On the afternoon of Monday, July 31, 2023, Andy, Kathrin, Sean, and I continued our daylong visit to Mount Rainer National Park. We had just completed a wonderful hike and had eaten lunch on the trail. For the afternoon, we decided to go up to Sunrise on the Mountain’s northeast side. Then some would head home and others of us would continue to hang out in Seattle.
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On Monday, July 31, 2023, Andy, Kathrin, Sean, and I spent the day at Mount Rainier National Park. Our primary goal had been to get up on the mountain early and do “one great hike.” One route that a friend of Kathrin had recommended, the Tipsoo Lake and Naches Peak Loop, had a five-star rating with an easy-to-moderate difficulty rating in my hiking guide. It seemed perfect, and in fact it was.
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Sean and I have liked Seattle ever since we first visited with Kathrin in 2012. As far back as our flight through SEA-TAC to get to Glacier National Park, we’d talked about wanting to return for a proper visit, particularly since Kathrin now lived there. The previous year, I’d just barely spent a little time in Seattle proper (although I’d driven through it a few times on that trip). Now it was time for me to sit down, stay a while, stay a week and a half, with multiple friends.
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Flying into Seattle from Chicago on Wednesday, July 19, 2023, I was able to see all three of Washington’s National Parks. And I would continue to glimpse them in the week and a half before we actually set foot on Mount Rainier. Meanwhile, Bold Bison was out there to be with a client, and Patrick and I had work to do. But we also made time for a really fine day hike up on the flanks of Mount Baker, right on the doorstep of North Cascades National Park.
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In July 2023, I had to return to Washington State for work. Bold Bison would be with a client for a week. It wasn’t, by any means, a reprise of the thirty-five days I’d spent on the road in the summer of 2022, but it was a nice chance to be in the Pacific Northwest in the middle of summer. The year before, flights had been very pricey with the first, halting reopening of post-COVID summer travel. So Sean hadn’t been able to join me. But in 2023, I decided to stay in Seattle after wrapping up on-site client work and have a mix of remote work and downtime at an AirBnB. Sean would join me. As would Andy, then Dan, then Angela. We’d get to see Seattlites, Kathrin and James and Malia and other Sean.
And we’d finally check Mount Rainier National Park off our list.
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Saturday, February 18, 2023 was our final afternoon of adventure on our return trip to Moab, and Sean and I spent it having a look at a few last views from the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park and from Dead Horse Point State Park. It had been a huge trip, even if, because of the weather, we had done significantly less hiking than we’d initially thought we would. But seeking alternatives to hiking led to our exploring further afield. Without the snowstorm, we probably would not have ended up at Natural Bridges or Bears Ears. It was yet another example of unexpected conditions in the National Parks leading to remarkable experiences.
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Saturday, February 18, 2023 was our last full day in Moab, and Sean and I planned to spend it up in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park. We had been there the previous Sunday to start the trip’s adventures, and now we we would bookend the trip with a return to see the things we had missed, including a very famous arch. And we also wanted to go on a proper hike, finally.
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Sean and I arrived at the Windows Section of Arches National Park less than half an hour before sunset on Friday, February 17, 2023. We were surprised that, while not exactly busy, the area wasn’t all-but-abandoned, like the part of the Park we’d just come from. The winter sunset was muffled by high, thin clouds that softened and diffused the light as we wandered on the easy paths around the area, taking in the views.
This post is mostly photos.
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Late in the afternoon of Friday, September 17, Sean and I headed up into Arches National Park one last time (on this second trip to Moab, at least). There were two major Arches, both near the Devils Garden section of the Park, that we still had never seen: Broken Arch and Sand Dune Arch. During our other times in the Park, both on this trip and the previous year, we’d simply prioritized hiking to other arches. After Sean had unfortunately had to spend the majority of that day working, at least he’d be able to get out and stretch his legs in some astounding scenery.
