“Wow, a year-long road trip visiting America’s national parks? Sounds awesome! The trip of a lifetime!” That was the reaction we often got from people before, during and after our project celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service…
The final park in our grand 2016 National Park Service centennial adventure was the one closest to home, Saguaro National Park in Tucson. I’ve lived in Arizona for decades but until now had never been to the park, and if…
Two national parks — Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns — sit not far from one another in a little corner of far west Texas and southeastern New Mexico, and in fact they are part of the same mountain system. We…
Before going to White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, we didn’t know what to expect other than, well, white sand, and we certainly didn’t expect to love the place as much as we did. From the main road — which passes…
For the fifth year in a row in our post-Thanksgiving tradition, Hector and I hiked from Grand Canyon National Park’s South Rim to the Colorado River and back up — in one day. Why would we do such a thing?…
The outskirts of Flagstaff in northern Arizona host two combined national park sites, Wupatki National Monument and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. Of the two, Wupatki is for more interesting, but with an early start it’s easy to fit both…
Petrified Forest National Park in northern Arizona is a step back in time, as far back as the Triassic Period and as recently as the 1940s. The park includes two sections — the Painted Desert section largely north of Interstate…
Mesa Verde National Park is a World Heritage Site in southwestern Colorado with 4,500+ archaeological sites documented so far — 600 of which are cliff dwellings — and more new sites are discovered each year. Because of our packed Project…
We only had four days to explore Rocky Mountain National Park — barely long enough to see just a few highlights of this 415-square-mile, high-altitude wonderland in northern Colorado. Our long, 10-hour drive to get there from Black Canyon of the…
We continued into Colorado to explore three very different parks, starting with Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. It began as a national monument in 1933 (and in 1999 became a full-fledged national park) thanks to the efforts of…