PRO: RVs Are Easy

The alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. on our first morning in Yellowstone. We’d spent the night in the Mammoth Campground near the park’s North Entrance, but we’d planned to go wildlife-spotting at dawn in the Lamar Valley— an hour’s drive away. We woke up the kids and buckled them into car seats without even changing them out of their jammies; Norman and I brushed our teeth in the sink and pulled down the pop-top from inside. With a bathroom in the van, I didn’t even leave the vehicle before we pulled away just minutes later.

Early-morning sun lit the valley as we parked in a pullout with a wide view overlooking Slough Creek. Temps hovered around 40 degrees, so we prepped coffee and oatmeal in the warmth of the van, the kids tucked under down blankets. Scores of bison grazed nearby, and after a couple of hours, we even spotted wolves loping in the hills through binoculars. The kids played outside until they got too cold, then warmed up in a vehicle with enough room to chase each other around before heading back out. It was a chill, comfortable, supremely enjoyable morning.

Could we have done the same thing with our usual tent setup? Yes. Would it have been a heckuva lot harder? Also yes. With the ease of the RV, there was no frantic stuffing of sleeping bags and packing of the tent, my freezing fingers hardly able to touch the poles. No dragging cold, whining kids off to the bathroom in the dark. And instead of a cramped car, we had a spacious home base for the wildlife show—which, yeah, very likely let us hang out a lot longer than we might have otherwise.

CON: RVs Are Huge

Those 40-foot motorhomes are slow, gas-guzzling land yachts that struggle on twisty mountain roads and cost as much as an actual house—and I mean a really nice house. I want no part in driving one of those, much less maneuvering one into a campsite. Plus, it’s hard to get into the outdoor spirit when you’re surrounded by buzzing generators on vehicles tall enough to block out the stars. Honestly, I’ve slept in campgrounds that felt less like a quiet escape and more like a Walmart parking lot.

The adventure van wasn’t nearly that hulking (though I still made my husband drive it). And according to Christopher Lynch, an employee of the Yellowstone concessionaire Xanterra who’d worked at the park’s Madison Campground for five years, from what he’s seen, much of the recent RV boom has been made up of smaller rigs like vans, rooftop tents and shorter trailers. So perhaps this complaint will shrink along with the vehicles themselves. After all, is there much difference between a minivan and a teardrop trailer?

PRO: RVs Are More Comfortable

By the time we pulled into Indian Creek Campground for our second night in Yellowstone, I was feeling a bit, well, stinky. That chilly morning in the Lamar Valley had turned into an 85-degree afternoon, and after a few hikes in the beating sun, I was dusted with dried sweat. I can’t pretend it didn’t feel heavenly to squeeze into the van’s shower, even though I forgot how to turn on the hot water and it ended up being a cold rinse (we later figured it out, and Norman and the kids got true showers that evening).

While I generally sleep very well on a sleeping pad in our tent, I’ll cop to the fact that the van’s mattress and pillows count as an upgrade. It’s nice to have heat (and air conditioning, for that matter). And here’s an advantage I’ll unequivocally give to an RV for camping in Wyoming: No startling awake at 3 a.m., wondering if that crackling sound is a grizzly bear getting ready to drag you out of the tent by your head.

PRO: RVs Can Get You Out More

Here’s where I’ll make a confession: We actually already own an RV of sorts. Don’t get too excited. It’s just a 20-year-old pop-up trailer with room for six to sleep, two little tables, and a propane heater that we found on Facebook Marketplace a couple of years ago. I hesitated to buy it, mostly because I didn’t want us to become “RV people.” But we wrote the check anyway, because I knew it would mean more nights outdoors for our family. With that little heater and more space to hang out in during bad weather, the camper has allowed us to stretch our camping season here in western Montana from April to late October.

Aimee Riordan, a friend of a friend in Seattle, has had the same experience with her Volkswagen Vanagon, a metallic bordeaux- colored campervan nicknamed Ruby. Riordan used to take her two kids tent camping, too, but after one memorable night in which raccoons invaded their site, she started thinking about other options. Now, the van has become “an escape pod for us to easily get out of town during shoulder seasons, when I normally wouldn’t have done that,” she says. “It’s gotten us to places we wouldn’t have gone. It’s all there, whenever you decide to go.”

PRO: RVs Get More People Out Overall

I don’t have hard data on this, but I’m sure that the RV boom has allowed many more newbies to dip a toe into camping and old-timers to continue camping. Last summer, we invited both sets of grandparents to join us on multi-night trips in Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier national parks. Our parents are all in their 70s now, and as my dad has flatly informed me, their days of sleeping on the ground are over. But the elevated beds and mattresses in our pop-up camper were just comfy enough to lure the elder generation out again. We roasted s’mores, had picnic table feasts, sipped coffee as the morning mist slowly lifted from the surrounding mountains— all multigenerational memories we wouldn’t have made without that RV.

Becky Goodell, CEO of Blacksford, the RV rental company that supplied our adventure van, told me she sees many older customers moving on from their tent days. But she estimates that 60 percent of their guests are brand-new to camping. “It brings in a whole ’nother set of people who would never tent camp,” she says. “But they want to see nature, and they want to be near the national parks. It ends up increasing the world of people who experience nature, who then go hiking, and then feel more strongly about protecting the environment.”

It’s hard to argue with that, even for me.

CON: RVs Are Easy and Comfortable

By our third night in the adventure van—which we spent at a site along the Yellowstone River in Paradise Valley, just north of the park—I could no longer deny that camping on wheels was easier and more comfortable than our usual tent experience. I was also realizing that fact might be exactly my problem with it.

I’ve shivered through frigid nights in the Utah desert and sweated through the humidity of summer tent camping in Wisconsin. I’ve had mice chew through my pack in Chile, biting bugs attack my face in Turkey, and black bears wander through camp in Washington. Rain has pounded its way through my tent seams; snow has made it damn near impossible to dig a cathole; wildfire smoke has kept me up all night wondering how close the fire was. And I wouldn’t change a single thing about those nights.

Maybe we’re not supposed to be comfortable all the time. Maybe it’s good for us to be reminded that, for all our technology and climate control, we are ultimately at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves. That with the right knowledge and attitude, we can rise to the occasion better than we realize—and if not, hey, suffering through a night of wind or rain or cold sure makes you feel alive.

Something changes when you close the door to an RV. You’ve separated yourself from the great outdoors you’ve purportedly come to experience; you in here, everything else out there. But a thin sheet of nylon and mesh isn’t enough to remove you from the greater world. When I’m in a tent, I’m both in the wilderness and of it, hardly different from the coyotes I can hear calling not too far away. In a time when disconnection from nature has brought us all to the brink of environmental catastrophe, becoming one with the wild world, even just for a night, can only be a very good thing.