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Friday, February 17, 2023 was our final weekday in Moab, and unfortunately, Sean got pulled into work, so I spent the day bumming around town and then driving out to Sego Canyon to experience some of the most astonishing Rock Art I’ve ever seen, a gallery of Archaic Barrier Canyon style Pictographs some 4,000 years old.
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It was approaching 3pm on Thursday, February 16, 2023 when Sean and I drove into the snow-laden Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. Down below the canyon rims, but still above the junction of the Green and Colorado Rivers, The Needles District is known for its many miles of hiking and backpacking trails amid a wonderland of red rock formations. That afternoon, as we continued our snowy driving tour to points south of Moab, we were lucky to see the red rock country blanketed white beneath a beautiful blue sky. While snow is fairly rare in The Needles (the higher Island in the Sky District gets more), they had received over a foot of snow in the same storm that had merely dusted Moab.
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Bears Ears National Monument protects 1.36 million acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. President Barack Obama established the National Monument at 1.35 million acres in December 2016, during the final weeks of his presidency, using the powers granted to presidents by the Antiquities Act of 1906. In December 2017, Donald Trump and his corrupt first Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unlawfully reduced Bears Ears by 85% to just over 201,000 acres. In October 2021, President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—the first Native American Secretary of the Interior—restored Bears Ears, retaining an additional 11,000 acres actually added under Trump.
The entire Bears Ears landscape contains some 100,000 sacred sites. In a historic first, Bears Ears National Monument is co-managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the Department of the Interior, the USDA Forest Service, and a coalition of five Native American tribes, the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.
Early afternoon of Thursday, February 16, 2023 found Sean and me gazing out at the heart of Bears Ears—the Bears Ears Buttes themselves—from Natural Bridges National Monument.
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Natural Bridges National Monument protects just over 7,600 acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. President Theodore Roosevelt used his powers under the Antiquities Act to establish the National Monument (Utah’s first National Park site) in 1908. The Park’s raison d’être is the presence of three sandstone bridges of varying age, height, and span near the intersections of White and Armstrong canyons. This tiny National Monument is entirely surrounded by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) portion of Bears Ears National Monument.
On Thursday, February 16, 2023, Sean and I set our sights on Parks and Monuments south of Moab, including Natural Bridges and Bears Ears, along with The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.
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On Wednesday, February 15, 2023, after a morning and early afternoon of touring rock art sites and after a late lunch, Sean and I set our sites on return to Arches National Park. Although we’d been inside its boundaries at the Courthouse Wash Panel a couple hours earlier, now it was time to drive on up into the heart of the Park. And although it was just wet down in Moab, up in the slightly higher elevations of the Park were experiencing a true snow squall.
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Rock art is not an artifact. It is an action still happening.
When I see petroglyphs and pictographs, basic questions come to mind. What do these figures and symbols convey to me now, what did they say to people in their time, and how do they fit with other sites and repeated motifs, stories being told across distances? The entire Colorado Plateau, around 250,000 square miles of mostly exposed rock, is an open book. The questions move on from what am I reading to where am I on the land? How did I get here, and how did they get here? What are the flute players playing? A resplendent person depicted holding a snake by one outstretched arm means what?
– Craig Childs, Tracing Time, Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
Overnight into Tuesday, February 14, 2023, it started to snow. It would continue to snow off and on for the next two days. So Sean and I hunkered down in Moab on Valentine’s Day and then spent the following day exploring the astonishing rock art near town.
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It was late in the afternoon of Monday, February 13, 2023, and Sean’s and my day at Capitol Reef National Park was swiftly concluding, but we had time for a drive along the relatively short scenic drive and one quick hike to see more Hisatsinom petroglyphs deep in Capitol Gorge. It turned out that we got to see the cliffs of the Waterpocket Fold just when the mid-winter late afternoon light was its most gorgeous.
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For roughly one thousand years, from 300 to 1300 CE, the Hisatsinom people lived across what is now Utah. They left behind distinctive pottery and a distinctive style of rork art. Archaeologists call them the Fremont, named after the river that cuts through Capitol Reef National Park.
