Foxy camp
We wrapped up the last leg of Wyoming’s Scenic Backroad without incident and rolled back onto the highway toward Casper. The town served its purpose — fuel for Marcel, groceries for us — and then we were out again before it could tempt us into staying civilized too long.
Just south of town rises Casper Mountain, crowned with a county park that hosts several campgrounds. After a few scouting laps (and a couple of Starlink vetoes), we settled on a site along Tower Hill Road — open, quiet, and just barely level enough after some careful block work. A morning walk revealed how the spot got its name: a bald hilltop buzzing with radio, microwave, and cell towers. Not exactly wilderness, but it gave Kerri the bandwidth she needed to catch up on work. We didn’t take a single photo — not because it wasn’t pretty, but because it was purely functional.
Still racing the calendar to beat Colorado’s first snow, we pushed south, crossed I-80, and rolled into Saratoga. Kerri, ever the scout, spotted a note on the map: city-run hot springs. That sounded like an easy win. We pulled in to find a packed parking lot, so we waited a bit, hoping the crowd would thin. It didn’t. It only got worse. Eventually, we grabbed towels and joined the masses. I dipped a toe in the water… and immediately understood why everyone else was sitting outside the pools. The temperature had to be at least 120°F — hot enough to boil a small crustacean.
Kerri and I both gave it a try, submerging to the waist before scrambling out like panicked lobsters. Thirty seconds, tops. No amount of “it’ll feel cooler once you’re in” could convince us otherwise. We packed our towels and our pride and drove off, slightly steamed but still amused.
Heading south again, we veered off onto a highway leading into the Snowy Range, then onto a dirt road into the forest. The first stretch was already full of campers, so we kept going until we found a small clearing just big enough for Marcel and a faint Starlink signal sneaking through the trees. The spot wasn’t level, but daylight was fading, so we called it home for the night.
The next morning, Kerri had another pin dropped higher up the mountain. We refilled water at a ranger station and bounced down a rough road until we spotted a narrow two-track twisting toward a lake. It was bumpy, slow, and absolutely worth it. A half-mile in, the trail ended at a glassy alpine lake, surrounded by evergreens and silence. Everyone else had stopped short, leaving us the entire view to ourselves.
It was cold up there — real cold — but mornings came with a reward. A pair of red foxes patrolled the lake’s edge each day, slipping past Marcel on their breakfast commute. The first morning I got too excited and shouted “FOX!” loud enough to scare them off before I could even grab the camera. Lesson learned. The next day I whispered it, and we watched them silently from the window, just two bright-orange ghosts gliding through the frost.
After all these years on the road, it’s rare for us to experience a true first anymore. But that morning — coffee in hand, breath fogging the window, foxes padding through the forest — felt like one. Worth every freezing night and every overcooked toe.
