On Sunday, August 5, Angela’s birthday and our final full day at Glacier National Park, we woke early to be on the road by 7. Angela’s birthday hike for 2018 would be the 3.8-mile (one-way) hike up to Grinnell Glacier, a favorite of all of our Glacier-loving companions. Our day’s adventure would also involve four boat rides on two lakes, because that’s what all the fanciest people have done in Glacier for over one hundred years.
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On Saturday, August 4, we decided to do the wooded hike to Florence Falls, 4.6 miles from the trailhead at Jackson Glacier Overlook on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Our hikes the previous two days had been up in the alpine heights, and the following day we’d be hiking to a glacier, so a hike through a valley to a waterfall was perfect for seeing another side of Glacier National Park.
After our morning hike at Hidden Lake on Friday, August 3, we spent the afternoon running errands in anticipation of “Prosecco Hour,” which is that hour when you drink Prosecco in your campsite. But when running errands is as scenic as going to the Many Glacier section of Glacier National Park, you certainly don’t mind.
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As we had the previous morning, we woke early on Friday, August 3. Our goal was to return early to Logan Pass to do the short hike to Hidden Lake Overlook and hopefully see some Mountain Goats and other wildlife. Then in the afternoon we’d go over to Many Glacier and reserve boat tickets for a hike over the weekend.
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The Highline Trail along Glacier National Park’s Garden Wall is one of the great hikes in the entire National Park system. It is simultaneously splendor-drenched and intimate. As gorgeous a view as you can find anywhere unfolds around you while up close, a delicate micro-habitat is home to bouquets of wildflowers. It is the extreme of expansiveness and quiet. It is also terrifying for someone, like me, who is afraid of heights.
Nevertheless, Sean’s and my first full day in Glacier, Thursday, August 2, was spent on the Highline with friends who return to it like a pilgrimage to a holy site.
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On July 31, a Tuesday, our journey to Montana began with a 5:20pm flight from O’Hare to…Seattle. Then we’d continue on to Great Falls. Sean and I both worked from home until it was time to head to the airport. And we both were stressed tying up some final things before the trip. Our stress continued on the way to the airport in a Lyft. Traffic was extremely heavy, and we’d left later than we’d wanted to because of work stuff.
Glacier National Park was established by Congress on May 11, 1910 with the enabling legislation signed by President William Howard Taft. The Park protects over a million acres of the northern Rocky Mountains along the Continental Divide in northwestern Montana. It was the tenth most visited National Park in 2017 with over 3.3 million visitors.
For years Glacier National Park has been writ large in Sean’s and my minds because it is so beloved of our friends Angela and Dan, fellow National Park enthusiasts who have visited the Park many times, often at the conclusion of long summer road trips. (They are both Chicago Public Schools teachers.) During the long Chicago winter, the four of us were part of a Wednesday night Skeeball league at a local brewery. Over the course of our weekly hanging out and playing (often terribly), the subject rose of our joining them at Glacier in the summer of 2018. We knew that we were going to California in July for Andrew’s wedding and that my birthday trip was coming in November, so an August trip to Glacier might work out quite nicely.
And so it did.
Just before 3pm on July 4, Sean and I departed Mist Falls and began the hike down Paradise Valley. The Falls marked the farthest into the heart of the Sierra Nevada that we would reach on this trip. The following day we would continue on to the third part of our California trip: three nights in San Diego and Andrew and Yesi’s wedding.
For our Fourth of July day hike in Kings Canyon National Park, Sean and I chose the popular trail to Mist Falls on the South Fork of the Kings River. From the parking area at Roads End, the trail gains about 800 feet of elevation in just under four miles, with most of the elevation gain at the end.
General Grant National Park was established in 1890 to protect 154 acres of the General Grant Grove of Giant Sequoias. Then, fifty years later, General Grant National Park was transformed into Kings Canyon National Park, 461,901 acres of mostly wilderness. The push to protect a greater portion of the Sierra Nevada as a wilderness Park was led in large part by Franklin Roosevelt’s legendary Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. The lands that would become Kings Canyon National Park were held by the Forest Service. In the 1930s, advocacy organizations like the Sierra Club and the National Parks Association were becoming increasingly concerned that development in the Parks was destroying their wilderness qualities. They felt that the lands in question may be better off managed as wilderness by the Forest Service rather than developed for visitors by the Park Service. This led to Ickes’ lobbying the organizations for support in the creation of a new National Park, the reverse of how these things usually happened. As the 1930s drew to a close, FDR’s enthusiasm for the new Park grew after Ickes shared with the president a book of images of the Kings Canyon region by famed photographer Ansel Adams. By early 1940, Ickes and Roosevelt had swayed Congress, and the president signed the establishing legislation for the Park on March 1. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed legislation that further expanded the Park to its present boundaries.