On Monday afternoon, February 13, 2023, Sean and I got to visit an extraordinary series of Hisatsinom petroglyph panels along the Fremont River in the heart of Canyonlands National Park. This was our first visit to such sacred sites on a trip that would be full of these encounters.
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Capitol Reef National Park protects almost 242,000 acres of the Colorado Plateau in south central Utah. Franklin Roosevelt originally preserved the dramatic heart of the landscape as a relatively small National Monument in 1937. Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded the Monument’s boundaries in 1968. Then in 1971, Congress upgraded its status to National Park while also fixing its final boundaries to just slightly smaller than Johnson’s.
The centerpiece of the Park is a one-hundred-mile-long ripple in the earth known as the Waterpocket Fold. Since the Waterpocket Fold runs north-south, Capitol Reef National Park is long and narrow. The center of Park activity, the Visitor Center, campground, and scenic drive, are clustered where the Fremont River and Utah State Route 24 slice through the Waterpocket Fold. Otherwise, the Park is fairly remote with large portions requiring high-clearance vehicles.
On Monday, February 13, 2023, Sean and I spent the day at Capitol Reef National Park, one I’ve been excited about since we started this odyssey. We had decided to make the drive from Moab early in our trip because a snowstorm was threatening to move across Utah beginning the following day. We didn’t want to risk not being able to get to Capitol Reef at all.
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On Sunday, February 12, 2023, Sean and I concluded our first afternoon in Canyonlands National Park with a visit to a giant hole in the earth. In a landscape rich with dramatic topography, Upheaval Dome in the northwest portion of the Island in the Sky, is a unique mystery. Scientists are unsure how this two-mile wide, basically round hole formed.
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Established in 1964 during the Lyndon Johnson Administration, Canyonlands National Park protects over 337,000 acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. It is adjacent to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area to the west, Deadhorse Point State Park tothe northeast, and Bears Ears National Monument to the south/southeast. At the heart of Canyonlands National Park is the confluence of two of the West’s most famous rivers, the Colorado and the Green. These rivers are foundational to the Park’s wildly eroded landscape, filled with sheer cliffs, towering buttes and hoodoos, sinuous canyons, and expansive flats. The Park is divided into three main districts, dictated by geology. To the southeast is The Needles, defined by the rock formations and hoodoos for which it’s named. To the southwest is The Maze, remote and rugged canyon country. To the north is the Island in the Sky, a great peninsula jutting south some 2,200 feet above the confluence of the rivers.
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 12, 2023, Sean and I took in some big views from the Island in the Sky.
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On Saturday, February 11, 2023, Sean and I returned to southeastern Utah’s portion of the immense Colorado Plateau. The plateau sprawls across 130,000 square miles of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Its huge uplift extends from the Colorado Rockies in the east to the Utah’s Wasatch Range in the west. It’s southwestern edge rises as Arizona’s Mogollon Rim above the Sonoran Desert. It encompasses Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Mesa Verde National Parks. It includes dozens of other Park units, including Dinosaur, Colorado, Hovenweep, Natural Bridges, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears National Monuments. And it encompasses the Navajo and Ute Nations, as well as hundreds of sacred sites like Chaco Canyon, Shiprock, Sleeping Ute Mountain, and Canyon de Chelly.
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In February 2023, Sean and I returned to Moab, Utah, almost exactly a year after we’d first visited. In 2022, we had gone to the storied outdoor adventure town for a long weekend visit to Arches National Park. We had enjoyed the hotel we’d stayed in—The Radcliffe—so much that, while we were checking out in 2022, I had gone ahead and booked us the same lovely room at The Radcliffe for ten days in 2023. That 2022 trip had focused on diminutive Arches, but the 2023 trip would incorporate its massive companion Parks, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef, completing our visits to the National Parks of Utah.
