A few thoughts after returning from my latest stop: Yosemite National Park.
I carefully chose each park this year. Not based on which national parks are the most beautiful. Or which ones I'd most like to visit. I picked each one because I thought it could symbolize a different issue for the future.
With Yosemite, that issue was people, lots of people, and the age-old question: Are we loving our parks to death? When I met with NPS director Jon Jarvis last fall, he said he hates that phrase. In essence, he said that his concern for the future isn't about having too many people visiting...
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When I started putting together a plan for the year, with a goal of focusing on one park and issue each month, I was thinking July would be Denali -- partly because I've never been to any of Alaska's national parks, partly because Mom wanted to go there.
She has been taking a trip to a national park each year with a group of girlfriends. But for 2012, they couldn't agree on a place. Mom's friends wanted to go the Everglades. She already had been there. She wanted to go to Denali. Her friends didn't want to. So they were going to take a year off.
I mentioned this to Dayton Duncan, the writer...
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I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who offered condolences about my mom. Thanks for the cards, calls, emails, donations, flowers and -- in many cases -- stories about your rocks.
A few days after I wrote about my mom and Mia and the book, "Everybody Needs a Rock," I found a package on my doorstep. It was about the size of a toaster, but heavier. When I opened it up, beneath a card and in the middle of crumpled newspaper, there was a rock, slightly larger than a baseball and full of subtle colors. It was a from a friend who moved from Jacksonville to Maine a few years ago. On the bottom,...
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First a confession: I had low expectations for Yellowstone.
I included it in the mix of parks to visit this year not necessarily because it was a place atop the list of ones I really wanted to see, but because I figured if I'm trying to write about the future of national parks I really should visit the world's first one.
I went to Yellowstone as a kid, as part of a long, cross-country journey. And while I have vivid memories of some of the other national places we hit on that trip -- Grand Canyon, Redwood, Lassen -- I don't remember much of anything about Yellowstone other than Old Faithful...
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As her cousins raced down a path in Yellowstone National Park a couple of weeks ago, Mia lagged behind. She was upset. I don't even remember exactly what she was upset about, just that it was the kind of meltdown that is an age-old staple of family trips.
Anyone who has ever gone on a Griswolds-like cross-country trip, either as a child or parent, knows about such inevitable drama. I'm still not sure how my parents had the will and patience to pile three kids in the back of a station wagon (one without air-conditioning or a radio) and drive a few thousand miles, hitting national parks, Wall...
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