I smelled Hot Springs before I saw it. Rolling into town on a September evening, the windows down and the Ouachita Mountains turning the color of bruised plums behind me, there was sulfur in the air — faint, mineral, not unpleasant once you stop thinking about it. My itinerary had this stop penciled in as … Read more
There’s a specific moment in Great Smoky Mountains National Park when you realize the season has turned. It happens somewhere along the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail, usually in the last week of August, when the light slants through the hardwood canopy at a slightly lower angle and the air carries a crispness that wasn’t … Read more
I’ve stood in a lot of places that claim to have it all. Most of them are lying. But Olympic National Park? It might be the only spot in North America where you can walk through a temperate rainforest in the morning, stand on a glacier-carved ridge after lunch, and watch the sun melt into … Read more
There’s a moment driving north on Highway 21 through the Idaho backcountry when the road crests a final hill and the Sawtooth Range materializes in your windshield like a wall of teeth. I nearly pulled off the asphalt right there — just stopped the car and stared. Eighty miles of uninterrupted granite skyline, snowfields still … Read more
I almost didn’t go. For three years, Glacier National Park had been the one major park I kept skipping, mostly because the vehicle reservation system felt like another layer of planning I didn’t have bandwidth for. You needed to book a slot, hope the weather cooperated for that specific window, and then race through the … Read more
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’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
I’m standing at the base of Mount Marathon in Seward, Alaska, watching people sprint up a mountain that most sane humans would prefer to climb slowly. It’s the Fourth of July, and this grueling 3.5-mile race — straight up 3,022 feet of scree, shale, and suffering, then straight back down — has been a Kenai … 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
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