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On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 16, 2022, my Bold Bison co-owner, Patrick, and I continued our day of desert adventure in the Rincon Mountain District on the east side of Saguaro National Park. We had already spent the morning in the Tucson Mountain District to the west and had had lunch in Tucson as we headed east to the Rincons. It was the final day of my week-and-a-day-long birthday trip to Tucson before heading home to Chicago the next day.
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Wednesday, November 16, 2022 was a Bold Bison day of adventure in the desert. Patrick and I had the day mostly to ourselves after the successful video shoots the previous day. We had captured basically all of the footage we’d need for the project, so anything we got today would be gravy. We had built this day into the trip as a safeguard, and honestly as an adventure day. It was my final full day in Tucson after being there for a week already, and I was looking forward to checking out a few things in Saguaro National Park that I hadn’t seen yet. Our plan was to catch the sunrise (again) in the Tucson Mountain District and then sunset in the Rincon Mountain District.
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Monday, November 14, 2022 was a transition day. Sean was set to fly home to Chicago in the morning. Then in the afternoon, Patrick would arrive and we would shift into Bold Bison work mode, shooting interviews and footage for a video project. For me, it felt like an instant revisit to Saguaro National Park. The initial exploration of the Park with Sean was complete. And now it was time for a second visit connected to work travel, except that there was a gap of only a couple hours, rather than months or years, between one and the other.
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Sunday afternoon, November 13, 2022, Sean and I continued our day in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Time was growing short as the sun traced its short November path across the wide-open sky. Our next stop was Senita Basin for our second hike of the day. But to get there, we had to drive down and along the border, wedged between Wilderness and a wall.
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Established in 1937 by the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument protects over 330,000 acres of the Sonoran Desert. The southern edge of the Monument is the international border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. Its eastern edge borders the Tohono O’odham Reservation. Bounded on the west and northwest by Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, the Monument is important to the Pacific Flyway of migrating birds. It is the northern extent of the range of species of cactus, the Senita Cactus, that grows nowhere else in the contiguous United States. The Monument is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Ninety-five percent of the Monument is federally designated Wilderness. It is fewer than fifty miles from the Gulf of California.
And it is beautiful.
On Sunday, November 13, 2022, it was where Sean and I were headed for the day.
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Our day in the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park—Friday, November 11, 2022—was coming to a close. We had greeted the sun that morning in the Saguaro forest, and we would say goodbye to the sun from the forest too. The next day would be my birthday, and we’d spend it exploring Tucson.
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On the afternoon of Friday, November 11, 2022, Sean and I continued our exploration of the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park with a hike up a portion of Tanque Verde Ridge Trail. It allowed us to quickly reach some great views of the entire northern reaches of the Santa Cruz Valley, which encompasses Tucson, and the mountains that encircle the city. The trail climbs for eleven miles up a southwest-northeast trending ridge into the heart of the Rincon Mountains high country. But on this afternoon, we only did the first one and a half miles, which was still a vertical rise of over seven hundred feet.
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Friday morning, November 11, 2022, Sean and I were up early. We planned to spend the day exploring the eastern side of Saguaro National Park, the Rincon Mountain District, beginning with a Ranger-led sunrise hike to greet the dawn in the Sonoran Desert. Later we would go on a hike up Tanque Verde Ridge, and then wander around in the Saguaro Forest.
But first, sunrise.
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On Thursday, November 10, 2022, Sean and I finished up our afternoon on the western side of Saguaro National Park by exploring some of the Tucson Mountain District’s northernmost areas, including sunset under Panther Peak (3,435 feet).
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I love the desert. I love all four of North America’s deserts with their unique characters and personalities. As we arrived in the Sonoran Desert, we eased our way in gently with a wonderful introduction to this diverse place’s plants and animals with a visit to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum before driving to the heart of Saguaro National Park’s Tucson Mountain District.
