After our lunch on August 24, Sean, Angela, Mary, and I set off on our afternoon adventures at Indiana Dunes National Park. Since the morning, we had slowly been making our way west from the easternmost point of the Park. Our next stop was the Visitor Center, and then we’d do some more hiking. It was already clear to us that we would not be able to do all the hikes on our list in one day, but we knew we’d be back to this out-our-backdoor Park time and again in the future.
Continue reading
On August 24, exactly a month after our visit to West Beach, we were back at Indiana Dunes National Park. This time, we were again there as part of our Let’s Go Outside group of mostly Chicagoans who pick places near the city to go for day hikes six times a year. The group had last done Indiana Dunes in July 2015. Four years earlier, we’d run into some issues finding parking, so I suggested to the group via Facebook earlier that week that we try and get an early start. Our plan was to begin at the Park’s far eastern edge, Mount Baldy, and work our way west with a series of short hikes. If people wanted to join us later, they could text and find out where we were. Also, if people needed to get back to the city early, they could peel off whenever they needed to.
Ultimately, there were four of us who explored the Park that day: Sean, Angela, Mary, and me. It was our first time exploring a National Park with Mary!
Continue reading
In the summer of 2019, after Indiana Dunes became a National Park, Sean and I planned two day trips there. The first trip was on a hot July day with a bunch of my family who were visiting Chicago from both the Detroit area and Seattle. Our choice for the day was West Beach, a unit of the Park that Sean and I had never been to. It boasts both a beach with a bathhouse and lifeguards and some nice hiking trails.
Continue reading
What’s in a name? Both everything and nothing.
On February 15, 2019, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore became Indiana Dunes National Park, the nation’s sixty-first. The legislation to “upgrade” the National Lakeshore to National Park status, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Gary) with the support of the entire Indiana Congressional delegation (but over the opposition of the National Park Service), had been inserted into the omnibus bill to reopen the federal government after the longest shutdown in history. The legislation, however, added no land to the Park, nor did it change its appropriation budget or increase levels of protection for an exceedingly fragile landscape. Although sites become part of the National Park System in different ways (only Congress holds the authority to establish a National Park while, for instance, a president may unilaterally create a National Monument), since the National Park Service General Authorities Act of 1970, all the units within the National Park System have been managed equally as a single system. But the term National Park holds a special place in the imagination. As Park Superintendent Paul Labovitz writes in the summer/fall issue of The Singing Sands, the Park’s newspaper, “Sixty-one of the 419 [NPS units] are called National Park, and when you think about they way National Park visits are written about and promoted, those 61 are usually the places featured.”
Indeed, Paul.
Continue reading
Monday, November 19 dawned cool and cloudless in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and we were heading home. This was the twelfth and final day of my wonderful fortieth birthday trip to two National Parks. Although we were saying goodbye, we intended to make a quick stop at Guadalupe Mountains National Park as we departed.
Continue reading
After saying goodbye to our friends on Sunday morning, November 18, Sean, Phil, Adam, Sylvan, and I piled into the car and drove back over to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. We wanted to do some exploring aboveground along the 9.5-mile Walnut Canyon Desert Drive.
Aboveground, Carlsbad Caverns National Park is 46,766 acres of the low, northeastern portion of the Guadalupe Mountains. Here, the ridges are low enough that they lack the more heavily wooded zones of the southern edge of the range. The ridges and canyons exhibit more typical plant communities of the Chihuahuan Desert.
Continue reading
On Friday, November 16, after a full day of exploring the underground palaces of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, we decided to visit a very special aboveground part of the Park in our final hour of daylight: Rattlesnake Springs, the site of a lush oasis in the Chihuahuan Desert beneath the Guadalupe range. Rattlesnake Springs is a small, twenty-four acre unit of Carlsbad Caverns National Park purchased by the National Park Service in 1934 as a means to ensure a reliable water source for the development of the National Park. Because of its water and array of trees and shrubs, Rattlesnake Springs hosts 350 bird species, forty species of reptiles and amphibians, and thirty species of mammals. John had been monitoring the site’s bird lists on eBird and was keen to visit, so we decided to check it out on our way back to Carlsbad.
Continue reading