I honestly don’t want to rain on your parade, but a 40’ unit is totally unsuitable for the type of camping you seem to want to do. It’s sort of a “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” thing. You can have a mobile hotel suite or you can be small enough to get back into the “neat” areas, but it’s a choice of which is most important to you. I’ve been camping in the national forests, mountains and upper deserts for 50+ years, well back off the beaten path and I use a 16’ TT. I think I could push the envelope to about 20’ before the restrictions became unacceptable to me.
It’s irrelevant whether there’s a site big enough to fit, the tight, curvy, and sometimes rough roads and trees preclude a big rig from even getting in. The FW is another issue. When I bought my F150 my idea was to get a small FW. I realized very quickly, fortunately before I committed, that the height of a FW prevented me from getting down the forest roads I wanted to camp on.
At 40’ I think you can write off national forests and probably most state parks. You’ll have some options in the national parks, but they’ll be limited. You could camp in the mountains if the highway in isn’t too curvy and you stay in an open area very near the pavement. Then you can unhitch and drive back into the neat areas. And there may be some highly developed national forest campgrounds along the highway you can get into. Also, you’d have no trouble in commercial campgrounds and the flats.
Everything with RV’s is a compromise and one needs to know what sort of camping they want to do in order to make a good decision. On one end of the bell curve you have the rvers who want all the comforts of home and pull it with them and they typically stay in highly developed cg’s with full hu’s. On the other end you have the “campers” who do it for the outdoor experience and sacrifice most of the room, comfort and amenities of home to do so. And they’re typically boondockers. Easy choice if you’re on either end of the curve. It gets dicier when you try to compromise and you need to weigh the relative importance of comfort and accessibility to the areas you want to go to. And you’re the only one that can make that decision.
