National Parks

There is something about standing in a national park that stops you mid step. The history, the scale, the quiet thought of what it must have looked like to the first people who ever laid eyes on it before there were roads or signs or parking lots. These are the national parks I have visited so far, each one leaving me with that same feeling of standing somewhere that deserves to be protected.

Visited National Parks

Arches National Park, Utah

Arches National Park sits in the red rock desert north of Moab, home to more than two thousand natural sandstone arches, the highest concentration anywhere in the world. Delicate Arch alone has become the symbol of Utah. Here is what to know before you go, plus a look back at it twenty years ago.

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

Thousands of red rock spires standing up out of the ground at the edge of a Utah plateau, glowing orange and pink at first light. Bryce Canyon is not really a canyon at all, and it does not look like anywhere else. Here is what to expect and what it was like to stand at the rim.

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Canyonlands National Park spreads across 337,598 acres southwest of Moab, the largest of Utah’s five national parks. The Green and Colorado rivers cut it into four districts, each one hours from the others. Island in the Sky is the closest and gives you the big view out over the canyon country. Here is what to know before you go, plus a look back at it twenty years ago.

Grand Canyon National Park – South Rim, Arizona

A mile deep, up to eighteen miles wide, and 277 miles long. The Grand Canyon is one of those places where the numbers are accurate and completely useless at the same time. Nothing in your existing frame of reference prepares you for standing on the South Rim and looking down. You just have to go and let it work on you.

Indiana Dunes National Park, Indiana

Tucked along the southern shore of Lake Michigan, Indiana Dunes National Park is one of those places that surprises you with how much it has going on. From towering sand dunes and diverse ecosystems to fur trading outposts and futuristic World’s Fair homes, there is far more here than a day at the beach. Come take a look at what this hard-won slice of the Midwest has to offer.

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

Cliff dwellings built into the sandstone alcoves of a high tableland in southwestern Colorado, left behind by the Ancestral Puebloans who farmed this mesa for seven hundred years. Mesa Verde was the first national park set aside for the work of people rather than the land itself. Here is what to know before you go, plus a look back at it twenty years ago.

Zion National Park, Utah

Sandstone walls climbing two thousand feet straight up, the Virgin River cutting along the bottom, and a canyon that makes you feel closed in and wide open at the same time. Zion was Utah’s first national park, and standing at the bottom looking up is the kind of thing a photograph never quite gets right.