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.
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.
Newspaper Rock: Archaic, Hisatsinom, Ancestral Puebloan, and Ute Petroglyphs
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.
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.
Junction Butte and Grand View Point, Island in the Sky, from The Needles District, Canyonlands National Park
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.
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.
El Pinacate (in Mexico) and the La Abra Plain from the Sonoyta Mountains, with the US-Mexico border fence visible
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.
Panther Peak rises above the Saguaro Wilderness in the Tucson Mountain District
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.
Our 2021 roadtrip to Colorado (and Utah) was sixteen full days and fifteen nights on the road. For a National Parks trip that was somewhat born of circumstance—buying a car, strategizing a post-lockdown COVID-era trip—this trip would have a huge influence on the year to come, both for Sean’s and my Park trips and for the shape of Bold Bison’s business travel. It has also reoriented us—or me—a bit to thinking about the continent. Our first taste of the Ancestral Puebloan world at Mesa Verde would inspire Sean and me to visit four more Ancestral Puebloan sites in the year to come, culminating in a May 2022 sojourn to Chaco Canyon. I would return to Great Sand Dunes National Park by myself—solidifying my infatuation with the San Luis Valley and the Sangre de Cristos—only a little over two months after this trip. We would return to Denver twice more. And flirting with the Colorado Plateau would lead to a February 2022 trip to Arches National Park (and a planed return to Moab in 2023).
But all that is to come. First, it’s time to wrap up this adventure.
We ended our time in Dinosaur National Monument on the afternoon of Friday, September 3 (2021) and began a holiday weekend journey home to Chicago that was itself an adventure. But first we had one more hike—stroll really—out at the end of Cub Creek Road before breaking camp and heading out.
The Fremont People lived in what is now Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Nevada for roughly the 1,000 years from 300 to 1,300. Unlike their contemporaries and neighbors, the Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners region (and later along the Rio Grande), the Fremont did not build permanent architecture like pueblos and cliff dwellings. Their villages were more ephemeral, and much of what we know about them comes from the tools and the art they left behind. The art, in the form of striking pictographs and petroglyphs, is often sublime.
On Friday, September 3 (2021), we knew that, one way or another, we’d have to be leaving Dinosaur National Monument early. But we didn’t want to go without seeing the grand Fremont petroglyphs near the campground.
After our morning visiting the Dinosaur Quarry and early afternoon checking out the paved portion of Cub Creek Road, we spent the remainder of the afternoon of Thursday, September 2 (2021) driving into the center of Dinosaur National Monument’s canyon country, just across the state line in Colorado. Our ultimate destination was the hike out to Harpers Corner, high above the Green River near its confluence with the Yampa River.
I have long wanted to visit Dinosaur National Monument.
The Monument, straddling the Colorado-Utah border, should be a National Park. By any conceivable metric, it more than deserves such a designation. At 210,844 acres, it is larger than thirty-one of the sixty-three Parks (larger than Shenandoah, Zion, Redwood, and Arches). Far more importantly, though, it contains three fundamental reasons for existing—any of which would warrant Park status—that make it important to history, science, and conservation. First, the Monument contains a world-important deposit of Jurassic-era dinosaurs: Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus. Specimens from major museums across North America came from here. Second, the Monument protects important cultural sites, including many pictographs and petroglyphs made by the Fremont peoples one thousand years ago. And finally, there is the landscape itself. Here, the Green and Yampa Rivers cut through the eastern edge of the Uinta Mountains, creating a dramatic canyon country of more varied hues than the redrock landscapes of Arches and Canyonlands to the south.
When President Woodrow Wilson declared the establishment of Dinosaur National Monument in 1915, he only set aside the eighty acres comprising and surrounding the Dinosaur Quarry just north of Jensen, Utah. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who in 1938 expanded the Monument to its present size by protecting the Green and the Yampa in their entire courses through the Uinta Mountains. FDR’s designation was crucial nearly twenty years later as conservationists successfully fought a scheme to dam the rivers at their confluence at Echo Park. This historic win bookended the fight forty years earlier to save Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park from becoming a reservoir. In both debates, the American public was asked to grapple with the question, “What is the point of protecting a landscape as a National Park or Monument if it can be destroyed by dams or resource extraction?” While Yosemite lost, Dinosaur won. And the win at Echo Park would help to protect Grand Canyon National Park in the 1960s from a long-simmering scheme to dam the Colorado River within the National Park.
Perhaps it’s lingering resentment over Echo Park. It could be local resistance in Utah to public lands protection (even as the state campaigns for and receives millions in tourist dollars from visitors to its existing Parks). It could simply be its remoteness. Whatever the reason, Dinosaur has never been upgraded by Congress despite being for decades on short lists of NPS units most likely to become National Parks.
Congress notwithstanding, Sean and I chose to treat Dinosaur as an unofficial 64th Park, both in how we approached it in the trip and in how I am treating it here on the site.
