Favorites from a Year of Parks

The year is winding down, and I’m looking both ahead and back. If I make it to 2035 or 2045, I’m betting that I’ll remember 2025 for the big trips I took. Other highlights occurred with some writing published and some success coaching high school track and good times with family. But in future decades, the experience of traveling through so many national park sites will undoubtedly rise to the top of my memory. (I’ll be deliberately overlooking the year's lowlights!)

So rather than ending the year here with the rather depressing topic I’ve been researching lately (the violence in the timber industry a century ago) or some musings about the untenable state of the nation, I’m going to revisit some of those park scenes.

Since I’ve returned from my trips, friends and family have asked numerous times some variation of, “What was your favorite spot?” My spouse has always detested “favorite” questions, and I understand why. “Favorite” is really an impossibility. Here are a few types of favorites, though:

My Favorite Unexpected Place: Hovenweep National Monument

• I expected to like Hovenweep, a small site in southeastern Utah, but the richness of archaeological evidence astounded me. A relatively short walk took us along a canyon edge, around its head, and then through it,  allowing us to get quite close to homes, storage sites, and defensive structures. All of it brought an intimacy often missing at the more popular parks.

My Favorite Lived-Up-to-the-Hype Park: Yosemite National Park

• I think I was unprepared for Yosemite. I’d read plenty about the park, but only after visiting did I realize how little I understood about its sprawling nature and impressive scale. I also failed to appreciate the feelings that arose when I retraced the steps of activists going back well over a century. Being on roads that were protested and seeing a dam that galvanized a nation in one of the first national conservation battles brought history alive in ways books fail to do.

The Most Aesthetically Interesting Park: Bryce Canyon National Park

• Many of Utah’s elected representatives detest the public lands in their state and would prefer to sell them, mine them, bury them beneath roads. But the parks are outstanding. The state markets The Mighty Five (Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion), and I finished visiting them with Bryce Canyon. The blend of colors—red to peach to white against the green backdrop of forest—and the otherworldly hoodoo shapes and textures capture my sense of beauty.

The Biggest Crowd: Zion National Park

• The approach to Zion started cluing us in. Fancy shops and fancier hotels crowded a canyon road. The parking lots and roads and the visitor center were madhouses. The heat did not help with a feeling like all of humanity was bearing down in this one special spot. I have no doubts that Zion is magical, but I felt few of those feelings and was pleased to move on!

The Most Fun Park: Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

• Not many parks say, Walk wherever you’d like; there are no trails. Not many parks allow dogs to roam alongside their companions. This combination made the Great Sand Dunes Park and Preserve delightful, as we trudged up sand dunes and then ran down them skipping and jumping like we were seven! It was like an enormous playground. 

My Favorite Understated and Underrated Park: Tie—Lassen Volcanic National Park and Pinnacles National Park

• California is home to an amazing set of national parks, but you don’t often hear about Lassen or Pinnacles as someone’s favorite. Each of these parks are really outstanding but not in a showy way, like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon can be. I spent enough time on their trails to contemplate vistas and natural history and wonder why people don’t talk about them more.

The One I Cannot Wait to Return To: All of them

• One point of the national parks is their persistence. Decisions that put places into the national park system are complicated, but they usually stick. That means we can return—again and again—adding more experiences to our memories and a deeper appreciation for what these places say about our nation and the earth. I cannot wait to get to the next one and to return to one and all of these.