The ferry ride from Ventura Harbor takes about ninety minutes, and somewhere around the forty-minute mark, the coastline of Southern California shrinks into a thin brown smear behind you. That’s when it hits — the quiet realization that you’re heading toward a place most Californians have never bothered to visit, even though it sits right … Read more
I pulled into Leadville, Colorado, at 10:152 feet above sea level, windows down, and my phone read 63 degrees. That was in the middle of July. Six hours earlier, I’d been sweating through my shirt in Denver at 97. The temperature drop didn’t make sense to my body — I’d driven straight uphill into what … Read more
I’ll say this about Lassen Volcanic National Park: it’s the only place in America where I stood next to a boiling mud pot, looked up at a glacier-carved peak, and watched a deer graze in a wildflower meadow — all within a 20-minute drive. And I had the trail mostly to myself. While the rest … Read more
The first time I got caught in a desert monsoon, I thought the world was ending. I was hiking outside Tucson in 108-degree heat when the sky turned the color of a bruised plum. Wind hit me so hard I staggered sideways. Ten minutes later, rain came in sheets so thick I couldn’t see the … Read more
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