At a little after 1pm on July 3, Sean and I reached the southern edge of the plateau on which Sequoia National Park’s Giant Forest sits. We were at the junction of Trail of the Sequoias and High Sierra Trail. In front of us to the south was the gorge of the Middle Fork of the Kaweah River, some 3,700 feet below. Beyond were the ridges and peaks of the southern Sierra Nevada.
Between the heavy pine and silver fir zones towers the Big Tree (Sequoia[dendron] gigantea), the king of all the conifers in the world, “the noblest of the noble race” … It extends, a widely interrupted belt, from a very small grove on the middle fork of the American River to the head of Deer Creek, a distance of about 260 miles, its northern limit being near the thirty-ninth parallel, the southern a little below the thirty-sixth. The elevation of the belt above the sea varies from about 5000 to 8000 feet … Southward the giants become more and more irrepressibly jubilant, heaving their massive crowns into the sky from every ridge and slope, waving onward in graceful compliance with the complicated topography of the region. The finest of the Kaweah section of the belt is on the broad ridge between Marble Creek and the middle fork, and is called the Giant Forest. It extends from the granite headlands, overlooking the hot San Joaquin plains, to within a few miles of the cool glacial fountains of the summit peaks … and is included in the Sequoia National Park.
– John Muir, The Yosemite, 1912
It was not yet 10:30am as we turned from the throng at the base of the General Sherman Tree and started into the Giant Forest on the popular, paved Congress Trail. I had a general sense that we would ultimately end up at the Giant Forest Museum (where at 6:30pm, the shuttle would return us to Three Rivers) by way of Moro Rock. But our exact route through the grove was yet to be determined.
Sequoia National Park was established on September 25, 1890 as the second National Park in the system. Its original primary function was to protect a number of groves of Giant Sequoias in the southern Sierra Nevada from logging. One grove of the famed trees had already been protected in 1864 when Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove were given to the state of California for permanent protection. On October 1, 1890, several days after Sequoia National Park was created, another grove of Giant Sequoias was protected as General Grant National Park (which in 1940 would grow to become Kings Canyon National Park). General Grant National Park protected the grove around the General Grant Tree, thought to be the largest in the world until 1931 when Sequoia National Park’s Sherman Tree was discovered to be larger. On that same October day in 1890, hundreds of thousands of acres around Yosemite Valley were also protected as Yosemite National Park, although the Valley and Mariposa Grove wouldn’t officially join the National Park until 1906.
All told, a flurry of legislation in early autumn 1890 began a process that would eventually set aside over 1,615,000 acres of the Sierra Nevada as National Parks. Over 404,000 of those acres were Sequoia National Park.
Our ten days in California began with three nights in Los Angeles visiting Charlie and Kevin, who had just moved there from Chicago and were still settling into their apartment in Marina del Rey. Sean and I were excited to see them in their new life.
In late May 2017, my cousin Andrew, who had been our fellow adventurer in Death Valley National Park, proposed to his girlfriend, Yesenia. This happy development ensured a fifth return to California for Sean and me in barely two years. At first, we’d assumed that this trip would be separate from any National Park adventures, but then our Chicago friends Charlie and Kevin announced in late 2017 that they were moving to Los Angeles in early 2018. As the wedding plans came together, Andrew and Yesi chose July 6 for their nuptials in San Diego. And as we began to put together a trip that would include some time with Charlie and Kevin in LA and the wedding celebration in San Diego, Sean pointed to the two National Parks in southern California that remained unvisited on the map that hangs in our home office. “Which are those? Can we visit them when we’re in California for Andrew’s wedding?”
