in my travels around Colorado, Utah, & Wyoming.
For several years I've noticed that most of the folks in NFS campgrounds have in-state license plates and the remainder usually are from Texas. Hardly anyone from anywhere else in the nation. By comparison, the one time I stayed in an RV Park (KOA in Estes Park CO), most were from the midwestern, southeastern, and eastern states and I think I was the only one with Colorado plates. (And I was there only because I needed a battery recharge and holding tank dump.)
So, I'm kinda concluding that those from the midwest and east/southeast tend to associate camping, particularly nice camping, with apparently fairly common and attractive private campgrounds/RV Parks. By contrast those of us native to the intermountain west tend to associate nice with NFS campgrounds and ugly with private campgrounds/RV Parks. Comments, thoughts?
Camping in the Intermountain West vs elsewhere in the nation...
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