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Saguaro National Park protects almost 92,000 acres of the northern Sonoran Desert. Established as a National Monument by Herbert Hoover in the waning days of his disastrous presidency, it was upgraded to a National Park by Congress in 1994, part of a robust legacy of desert conservation during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Of the Park’s 92,000 acres, 71,000 are federally designated Wilderness.
The Park comprises two distinct units on the eastern and western edges of Tucson, Arizona. While both units contain the same general ingredients of desert grassland and variously vegetated transition zones climbing the slopes of mountain ranges, they have markedly different flavors. To the east, Rincon Mountain District contains a true Sky Island, a mountain range high enough and cool enough to cradle habitat remnants of ecosystems—trapped above warming valley floors as the Ice Age glaciers retreated—usually found much farther north. To the west, Tucson Mountain District, smaller and lower, feels more iconically like desert, with dramatic, virtually bare, mountains rising sharply from flats and valleys.
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Post-pandemic, I’ve had occasion to go to Washington DC relatively frequently, for conferences, as part of my responsibilities as board chair for the Institute for Conservation Leadership, and even for the day to see exhibitions at the National Gallery. It’s an easy flight from Chicago. Although both Sean and I really like DC (I mean with all the museums it’s like free Disneyland for thinking people), we hadn’t really been there intentionally within the context of the National Mall being a unit of the National Park Service.
In both June and August of 2022, during trips to the District, I’d walked through the astounding installation, Raven and the Box of Daylight, by Tlingit artist Preston Singletary at the National Museum of the American Indian. I really wanted Sean to see it, and we were softly looking at weekends to spend in DC. In late summer, while telling Angela about the installation, she mentioned that she had never been to DC. So we three decided to go for a weekend to see the installation, to check off some National Mall stamps in our Passports to the National Parks, and to see the Space Shuttle Discovery, something all three of us had wanted to do ever since the Space Shuttles had been decommissioned. We chose a weekend in October, when it wouldn’t be too hot in the District.
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In 1978, Congress established Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, which combined an existing National Park unit with a Louisiana State Park and a French Quarter Visitor Center to create a National Park unit with a broad mandate to preserve and interpret the Mississippi River Delta region and southern Louisiana. That the Park is named after an enslaved people-smuggling pirate who was also a war hero underscores the complex layers of history, laid down like delta silt, in the region. Historically, the National Historical Park focuses on the Battle of New Orleans (the final battle of the War of 1812) and the pirate/privateer Jean Lafitte. Culturally, the Park focuses on New Orleans’ French Quarter, Creole culture, and Acadian/Cajun culture. Ecologically, the Park preserves 23,000 acres of bayous, swamps, marshes, and surrounding uplands at Barataria Preserve south of New Orleans, between the city and the Gulf of Mexico.
It was to Barataria Preserve that Sean and I were headed immediately after attending a jazz concert on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 13 [2022].
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New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, established in 1994, preserves and shares “the cultural history of the people and places that helped to shape the development and progression of Jazz in New Orleans.” It is a Park that both interprets place-based history and also celebrates and participates in a living arts scene in its city. The Park Rangers at New Orleans Jazz are working musicians with performing careers in the city beyond their work at and through the Park.
In September 2022, Land Trust Alliance Rally: The National Land Conservation Conference was held in person for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference is the most important in Bold Bison’s annual calendar, and we were excited to participate in person and see our friends and colleagues, many of whom we knew only through Zoom at that point. Sean and I had never been to New Orleans, so I suggested that he come along, which he was excited to do. It turned out that our friend Mayilu had been planning a trip to New Orleans with some girlfriends for the weekend before Rally, but her friends had had to cancel. So we decided to go early. Friends Nick, Josh, and Laura decided to tag along too.
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On Tuesday, July 26 [2022], I continued my solo circumnavigation of the Olympic Peninsula and Olympic National Park. This was both my second visit to Olympic and only the second time I’d visited a National Park alone. (The first was the previous November when I stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park for a hike on my drive home from New Mexico). The first time I’d visited Olympic (a decade earlier in April 2012), it had been with Sean and Kathrin. But on that day too we did a day of highlights on a long drive between Portland and Seattle. Someday, I’ll visit Olympic and stay a while.