We saw quite a range of species during our trip to Great Basin National Park, which is unsurprising given the huge elevation differences in the Park. This list also includes species we saw in Snake Valley, outside the technical boundary of the National Park.
After the morning’s solar eclipse, Sean and I decided to spend the afternoon of August 21, our final full day at Great Basin National Park, exploring one of the only remaining major sections of the Park that we hadn’t yet visited: the Snake Creek Canyon area. Like most of the other reasonably accessible portions of the Park, it is reached from the Snake Valley side of the Snake Range.
As our visit to Great Basin National Park moved into its final third, the only thing defining our remaining time was the solar eclipse that would occur on the morning of August 21.
After our midday hike on Sunday, August 20 to Lexington Arch, Sean and I returned to Baker and drove over to Baker Archeological Site on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land just north of town. The site was the location of a Fremont people village, which had been excavated in the early 1990s. The Fremonts, named after a river in Utah where their sites were first discovered, lived in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Colorado from roughly 1 to 1300 CE.
The nice thing about giving ourselves ample time in a relatively small National Park is that by the morning of our third day in the Park we had done quite a lot of the must-do experiences. Now any Park could withstand a visit of a week or more, but staying a couple nights (as we had at Badlands, Wind Cave, Bryce Canyon, etc.) can at least be a rock-solid introduction to the main features of a Park. But we had allotted more time to Great Basin than we had to Yosemite…or Grand Canyon…or Death Valley. We’d allotted it the same amount of time as Denali. The result was that we were able to get a little more off the beaten path.
On Sunday, August 20, that meant getting off the beaten path and on to the destroyed path to Lexington Arch.
August 19 was our Saturday at Great Basin National Park. While we had not mapped out any day-by-day approach to exploring the Park, we suspected that if the weather were nice, we’d likely climb up something. From the campground at 10,000 feet, Wheeler Peak at 13,063 feet looked intimidating. Being unused to elevation was clearly an issue for us at this point in the trip. I suggested that we do the Alpine Lakes Loop Trail from the campground and also hike up to the saddle between Wheeler Peak and Bald Mountain. From there we’d have a view of Spring Valley on the other side of the range. Then if we felt like it, we could hike up Bald Mountain to its 11,562-foot summit.
On the afternoon of August 18, after our lunch and a rest in camp, we decided to go on an afternoon hike to the Bristlecone Pine Grove beneath the Wheeler Peak Cirque. The Bristlecones are accessible three miles and six-hundred feet up a winding forest trail that begins at the entrance to Wheeler Peak Campground. The trail continues another mile to the remnant of a glacier. On the question of whether we’d go all the way to the glacier, we decided to see how we felt once we’d seen the Bristlecones, which were our main objective.
The morning of August 18 was devoted to our tour of Lehman Caves, the highly decorated limestone cave that the south Snake Range had first become famous (and federally protected) for. When our friend Patrick had visited Great Basin National Park on a lark during a road trip from the Bay Area to Chicago, he hadn’t been able to tour the cave because the tours were sold out. We had booked ours weeks in advance so that wouldn’t happen to us. My thinking had been that we would do the cave tour straight off on the morning of our first day in the Park, then we’d have the rest of our time to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted.
Sean and I departed Chicago for Great Basin National Park on Wednesday, August 16, 2017. The night before we had celebrated our second wedding anniversary with a lovely evening of tapas and paella. After a strategic planning call on Wednesday afternoon, I shouldered my large pack, which I’d brought with me to my office in the Loop, and headed for the Blue Line El to O’Hare Airport. Unfortunately, there was a severe delay, so Sean and I changed plans. We met at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph and were driven to O’Hare by a Lyft driver named Juan. Juan’s youngest son was studying business at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. After school, Juan’s son planned to learn the legal marijuana business in Colorado before returning home once it was legalized in Illinois. I guess it sounded like the kid had a good head on his shoulders.
Stretching from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California all the way to the Wasatch front of the Rocky Mountains in Utah and from the edge of the Mojave Desert and the Colorado Plateau in the south to the Snake River Plain of Idaho and the Harney Basin of Oregon in the north, the Great Basin comprises a huge expanse of the American West. While it is vast enough to encompass a variety of landscapes and habitats from alpine peaks low-lying desert, the Great Basin is generally signified by high, arid sagebrush desert cut by mountain ranges. The Great Basin boasts 160 north-south trending mountain ranges separating ninety valleys.
