I almost didn’t write about North Cascades. There’s a selfish part of me that wanted to keep quiet about the one national park where you can show up on a Friday in July and still find an empty trailhead. But that’s exactly why more people need to know — because this park is too extraordinary … Read more
If you blink crossing the bridge from the mainland onto Pine Island, you’ll miss it. But that would be a mistake. Matlacha, Florida — pronounced “mat-la-SHAY” — occupies a sliver of land so narrow that the Gulf of Mexico laps at one side of the road while the back bay bleeds into the other. It … Read more
I stood at the Visitor Center in Zion last July, sandwiched between a family of five and a busload of tourists all photographing the same shuttle bus. The thermometer read 104 degrees. The line for the restroom wrapped around the building. And I thought: there has to be a better way. That’s when I started … Read more
I’ve been to a lot of national parks. I’ve driven the Going-to-the-Sun Road, hiked into the Grand Canyon, and watched Old Faithful from a bench surrounded by three hundred strangers. But nothing prepared me for a park where you can’t actually go anywhere without a boat. That’s Voyageurs National Park — 218,000 acres of northern … Read more
I’ve stood at the edge of a lot of overlooks in this country, but nothing prepared me for that first glimpse of Crater Lake. You pull into the Rim Village parking lot, walk about thirty seconds toward the edge, and suddenly the ground just drops away beneath you — and there it is. This impossibly … Read more
I’d been driving east on US-50 through Nevada for two hours without passing a single gas station, restaurant, or town worth more than a paragraph in a guidebook. My Celestron SkyMaster binoculars rode shotgun, ready for the dark skies ahead. The highway stretched ahead like a gray ribbon unspooling across alkali flats, and my phone … Read more
I almost didn’t write this article. Not because the Catskills didn’t deserve it — but because I was halfway hoping nobody else would discover what I found during ten days last June, driving through Greene and Ulster Counties with no plan beyond “find water and follow it.” What I found was a mountain region two … Read more
I almost didn’t go. A friend mentioned Block Island offhandedly at a barbecue last summer — something about “the Hamptons without the attitude” — and I filed it away under “places I’ll eventually forget.” But a cancelled ferry to Martha’s Vineyard in late June left me stranded at the dock in Point Judith with a … Read more
I showed up to New River Gorge with zero expectations. A friend had mentioned it offhand — something about a bridge and whitewater — and I figured I’d spend a long weekend poking around before heading somewhere more “destination-worthy.” That was three summers ago, and I’ve been back every year since. West Virginia’s newest national … Read more
I showed up in Saratoga Springs on a Tuesday afternoon in late July with zero expectations and a beat-up weekender bag that had seen better days. A friend had been telling me for years that this little upstate New York city was the crown jewel of East Coast summer travel, and I kept brushing it … Read more