That April day with Kathrin and Sean, the weather had been more expected (cool, rainy). But on this late July day, it was 90 degrees at Hoh Rainforest, my next stop. It made for a completely different experience.
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On Sunday, July 15 [2022], Bold Bison continued an epic journey from West Coast client to West Coast client by flying from San Diego to Washington State. Patrick would only be there four days, but I would be there for over a week and a half. Along with a bunch of adventures and a lot of good work, I ended the trip with a day at Olympic National Park, the park that Sean and I visited just second on this whole National Park odyssey.
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On Sunday, July 10 [2022], we technically had the day off, but—as we had during our Texas adventure and as we would again on future Bold Bison trips—Patrick and I spent the day hiking, this time in Kings Canyon National Park. Often with Bold Bison, our work responsibilities and recreational activities blend, and they would on this day. In addition to hiking in Kings Canyon proper, we continued capturing photos and video footage of the devastation wrought by the KNP Complex Fire.
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After our time in Oregon and San Francisco, Bold Bison’s summer 2022 West Coast tour continued in the southern Sierra Nevada. We had been engaged by Sequoia Parks Conservancy (SPC), the nonprofit friends group for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, to help them tell the story of, and to continue raising recovery funds for, the KNP Complex Fire that had raged through the Parks and their Sequoia Groves in 2021.
The KNP Complex Fire storytelling project was actually the second project we’d had with Sequoia Parks Conservancy. The first was creating the brand and website for the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, whose members include the National Park Service, USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Geological Survey, Tule River Indian Tribe, State of California, University of California Berkeley, and Tulare County, along with nonprofit partners, Save the Redwoods League, Giant Sequoia Monument Association, and Sequoia Parks Conservancy.
So on Thursday, July 7 [2022], Patrick and I picked up our rental car—an alarmingly fuel inefficient Toyota Four Runner—in downtown San Francisco, crossed the Bay Bridge, and continued down the Central Valley toward Sequoia National Park.
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In the summer of 2022, I was on the road for Bold Bison for thirty-five days, with the vast majority on the West Coast. Combining multiple projects and meetings into one long trip was a way to be able to be onsite with our clients as inexpensively as possible. In addition, I was able to revisit a few National Park units, both on official business and on my downtime. Any unit I visited would have to be a revisit of a Park I’d already been to with Sean so that we didn’t get misaligned. Still coming out of the pandemic, having a good long time on the road was good for my mental health, although I was disappointed that Sean wasn’t able to join for at least part of the adventure.
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We completed our day’s visit to Chaco Culture National Historical Park on Friday, May 20 [2022] with a couple of walks in “Downtown Chaco.” Here in the center of Chaco Canyon we were also in the center of the Chacoan world. There was still a lot to see, but since our time was beginning to run short, we decided to focus on two sites: Peublo del Arroyo and Casa Rinconada, which offered different perspectives on Chaco than what we had already seen.
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Almost 7,500 years ago, around the year 5446 BCE by modern calendars, a star exploded, sending incredibly bright light out into space. The light from that supernova reached Earth on July 4, 1054. Chinese astronomers recorded a bright new star that suddenly appeared in the sky. It was so bright that it was visible both day and night for months.
Halfway around the world, Chaco was near the height of its power, a ceremonial and administrative city and center of trade whose grandeur was unmatched in the Ancestral Puebloan world. A culture deeply attuned to the cosmos—multiple structures at Chaco were oriented to the solstices and equinoxes—the Chacoans would have born witness to the new star. It is possible that they recorded the supernova—now faded into what modern astronomers know as the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus—on a remarkable pictograph panel near the western end of Chaco Canyon.
Continuing our day in Chaco Canyon on May 20 [2022], Sean and I determined to hike to see the Supernova Pictograph.