One of those mountain ranges is the Snake Range in eastern Nevada near the Utah border, which separates Snake Valley (elevation: 5,300 feet) in the east from Spring Valley (elevation: 6,400 feet) in the west. The Snake Range is capped by Wheeler Peak at 13,065 feet, the second-highest peak in Nevada. In 1922, President Warren Harding established Lehman Caves National Monument to protect a magnificently decorated cave in the eastern slopes of the south Snake Range. For the succeeding sixty years, talk ebbed and flowed of creating a National Park in the Snake Range. Finally on October 27, 1986, Congress combined Lehman Caves National Monument with a portion of Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest to create Great Basin National Park, 77,180 acres of sagebrush sea, Pinyon-Juniper woodland, conifer forest, sub-alpine and alpine mountain habitat, Lehman Caves, Lexington Arch, and Great Basin Bristlecone Pine woodlands.
President Barack Obama established Pullman National Monument on Chicago’s far South Side in February 2015. The site, Chicago’s only National Park unit, commemorates layers of industrial, labor, and race history that continue to the present day.
When I started working at Openlands in June 2012, I was excited that my new job would expose me to lots of places to get outside in and around Chicago. A native Detroiter, I knew precious little about Chicago’s suburbs and exurbs or about rural Illinois. Getting outside meant going up to Wisconsin or back to Michigan. In 2014, Sean and I started taking one Saturday a month between May and October to go with friends on a day hike somewhere within two hours or so of Chicago. The places we visited included Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, Sagawau Canyon, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, the Openlands Lakeshore Preserve, Ryerson Woods, and others. What started with a few friends grew into a Facebook group with friends of friends of friends. In 2018 the group has over fifty members.
On Sunday, June 18, 2017, our “Let’s Go Outside” group went to Pullman National Monument and a few other South Side spots.
Our final morning at Death Valley National Park dawned with the sun pushing away the shadows from this vast place. It was Tuesday morning, February 28, and we’d have to start back to San Diego by noon at the latest. The following afternoon, Sean and I would fly home to Chicago.
The previous night as we found our campsite, everything was a rich black. In the morning as we looked out of our tents into the sunrise, we found the foothills of the Cottonwood mountains, where our camp was nestled, gloriously lit up. As were the quickly departing clouds. Although other parts of the valley had felt the drop of rain overnight, our tiny corner of it hadn’t.
Mosaic Canyon follows a fault almost two miles into Tucki Mountain. Actually, the canyon continues farther into the mountain, but at 1.8 miles, an insurmountable fifty-foot dry fall marks the end of a really great hike. Mosaic Canyon is a testament to the power of water written in beautiful stone.
Andrew, Sean, and I arrived at the parking area for Mosaic Canyon at about a quarter to four on February 27. We had traveled some eighty miles from our campsite on Harry Wade Road far near the southern end of Death Valley. Now in the foothills of Tucki Mountain above Stovepipe Wells, we were ready for our final adventure of our final full day in Death Valley National Park.
Badwater Basin in Death Valley is 282 feet below sea level, making it the lowest point on North America and among the lowest on the planet. The basin is covered in a crust of salt, ninety-five percent of which is table salt (sodium chloride). With nowhere lower to go, the Amargosa River ends its one-hundred eighty-five-mile journey here. Runoff from the eastern side of the Panamint Range and the western side of the Amargosa Range also ends up here. Once, Death Valley was filled by Lake Manley, eighty miles long and six-hundred feet deep. But the lake slowly dried up after the last Ice Age, leaving a bed of salt replenished by salts and minerals carried by water trapped here before evaporating.
After our twilight drive down Death Valley the previous evening, we were ready to spend Monday, February 27 making our way slowly back up the valley to the vicinity of Stovepipe Wells. The plan for the day was to take our time exploring some canyons and visiting Badwater Basin. We’d walked down to the Amargosa River after breakfast. Now, having struck our camp along Harry Wade Road, Sean, Andrew, and I were back in the Jeep headed to Room Canyon not far to the north.