Colorado National Monument was established in 1911 during the administration of William Howard Taft to protect over 20,000 acres of the northeastern portion of the Uncompahgre Plateau in western Colorado. Erosion has carved this part of the plateau into a series of dramatic redrock canyons overlooking the Grand Valley of the Colorado River. True redrock country, the Uncompahgre Plateau rises above the easternmost portion of the immense Colorado Plateau, home to some of the most storied National Park landscapes, among them Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, and Grand Canyon. In fact, Arches National Park’s entrance is less than a 90-minute drive from Colorado National Monument’s western entrance.
On Wednesday, September 1 (2021), our plan had been to tour Colorado National Monument for the day as we drove between Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Dinosaur National Monument. It turned out, though, that this first day of September was very wet. It was the only rainy day of the trip. Having packed up a wet tent and wet gear that morning, we decided to take the day bit by bit and see what we wanted to do. First off: meeting up with Jimmy in Grand Junction to get some coffee and some food.
Dune field and Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Great Sand Dunes National Park and PreserveSquare Tower House, Mesa Verde National ParkPainted Wall, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National ParkMonument Canyon, Colorado National MonumentSplit Mountain, Dinosaur National Monument
Hi. It has been a while.
As Sean and I flew home from New York on March 2, 2020, we couldn’t have known how profoundly the world was about to change. We also couldn’t have known that it would be some eighteen months before we’d visit our next National Park unit. We’d had plans to visit Parks: a visit to Great Smoky Mountains National Park with my parents was already booked for April 2020; we were looking at Santa Fe and White Sands National Park in 2020; September of that terrible year was supposed to include a marriage celebration on Cape Cod followed by Acadia National Park and the Canadian Maritimes; we had loose plans for a weekend trip to St. Louis and Gateway Arch National Park. For 2021, we’d been considering possibly the Hawaiian Parks and American Samoa, maybe a 10th anniversary return to Isle Royale National Park combined with the Lake Superior Circle Tour, and then maybe that marriage celebration would be feasible for fall 2021.
None of those trips happened. Instead we stayed home, coped, watched in horror as the pandemic raged. We adjusted and created new ways to socialize. We even made some great new friends. Between gorging on poetry and the news, I built my business. As soon as it was our turn, we got vaccinated. We’re still skittish about flying, which was of course a fundamental component to nearly all of our Park trips. In June 2021 we bought a car, my first in seventeen years, because without it our horizons had contracted to the quiet, leafy streets of our Chicago neighborhood.
In early spring 2021, when it became clear that New England and the Canadian Maritimes were unlikely for the fall, we looked to alternative trip ideas. It may have felt optimistic, but we figured it would be good to get a trip booked even if we later had to cancel. Anticipating a road trip (even though we were yet to actually buy the car), we turned our gaze to Colorado.
On Sunday, March 1, 2020, Sean and I spent the day eating, drinking, seeing old friends, and going to the theater again. We also visited one more National Park Unit, Castle Clinton National Monument at the lower tip of Manhattan. Of course we could not have known then that this would be the last unit we’d visit before a global pandemic set in, making it also the last unit we’d visit in 2020 or the foreseeable future.
On Saturday, February 29, Sean and I started a long, fun-filled day in Manhattan with a sobering visit to African Burial Ground National Monument, which marks and memorializes an early colonial slave cemetery that was only rediscovered in the early 1990s. The visit anchored and provided framework for a day that would focus on history, science, family, and race, culminating in an activist-minded Broadway show. But even with all that on a packed day during a packed weekend, African Burial Ground National Monument was deeply resonant and has stuck with us in the months since our visit.
Early afternoon on February 28 Sean and I wandered over to the West Village to our second National Park unit of the day: Stonewall National Monument, which was established by President Barack Obama in 2016 as the first LGBTQ+ National Park site. The National Monument honors a key catalyzing event in the burgeoning gay rights movement of the late 1960s, the June 28, 1969 raid by New York City police of The Stonewall Inn, a mafia-owned gay bar, and the six nights of riots that followed as LGBTQ+ New Yorkers fought back, led by homeless gay youth and transexuals, many of whom were people of color. While not the start of the gay rights movement, nor even the first riot, Stonewall led to an explosion of gay rights organizing across the country as gay people embraced a stance of being out and proud about their sexual orientation.
A grave personal injustice was done to the American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who, without individual review or any probative evidence against them, were excluded, removed and detained by the United States during World War II.
Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
As the afternoon of September 18 progressed, Sean and I drove over from Petroglyph Point at Lava Beds National Monument to nearby Tule Lake National Monument, one of the newest in the system. In 2008, George W. Bush had established WWII Valor in the Pacific National Monument, which was subsequently abolished by Congress in March 2019. Its three sites each became their own park units: Pearl Harbor National Memorial, Aleutian Islands World War II National Monument, and Tule Lake National Monument.
Tule Lake National Monument preserves and interprets Tule Lake Segregation Center, the largest and most controversial of the ten internment camps in which Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.
Lava Beds National Monument. A place containing the wonders and the terrors of both nature and human nature all within its boundaries.
– Sean M. Santos
Sean wrote the above on Instagram after we concluded our visit to Lava Beds National Monument and nearby Tule Lake National Monument on Wednesday, September 18. As we were headed back to our night’s lodging, he also observed, “Everyone who finds themselves in this part of the country should come and visit this place.”
