Tag: National Historical Park

Detour: Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve

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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Detour: New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park

The Arrowhead Jazz Band

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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West Coast Adventures 2022: From Portland to the Golden Gate

The Golden Gate Bridge from Lands End, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

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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Chaco Culture National Historical Park: Downtown Chaco

Casa Rinconada

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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Chaco Culture National Historical Park: Hiking to a Supernova

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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Chaco Culture National Historical Park: Pueblo Bonito

(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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Detour: San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

Balclutha

It was the middle of Monday afternoon, September 9, and Sean and I had finished our trip to Alcatraz Island. With the rest of the afternoon in front of us, we decided to walk over and have a look at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The Park, established in 1988, celebrates San Francisco’s history as a major port city, as well as seafaring traditions along the entire West Coast.
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Isle Royale National Park: Go North, Young Men.
Sean at Michigan Department of Transportation Baraga Cliff Roadside Park Honoring Peter R. Kamarainen

Adam and Phil arrived Saturday evening from Detroit. Sean and Phil poured a round of drinks (Moscow Mules and rye on the rocks), and we set to work over the topographical map of northeastern Isle Royale. We hit upon an ambitious but achievable hiking route:
- Day One: Rock Harbor to Lane Cove, 6.9 miles
- Day Two: Lane Cove to East Chickenbone Lake, 10.9 miles
- Day Three: East Chickenbone to Lake Richie, 5 miles
- Day Four: Lake Richie to Daisy Farm, 5.8 miles
- Day Five: Daisy Farm to Rock Harbor, 7.1 miles
Afterward, we sorted meals, took a clipper to my longish hair, and went to bed.

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