Room Canyon, hidden in the foothills of the Black Mountains south of Mormon Point, features sheer reddish walls opening to a large room (for which the canyon is named) beneath a dry fall. The room is a 1.3-mile hike from Badwater Road. Side canyons add some distance, making exploring Room Canyon a 3.6-mile total out-and-back hike from the road.
By 5pm on Sunday, February 26, Sean, Andrew, and I were back in the Jeep and driving south through the northern part of Death Valley. The task at hand: finding a place to rest our heads for the night. The immensity of Death Valley was more apparent for us on this drive than it had been throughout the rest of our time in the Park. It was fifty-seven miles from Ubehebe Crater to the Park Headquarters at Furnace Creek. And our intention was to continue south well beyond Furnace Creek.
After saying goodbye to the Racetrack on Sunday, February 26, Andrew, Sean, and I climbed into the Jeep for the return drive to our campsite in Hidden Valley. After breakfast, we’d make the drive all the way back to central Death Valley, with a stopover at the Ubehebe Crater complex of maar, or steam, volcanoes.
So here’s the thing about North America: we haven’t been here that long. We really haven’t. Likely Native Americans have been here longer than history and science have traditionally thought. The thirteen-thousand-year-old bones found at Channel Islands National Park hint at that. But in particular, we who descend from peoples who didn’t cross the Bering Land Bridge have been on this continent hardly any time at all. And so there are still mysteries here. There are still things we don’t understand about how this place we call home works. How just the right barometric pressure and just the right wind velocity and just the right thin skein of ice or frost on just a flat enough surface like a dried lake can cause solid rock to skid across the land and leave a trail like a snail, a long footprint like a snake that twists and spirals and doubles back on itself. Because there are mysteries left on this continent.
And one of those mysteries is Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park, a mysterious that place exists in 2017 is a testament to the legacy of a century and a half of conservation in North America. And so we went, three Catholic boys as if to church, on the morning of Sunday, February 26, to a place full of magic.
After breaking camp in Panamint Valley, Andrew, Sean, and I drove to Death Valley proper, over a pass through the Cottonwood Mountains of the Panamint Range. It was 3pm on February 25 by the time we reached Stovepipe Wells in the shadow of Tucki Mountain. We’d been in Death Valley National Park for twenty-four hours already, but had yet to check-in, as it were, and inquire about backcountry camping or register as visitors.
We passed the campground, which, situated on the desert floor, sort of looked like an RV parking lot with tents. Seeing it, we were very glad to be camping in the backcountry. Already, the solitude it afforded had infected us and made us glad.
The desert was cold when I woke up and emerged from my tent into the pre-dawn glow at the edges of the Panamint Valley. It was just after 6am on Saturday, February 25, and the temperature must have been in the low forties at least.
On Thursday, February 23, Sean and I began our Death Valley National Park adventure by boarding a flight from Chicago O’Hare to San Diego. It had been a long week for me, with a major meeting that I had literally staged ending some three hours before our flight, and getting away to the desert to clear my head was just profoundly inviting.
At almost 3.4 million acres, Death Valley National Park is the largest National Park outside of Alaska and the fifth largest National Park overall. It encompasses entire mountain ranges and arid valleys at the western edge of the Great Basin, where the Mojave Desert transitions into the higher, colder Great Basin Desert. The Great Basin, hemmed in on the west by the Sierra Nevada, on the east by the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains, and on the south by the Colorado Plateau, is defined by the inability of any of its streams or rivers to reach the sea. They all flow from mountains or springs to valleys where they vanish, just as the Amargosa River flows south through Nevada, makes a wide, northerly turn, and ends in the salt flats of Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California.
For all its justifiably famous desert, Death Valley National Park is a landscape of staggering topographical relief. From Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level and the lowest point in North America, it is less than twenty miles as the raven flies to Telescope Peak, at 11,043 feet the highest point in the Panamint Range and in the Park. The Panamints and their companion ranges in the Park, including the Black Mountains and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range, are some of the 160 north-south trending ranges, which, along with the ninety valleys in between, comprise the Basin and Range Province.
The rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, the wind that sweeps off the slopes, the dry air that rises with each succeeding range and then is pushed into each valley by the wind, and the low elevation of Death Valley makes it the hottest and driest place in North America. The average temperature in July is 116 degrees. The record high is 134 degrees.
