Best idea yet: Visit all 58 national parks
I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary on PBS, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and it occurred to me how lucky we are to live where we do.
We live within a day’s drive of six national parks. We have three national parks right here in our state – more than any state except California, Alaska, Utah and Colorado.
But then it also occurred to me: How many of these parks have most of us visited lately? Or ever? The answer, I’m sure, would depress me. Most people simply don’t have enough free time to cruise through Mt. Rainier National Park, Olympic National Park and North Cascades National Park with any regularity – and those are just the ones in Washington.
And most of us certainly don’t have the time to truly see them right: to circle Mt. Rainier on the Wonderland Trail, for instance, or to traverse Olympic National Park from southern border to northern border with backpack.
The latter is one of my long-standing dreams. It’s eminently doable, as one of my old backpacking buddies used to say – up the North Fork of the Quinault and down the Elwha. But for some reason, I have never gotten around to doing it. Too many complications: arranging a shuttle, getting time off from work, getting into shape, arranging for the emergency helicopter evacuation …
And yet …
We also happen to live in a country where millions of people manage to find the time and money to visit Las Vegas every year. Not that I have anything against Las Vegas, except for the fact that it’s a blot on the landscape, a garish symbol of all things annoying and the most ingeniously devised sucker-trap in human history.
Yet even most Northwesterners would rather spend a week at Caesar’s Palace than scout for mountain goats on Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics or experience the phenomenal riot of wildflowers at the aptly named Paradise at Mt. Rainier.
It’s enough to make you despair of humankind, although I do understand that you can do lots of things in Vegas that you can’t do in a wildflower meadow, unless you want to get insect bites in unscratchable places.
Still, I can’t escape the feeling that Americans don’t value our national parks and national monuments. This sinking feeling is what prompted my wife, Carol, and me to plan a grand national park trip in 2005. We hit Bryce Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, Grand Canyon National Park and Arches National Park, all in one trip. Later that year, we added Yellowstone and – during a family reunion in Florida – Everglades National Park to our Big Park Year.
Still, our national park record remains dismal. We still haven’t even seen most of the parks in California, including the granddaddy of ’em all, Yosemite. We have seen only two out of eight national parks in Alaska. And we’ve seen hardly any of the national parks east of the Rockies.
In fact, I just did a quick count and realized I have seen only 19 of the 58 national parks.
That’s a stunning failure rate. If I’m truly going to get on my high horse about national parks, I need to do better than that. So today I would like to announce a modification in my lifetime goal, which I announced in these pages years ago. Back then I said that one of my travel goals was to “never set foot in Las Vegas.”
Today, inspired by Ken Burns, I want to modify that goal as follows: “To never set foot in Las Vegas until I have visited every single national park in the U.S. and traversed Olympic National Park with backpack.”
Don’t you think I’ll have earned a wild weekend in Vegas?