Lava Beds National Monument was established in 1925 to protect over 46,000 acres of the north flank of Medicine Lake Volcano, a massive and low shield volcano in the southern Cascades, not far northeast of Mount Shasta. Although relatively small, the Monument boasts three lava flows, multiple cinder cones and other volcanic features, and almost 700 lava tube caves, the highest concentration in North America. At around 4,000 feet in the eastern foothills of the Cascades in northern California, the vast sagebrush sea washes right up to the Monument’s tortured volcanic landscape. The Monument is bounded on the north by Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge and on the west, south, and east by Modoc National Forest with some private property to the northeast toward the town of Tule Lake, California. It contains over 28,000 acres of federally protected wilderness.
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.
On Tuesday, September 13, we left Zion National Park for a day trip back up the Grand Staircase to the Pink Cliffs at Cedar Breaks National Monument on the western edge of the Markagunt Plateau. The Pink Cliffs here are the same geological layers as at Bryce Canyon National Park, but at Cedar Breaks, uplift has caused the rim of the amphitheater above the cliffs to soar 2,400 feet higher to an average elevation of 10,400 feet. That was also some 6,400 feet higher than the elevation of the floor of Zion Canyon where we’d slept the previous night.
Cedar Breaks National Monument was established on August 22, 1933 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It protects just over 6,100 acres of the subalpine edge of the Markagunt Plateau and the spectacular Cedar Breaks amphitheater plunging 2,000 feet below the plateau rim and spanning three miles across. Despite its close proximity to some of the most famous National Parks in the country, Cedar Breaks National Monument is lightly visited, averaging fewer than 500,000 visitors per year.
Aquarius Plateau and Sinking Ship (foreground) from Bryce Canyon National Park
On Friday, September 9, 2016 Sean and I began our trip down the Grand Staircase with an evening flight to Phoenix. More often than not, this was our modus operandi, to fly out after work, stay overnight near the airport, and begin the trip proper on the ground in the morning wherever we were. That Friday, I was more than ready to be gone. It had been a very long week at work, culminating in issues with a new vendor. (I’d ultimately be proven right in my assessment of their shoddy service.) But either way, it would be good to do some hiking in a place I’d wanted to visit since childhood.
In August 2016, in the midst of our Centennial Year goal of eight National Parks, Sean and I unexpectedly visited three National Park Service units that were not National Parks.
After having spent ten days in late May in California, in August Sean and I spent another week in the state. It would ultimately be the second of three trips to California that we would make within nine months. The first trip’s goal was to visit our friend, Patrick, at the Getty and hit two National Parks: Yosemite and Channel Islands. While we were there, Sean mentioned that he’d likely be coming back in a few months as his firm rolled out a new software at its offices across the country. Back in May, I’d dismissed out of hand the idea of returning with him. But as the summer progressed, I found myself persuaded.
In August 2016, Sean’s firm sent him to Los Angeles and San Francisco for a week. On Sunday afternoon, August 7, we were treated to spectacular aerial views of southern Utah and northern Arizona. In particular, we were able to see Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and Grand Canyon National Park, all from the comfortable cruising altitude of American Airlines Flight 2220 from Chicago O’Hare to LAX.
In 1906, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which allowed the president to create National Monuments, as opposed to National Parks, which could only be created by Congress. The act was intended to allow for quick protection of land, particularly to allow the government to protect archeological sites that were being looted by pot hunters. It was the second step, after the invention of National Parks, in the creation of a system that would still not have its own managing agency until the Park Service would be created ten years later in 1916. Concerning restrictions on the use of land, it was also the second step in a series of protections that would culminate in the Wilderness Act in 1964.
The Antiquities Act was also a bold expansion of executive powers concerning the removal of land from private or “wise use” (e.g., National Forests) enterprises. President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed the Antiquities Act into law on June 8, was not shy about using it. Roosevelt would ultimately declare fifty National Monuments, six of which (including Grand Canyon, Pinnacles, and Olympic) would later be upgraded to National Parks. The presidential power embedded in the Antiquities Act remains controversial, with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives within the past two years voting to hobble the act by making National Monuments subject to congressional approval.
Jewel Cave National Monument was established by President Theodore Roosevelt on February 7, 1908 as the nation’s thirteenth National Monument. It was intended to protect what at the time was assumed to be a small, but distinctly beautiful cave. Jewel Cave now stands as the second longest on Earth at over 166 miles of explored passageways.
After our morning tour of Wind Cave, we had planned to do a couple short hikes and then visit Jewel Cave for the 2pm Scenic Tour. The unexpectedly busy tours at Wind Cave (particularly for a Monday after Labor Day) made us a little anxious about getting the tour we wanted that afternoon. (The ultimate plan was to come back to Wind Cave to do some hiking in the late afternoon.) So we started out on the 35-mile drive to Jewel Cave
As our route took us through the town of Custer and into the heart of the Black Hills, we began to see granite outcrops indicative of the center of the Hills.
