Sunday, January 16, 2011

What do you have against national parks?


That's a fair question given the fact that I am writing this blog.  The truth is, some of my favorite vacations have involved camping on the Pacific coast in Olympic National Park, backpacking through Glacier National Park, and hiking around the Grand Tetons.  Even the mere sight of a brown and green NPS entrance sign makes me happy.  But I'm convinced that there are spectacular sights that are virtually undiscovered because they haven't been endorsed with the NPS stamp.  

There's an awful lot of tan on this map... 


I started thinking about all the great trails "out there," not raved about by a thousand websites and devoted to by a dozen guidebooks, when my boyfriend, Wet Boots, was trying to plan a last minute vacation to the Grand Canyon last year.  He was lucky enough to be able to take a long weekend trip on short notice but unlucky enough to want to go to the Grand Canyon in April, the park's busiest month.  Practically speaking, his application for a backcountry permit was several months late.  There had to be other parks, another camping spots that -- while not giving him the Grand Canyon -- would give him a similar experience but without the crowds or the intense competition for those prized permits.  I found some potential spots in Arizona (the Superstition Mountains, for example), but I couldn't blame Wet Boots for not wanting to gamble the success of his vacation on little more than my Google results. 

So I'm going on a series of adventures to state parks, national forests, land trusts, and the like, to find those great but less well-known hikes and make them more accessible.

If we just added national forests.
 * Obviously, names have been changed to protect the innocent.