Sep 30 2024
Shenandoah National Park is one of the great hiking destinations of the eastern United States. More than 500 miles of trails cross Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, leading to rocky summits, Appalachian forests, tumbling waterfalls, quiet streams, historic sites, and viewpoints overlooking the Shenandoah Valley and Virginia Piedmont. The variety is one of Shenandoah’s greatest strengths. …
Sep 29 2024
Sequoia National Park is famous for the largest trees on Earth, but hiking reveals a much bigger landscape than the giant sequoia groves alone. Trails lead beneath ancient trees, around quiet Sierra meadows, beside rushing rivers and waterfalls, across enormous granite domes, and high into alpine country overlooking the Great Western Divide. The variety is …
Sep 29 2024
Saguaro National Park offers some of the most distinctive desert hiking in the United States. Trails wind through forests of towering saguaro cacti, cross sandy washes, climb rocky ridges above Tucson, pass historic homesteads and mines, and eventually rise from the Sonoran Desert into surprisingly cool mountain forests. The park is divided into two separate …
Sep 29 2024
Saguaro National Park may be named for its towering cactus forests, but the wildlife living among those saguaros is every bit as fascinating. Javelinas travel through desert washes, coyotes hunt across cactus-covered slopes, bobcats move quietly along rocky canyons, roadrunners race after lizards, Gila woodpeckers excavate homes inside saguaros, and desert tortoises emerge when temperature …
Sep 29 2024
Redwood National Park is famous for containing some of the tallest trees on Earth, but the ancient forests of Northern California protect much more than giant redwoods. Roosevelt elk graze in coastal prairies, black bears wander through forests and river valleys, marbled murrelets fly between the Pacific Ocean and old-growth trees, and banana slugs slowly …
Sep 28 2024
Petrified Forest National Park may be best known for brilliantly colored petrified wood and the striped badlands of the Painted Desert, but the park also protects a surprisingly rich community of living wildlife. Pronghorn move across open grasslands, coyotes hunt along washes, golden eagles soar over the badlands, and colorful collared lizards bask on sun-warmed …
Sep 28 2024
The Hoh Rain Forest is one of Olympic National Park’s most unforgettable landscapes, a place where enormous Sitka spruce and western hemlock rise above carpets of ferns while moss hangs from bigleaf maples in long green curtains. Rain, mild temperatures, old-growth trees, and the constantly moving Hoh River combine to create one of the finest …
Sep 28 2024
North Cascades National Park protects one of the wildest mountain landscapes in the contiguous United States, and its wildlife reflects that ruggedness. Black bears forage in forests and avalanche chutes, mountain goats traverse cliffs that appear almost impossible to climb, hoary marmots whistle from subalpine meadows, and pikas disappear among high-elevation talus slopes. Some of …
Sep 28 2024
Grizzly bears once occupied the North Cascades for thousands of years, moving through river valleys, berry-covered mountain slopes, avalanche chutes, subalpine meadows, and remote wilderness stretching across what is now Washington and British Columbia. By the twentieth century, however, decades of trapping, hunting, bounty programs, and other human pressures had reduced their numbers to the …
Sep 28 2024
North Cascades National Park contains some of the most spectacular hiking terrain in Washington, with trails leading through old-growth forests, beside turquoise lakes, across subalpine meadows, and toward glaciers and jagged mountain passes. The scenery can feel surprisingly wild for a national park within a few hours of Seattle. The challenge is deciding where to …
