Almost a decade ago, in July 2001, my then-boyfriend, Nathaniel, and I went on a road trip from Ann Arbor, Michigan to visit a friend in D.C. After a few days in the district, we continued to Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia and then on to Kittyhawk, North Carolina.
On the drive back to Michigan, we passed through Virginia. Looking at the Rand McNally, I noticed that Shenandoah National Park was…in the same state that we were! And it wasn’t too far out of our way, so we decided to head to the park.
We reached the south entrance (also the northern terminus of the Blue Ridge Parkway) in the late afternoon and proceeded along the park’s famous Skyline Drive. The drive zig-zags along a stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains, at varying times offering views west into Shenandoah Valley and east toward the Virginia piedmont.
A year after we visited the Grand Canyon, the same group of five (Aunt Judy, Uncle Tom, Jenny, Amy, and me) spent a weekend at Yosemite National Park. This time, happily, we were joined by my cousin, Andrew, and our Grandma.
This morning as I lay in bed waiting for it to be time to get up and face the aftermath of a Chicago blizzard, I tried to name all 58 parks from memory, counting off on my fingers. I remembered 55 of them.
Virtually every project I’ve ever undertaken has begun with, or sometimes extended from, reading. And this National Parks project is no exception. My old, beloved copy of the Reader’s Digest Our National Parks from childhood is sorely outdated, both stylistically and factually. So I turned my attention, at least to start, to this volume:
National Geographic Guide to the National Parks of the United States, Sixth Edition, March 2009.
In the summer of 1992, a family trip took my aunt, uncle, two cousins and me to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We stayed in a canyon-view room in Thunderbird Lodge. Fanny packs strapped securely around our waists, we strolled the rim looking at the vistas. Drama was provided by an escaped convict who fled into the park causing the closure of a large section of the eastern part of the South Rim, as well as road blocks on the highways in and out of the park.
Thirteen years old, about to start high school in September, I was enthralled by everything.
I had been primed for the park. I’d read every book about the Grand Canyon in my Catholic elementary school’s library. Picture books about the canyon from the 1960s with vividly washed-out photographs of Ponderosa Pines and squirrels with funny little tufted ears, I’d read them all. In particular, I’d read Marguerite Henry’s 1953 historical novel about a semi-wild burro, Brighty of the Grand Canyon.
The immediate origin of this project was a trip to Akron, Ohio that Sean and I took in July 2010 to celebrate the marriage of friends. Although for years I’d seen the sign announcing Cuyahoga Valley National Park as I’d driven the Ohio Turnpike from the Midwest to New York, New England or D.C., I’d never really had the opportunity to see the new park.
But there we were with the valley rolling north into the distance clearly visible from our downtown Akron hotel room. We decided to get up earlier than we needed to the next morning in order to have a chance to drive through the park on our way back to Chicago.
And such has it been. Save for two family excursions to the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, my other encounters with the National Parks have involved spontaneous, almost foolhardy, reroutes of trips that had nothing to do with visiting a National Park.
But each pell-mell trip, whether it be a drive from Kittyhawk to Ann Arbor diverted through Shenandoah National Park because “we’re in the same state so why not?” or deciding suddenly to truck it to Badlands National Park in the middle of January because a massive snowstorm was blocking routes south, resurrected the nagging little voice that at thirteen had been certain that I would see Arches, Glacier, Olympic and all the others before I died.
At 31, driving through Cuyahoga Valley on a warm, sunny Sunday summer morning, I asked why not see them all?
Why not indeed?
This project is predicated on the idea that it is possible for an average American to visit all 58 National Parks in a lifetime, regardless of how daunting American Samoa or Gates of the Arcric may feel. The sixteen-year parameter is less a fixed deadline than a guideline. And I fully intend to live my life normally, advancing my career, pursuing other interests, and doing other traveling during this time.