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(Note: Although Sean’s and my odyssey is focused on the now sixty-three National Parks proper, some of the units protected by the Park Service are so important or tell a story of such magnitude that they are part of an unofficial 63+ list for us. They are units that, but for the accidents of history or the vagaries of politics, certainly deserve to be celebrated as part of the core function of the whole national project of setting aside places of immense value. Dinosaur National Monument is one such place. Chaco Culture National Historical Park certainly is another. Just as with Dinosaur, I’m treating our trip to Chaco as if it were one of the sixty-three.)
The thing to understand about Chaco is that it was a city. But it was a very special kind of city. For three hundred years it was the center of the Ancestral Puebloan world, a place of ceremony, religion, culture, and trade with influence that spread across geography and time. A collection of magnificent Great Houses in an arid canyon at the center of the San Juan basin near the southeastern edge of the Colorado Plateau in what is now northwestern New Mexico, Chaco was likely an administrative center where ritual bound together a far-flung Ancestral Puebloan homeland.
Chaco held such prominence in all my reading about the Ancestral Puebloan world since our visit to Mesa Verde National Park that I had prioritized seeing it for ourselves.
On Wednesday, May 18 [2022], we began our journey to Chaco and a return to one of my favorite landscapes: Northern New Mexico. In addition to seeing Chaco, I also wanted Sean to experience the very special AirBnB I’d stayed in outside Taos the previous November. And I was excited to see the exhibition New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. It turned out that late May 2022 was the best option for an overlap between the AirBnB being available and the run of the exhibition. So off we went.
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Tuesday, March 22, [2022] was our final afternoon on St. John. Hungry after our six-plus-mile hike to and around Reef Bay, we had a leisurely lunch at Miss Lucy’s very close to where we were staying at Concordia. The next day we would have to say goodbye to St. John and make our trip by boat, plane, and car back to wintry Chicago.
But we still had time for a couple more adventures.
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Nestled in a valley near the center of the south side of St. John, there is a grotto of freshwater, a sort of naturally occurring cistern. Near the water’s edge is a collection of petroglyphs depicting what appear to be faces and symbolic shapes. The petroglyphs were made by the Taíno people, who inhabited the Greater Antilles and the northern Lesser Antilles at the time Columbus’ invasion began in 1492. This place of reliable freshwater was clearly important to the Taíno. It was to this most remote part of Virgin Islands National Park that our adventures would take us on Tuesday, March 22 [2022], our last full day on St. John.
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Late afternoon on Monday, March 21 [2022], we finally swam at Trunk Bay. When Sean and I had been to Virgin Islands National Park nine years earlier, the day we’d reserved for visiting Trunk Bay turned out to be windy on the north side of St. John, so Trunk Bay was closed for swimming because of dangerous surf. But on this trip, we got to enjoy a late afternoon swim and sunset at one of the most beautiful beaches on the planet.
On Monday, March 21 [2022], we went snorkeling at Waterlemon Cay, one of the premiere snorkeling sites in Virgin Islands National Park. Skipping it on our first trip had been my biggest regret, so I was very excited to see what it had to offer.
On Sunday, March 20, [2022],after we’d spent the morning and early afternoon on a visit to Annaberg, which was a repeat for Sean and me, we spent the late afternoon swimming at Hawksnest Bay, which we had not done on our first visit to Virgin Islands National Park in 2013. It was well worth it. And we could see why it is popular with St. John locals.
Transferred to the National Park Service upon the establishment of Virgin Islands National Park in 1956, Annaberg preserves and interprets the legacy of chattel slavery in the Danish West Indies, which supported St. John’s small piece in the Caribbean’s massive and world-altering cane sugar industry. Located on a bluff on the island’s north side, and commanding an astonishing view, the site was unexpectedly our destination on Sunday morning, March 20 [2022], the vernal equinox.
For Sean and me, this was a return. Read about our first visit to Annaberg here.
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