Great Hosts and a Great Place to Be
Our stay: We are a Family of 5 that home schools and is semi-fulltime (9 months a year) and we have stayed at ALL kinds of campsites from coast to coast. This was our first Hipcamp experience and we spent 10 nights here. The only thing we can say is that it’s a wonderful place to stay! Excellent campsite, with excellent hosts and FULL hookups this close to Yellowstone! For the price they are asking, good luck finding ANYTHING better than that because it doesn’t exist.
The site itself: The camping spot EASILY fit our 35ft RV and our car with plenty of space left over for the provided picnic table and our outside cooking desires. The Hipcamp description says that they can accommodate 40ft rigs, but to my eyes bigger than 40ft would fit without any issue. All the utilities were clearly very new, well kept and in perfect working order. All power from the power pedestal passed my surge guard/electrical management system (EMS) without any errors. The site is pretty level with a slight slope towards the road which I assume is for water runoff.
The location: Obviously this is a really a great place to spend time for Yellowstone, but also the entire Paradise Valley area of MT. 10 minutes to Gardiner and Yellowstone is GREAT. We also drove North up the Paradise Valley several times and it’s a perfect location for that too. ~45 minutes to Livingston if you need more supplies than Gardiner can provide or just want to explore the area. Also, do NOT miss the hike to the OTO Ranch right from the site! It’s worth it.
Internet: I work from the road, so I thought I would put some feedback in about this aspect. My phone is AT&T and reception was non-existent. I also have a pretty high-end antenna on the roof feeding a Pepwave modem with AT&T and Verizon Sim cards. Again, the AT&T signal here was ZERO, but I could get okay-ish Verizon in the morning and evening, but speeds during the day were pretty poor. I assume that was tower congestion. The host provided free WiFi that was pretty usable. I could pretty easily do my work and we watched a few movies during our stay.
Negatives? You’ll read it in the other comments, but sure, it’s worth mentioning that you are RIGHT next to HWY 89. We KNEW it would be there when we booked it and during our stay, it just didn’t bother us. So, there you have it, HWY 89 is a stone’s thrown from where you are camping. If that’s going to bother you, I’d probably avoid booking this location. If you can ignore it (or appreciate that the positives outweigh the one negative), then you cannot go wrong staying here.