As one would expect, the species list for our Florida Keys trip is filled with interesting species. It’s not comprehensive and notably lacks plants, but it was worth compiling nonetheless.
All eight of us had spent the morning of November 19, 2016 kayaking in Biscayne Bay and in the mangrove estuaries along its mainland shores. Now it was time for a picnic lunch at Convoy Point. Our time at Biscayne National Park, having only just begun, was also drawing short. And that meant that our whole Florida Keys adventure would soon be concluding.
Looking north from Convoy Point, Miami rose from the ocean like Atlantis.
Biscayne National Park was established in 1980 and protects almost 173,000 acres of the northernmost Florida Keys, coastal Florida south of Miami, and the expanse of Biscayne Bay. It is in good company with Dry Tortugas, Glacier Bay, American Samoa, and Channel Islands as a National Park whose primary function is to protect nautical resources and habitat. Biscayne Bay was originally proposed for protection in the 1940s as part of Everglades National Park, but it was ultimately eliminated from that Park’s boundaries. The mainland areas and keys of Biscayne Bay remained largely undeveloped until the 1960s when proposals emerged to extend the hyper-development of Miami Beach to the Biscayne keys. A proposal to dredge the bay to create a deep-sea port on the mainland activated intense grassroots opposition. In 1968, that opposition led to the establishment by Congress of Biscayne National Monument, which was expanded and upgraded in 1980 to National Park status.
For several years before our visit on November 19, 2016, Biscayne National Park had lacked an official concessionaire. For decades, official partners had offered glass-bottomed boat tours and other activities for exploring the Park. By last November, limited tours were again being offered, but not on a day that made sense for our trip. Lacking a private boat, let alone one in Florida, we focused our day at Biscayne on kayaking.
Thursday, November 17, 2016 was the second full day of the trip that we’d spend in Key West. I was up fairly early to get some work done: approving an e-blast that had to go out that day. The Detroiters woke up next and joined me on the patio at Casa Amor. They then wandered out to get breakfast, while I stayed behind finishing up my proofreading and waiting for the Chicagoans to emerge. We agreed that we’d check in throughout the day since we all wanted to meet up for the Dry Tortugas National Park Visitor Center at the Key West Bight.
All too soon, the day of our departure from Dry Tortugas National Park had arrived. It was the morning of November 16, 2016, and when we Chicagoans returned to camp from our walk to see the sunrise, the Detroiters were already up and seeing to breakfast. We began to load up our gear. Even though the ferry didn’t leave until 3pm, we were obliged to load our camping supplies onto the boat as soon as that morning’s passengers disembarked. We’d be transformed into day trippers for our remaining hours on Garden Key.
On November 15, 2016, evening approached the Dry Tortugas, and some of us made our way toward Bush Key, which we had dubbed “Bird Island,” for the sunset. Twenty-four hours after first wandering out onto Bush Key for the previous evening’s sunset, the island not only felt more expansive, but this short walk felt like a trek (in a good way), even though it was less than a mile.
Fort Jefferson on Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park in the Gulf of Mexico is built out of sixteen million bricks, some from the Pensacola area, but most from the North, particularly New England, particularly Maine. In the early years of construction, the fort was built by hired laborers (often Irish), engineers, craftsman, and slaves on loan from their owners in Key West. During and after the Civil War, prisoners at the fort, hired laborers, and freed slaves comprised the construction crew.
Construction on the fort began in 1846, the same year that the United States went to war with Mexico, and its location was seen as being key to controlling the Gulf of Mexico. While the fort was being constructed, however, military technology developed for the Crimean War in the mid-1850s called into question the durability of masonry armaments. Then in April 1862, during the Civil War, the United States successfully bombarded and breached Confederate-held Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, rendering masonry fortifications obsolete. Construction on Fort Jefferson, though, continued until 1875, but the fort remains unfinished.
Now the fort is administered and cared for by the National Park Service. It is a monument to the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Monroe Doctrine of hemispheric hegemony (not to mention the lust of southern slavers to annex Caribbean islands and turn them into slave states) dictated strong U.S. military presence in the Gulf of Mexico.
During the Civil War, the United States held the fort, ensuring that it never fell into traitorous hands, and it became both part of the naval blockade of the South and a military prison. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared it Fort Jefferson National Monument. By 1992, military history had given way to ecology in assessing the Monument’s importance, and Fort Jefferson National Monument became Dry Tortugas National Park. The fort and destroyed Garden Key served as a place to absorb visitors while the other tiny islands and the waters around them healed.
It was the afternoon of November 15, 2016, and with the island drained of its day trippers, our little gang of eight ventured into Fort Jefferson to explore, learn, take in history, and be generally irreverent.
Just before dawn on Tuesday, November 15, 2016, a bit of light rain fell on Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park. It was barely enough to warrant putting the rainflies on our tents, but it caused us to stir a bit. By the time the sun rose just about 7am, most of us were awake and ready for a quiet, relaxing day on the island.
As late afternoon arrived on Garden Key on November 14, 2016, the vast majority of the island’s inhabitants outside of Fort Jefferson were lounging and relaxing.
By late Monday morning, November 14, 2016, our group of eight was settled into our campsites in the small campground on Garden Key at Dry Tortugas National Park. Garden Key is about 1.8 million square feet, although its size was hugely expanded (from an estimated 350,000 square feet) during the construction of Fort Jefferson in the nineteenth century. Regardless, it is a very small desert island with the remains of a huge masonry fort. There was nothing claustrophobic about being on Garden Key, but for a few days our world would contract from the bigness of living in major cities and being constantly connected. We would be living on a tiny bit of land barely rising out of the sea and largely cut off from the outside world.
Dry Tortugas National Park protects almost 65,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico seventy miles west of Key West, Florida. The National Park is surrounded by the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the Tortugas Ecological Reserve. While the surface area of the Park is mostly water, a handful of tiny islands rise above the waves for a total of 104 acres of land. Chief among these are Loggerhead Key, which boasts the 157-foot tall Dry Tortugas Lighthouse, and Garden Key, site of Fort Jefferson and the primary hub of visitation in the Park. Only one other island, Bush Key, of the remaining five is open to the public. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the Dry Tortugas island group a National Monument in 1935. The boundaries were expanded in 1983, and Congress upgraded the Monument to a National Park in 1992.
[Note: It feels strange to be writing about our trip to Dry Tortugas National Park and Biscayne National Park while those Parks are closed and damaged and while Florida is just beginning to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Irma. But these places will reopen and recover, and any part this website plays in encouraging more people to visit these Parks and spend money this winter and in years to come in the Florida Keys will, I hope, help in some small way.
Additionally, at Out in the Parks, where I sell prints of a selection of my photographs of the National Parks, I’m doing a fundraiser: while the four National Parks impacted by Hurricane Irma—Biscayne, Dry Tortugas, Everglades, and Virgin Islands—remain closed, 100% of proceeds from photographs featuring these Parks will benefit their respective affiliated non-profit organizations: Florida National Parks Association, Everglades Association, and Friends of Virgin Islands National Park.]
As 2016 aged, Sean and I reached the conclusion of our aim to calibrate the National Parks that we had visited so that by the end of the National Park Service Centennial year we would have been to the same National Parks. After our descent of the Grand Staircase, Sean had been to twenty-one Parks to my twenty Parks since he had been to Dry Tortugas National Park during a spring break trip to Key West while he was at Michigan State University in the 1990s. He had caught up to Yosemite, Shenandoah, and Grand Canyon, and now it was my turn. We would, logically, add Biscayne National Park to our trip, thereby ending 2016 with our visited-Parks number at a not-too-shabby twenty-two.
After our grand hike on Widforss Trail, instead of returning immediately to our campsite, we went to the Grand Canyon Lodge campus to hit the North Rim Visitor Center one last time. It was the late afternoon of Saturday, September 17, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to linger at Grand Canyon National Park the next morning waiting for the visitor center to open if we wanted to get back to Phoenix in time for our flight home.
The morning of Saturday, September 17 was clear and warmer than the previous morning. Our plan for the final full day of our Grand Staircase adventure was to hike the Widforss Trail, a ten-mile round trip through the forests of the Kaibab Plateau to Widforss Point. Widforss Point, which provides a panoramic view of the Grand Canyon, is the type of viewpoint that on the developed South Rim would be served by shuttle buses and a packed parking lot. But because it was on the far less developed and less visited North Rim, it was accessible only to hikers and backpackers.