After Yosemite’s magnificent waterfalls, stunning vistas and valleys, Redwood is quieter, with more solitude and an intimate closeness with the trees: less spectacle and more spiritual. This World Heritage Site is a marvelous place to get lost alone among giants, to reminisce as if traversing the great forests of Middle Earth. One of the young hikers strode in full Frodo costume, looking for Ents. As some of the trees living here predate all but the earliest human history, you can’t blame him for getting into the spirit. When Frodo first entered Lothlórien to seek Galadriel’s help, he spent his first night in a treehouse in a giant Mallorn tree. “He felt a delight in the wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.”
My favorite park for tall trees, the redwood forest is real and huge, so plan on hiking. The photo above is near Trillium Falls on a highly recommended 3 miles hike in the National Park from Elk Meadow near the south end of the park. I also walked from the Prairie Creek visitor center up to Big Tree—a Giant Sequoia—in the Prairie Creek State Park on the Knapp trail returning on the Cathedral trail on the other side of the scenic drive. There are several ways to do the 3 mile loop, as well as plenty of shorter or longer hikes from many trailheads, flat or up onto ridges or down to the coast. There are also tide pools, fresh water lagoons, beaches, mountains, camping, elk (I saw 12) and more. Best of all, it was 30 degrees cooler than inland in July. The coastal redwood forest is lush and beautiful, safe for now.
“Many of these trees were my friends. Creatures I had known from nut or acorn. They had voices of their own.”
In 1859 John Muir built a Sugar Pine cabin some yards from the spot above and lived in the Valley for 2 years. Sugar Pines can live 500 years, so the decades John Muir spent saving this valley are just a fraction of their long lives. Muir saved Yosemite, lost neighboring Hetch Hetchy to a dam, and influenced Teddy Roosevelt who ended up protecting 150 million acres of forests nationally. Now the park is a World Heritage Site, with the Merced Wild & Scenic River running through Yosemite Valley, and it’s my favorite park for waterfalls. But in the near future, the crown jewel of John Muir’s legacy may still be lost forever.
Some species of trees still living here evolved in the Jurassic, long before the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out most dinosaurs and millions of years before humans arrived. Millenia ago, natives started fires for hunting and agriculture, and over a century ago, the timber industry clear cut forests throughout the Sierra Nevadas. But humans now present a threat bigger than any logging or dam. Now the threat is carbon pollution, which dwarfs all others, even logging. Fires burn hotter, more frequently and many times larger, because we have changed our planet’s climate dramatically—and it’s still getting worse. Species here, despite evolving 1000 times earlier than humans, are now threatened with extinction by our vehicle exhaust.
10 years ago, the 250,000+ acre Rim Fire burned over 10% of Yosemite, killing many Sugar Pines and Sequoias that had survived fires for centuries or millennia. At the time, it was the second largest fire in California history. Now it doesn’t even make the top ten. I visited the park with my family before that fire, and the park was undamaged. Now, the park is still beautiful, but it is still scarred badly, with many areas still closed.
Yosemite Falls should not be so glorious in the photo above taken in July. The snow should still be on the mountain tops, melting slowly over many months. Instead, every decade is warmer than the last and the rate of temperature rise in increasing. The Lyell Glacier that Muir saw in Yosemite has lost over 95% of its mass, no longer moves and will be gone in a few years. Man has messed up the climate, and many of the species, including the largest trees, can no longer live here safely. And it’s not the fault of Smoky Bear telling people to put out their campfires, it’s the fault of people who continue to drive gas powered vehicles. And yet the park is full of them, blithely surveying the damage they contributed to and continue to cause. If I were in charge of the park service, I would convert the shuttle buses to electric and ban all fossil fuel vehicles.
This boiling mud pot in the Sulphur Works area is so close to the road that the shoulder has collapsed. There’s a parking area a minute walk away and the views include many other steamy volcanic features, rough landscapes broken by eruptions and snow in July. The trail to the larger Bumpass Hell area was blocked by snow from the parking lot. I didn’t care, since I’ve been there before with my kids, before the fire. We stayed at Drakesbad Guest Ranch with their amazing natural hot spring pool where we swam and floated under the Milky Way, one of my fondest memories of any national park.
In 2021, the 1 million acre Dixie Fire severely burned 70% of this Northern California park, mostly the wilderness area. With Mount Lassen over 10,000 feet, many of the trees in the park grow extremely slowly, so the fire damage will be visible for up to a century, assuming we don’t have another fire before the forest can recover. Like much of the park, Drakesbad Ranch is still closed, although most buildings were saved. The devastation is terrible to see.
The park newsletter does not mention the Climate Crisis in a complete denial of reality, but it did congratulate itself for ‘30 years of fuel reduction that decreased burn severity’. We now live in the Pyrocene Epoch, the Age of Fire, where man has created conditions for multiple million acre fires each year, when the most beautiful places can be destroyed in a few hours. Once we imagined our parks would be there for future generations to enjoy. Now we wonder if they will still be there for our next vacation.
The cloaked inhabitants can’t be seen on Wizard Island under Watchman’s Overlook above, nor can the massive moss beds in our nation’s deepest lake. But there’s plenty of evidence of volcanic activity, including lava flows, cinder cones and the caldera itself. The lake is restricted, but there are a few summer boat tours from Cleetwood Cove. The rim road on the far left side is often under construction, but there are many trails and overlooks elsewhere including from the Rim Village off to the right. Due to snow, the Scenic Rim Drive is usually closed from November through June, if not longer. The outside of the mountain is also worth exploring, such as a one mile hike through Godfrey’s Glen in the south. Signs of 2017 wildfires are seen near the north entrance, and the forests of Oregon are getting hotter and drier due to carbon pollution.
I’m finally catching up on my summer travel backlog, just California national parks for the remaining Mondays of the year. Thursday posts will also continue eclectically.
Even though the Hoh Rain Forest is on the far side of the park from Seattle, it’s popular in July, so I watched an otter playing in the water for half an hour while waiting my turn to drive through the gate to look for parking. (A parking map at the gate would save everyone time). The Hall of Mosses Trail above is easily hiked from the visitor center, and it’s impressive and definitely worth the trip. Several of the trees appear to be 1000 years old, and the streams are clear from spring water, where I saw tiny salmon among the bright green watercress.
There are some signs that the increased heat from carbon pollution is damaging some of the mosses, and while the overall annual precipitation has remained the same, it’s more concentrated in heavy downpours and less in the misty fog-drip that these sensitive plants require. The glaciers are also disappearing rapidly and will disappear completely in a few decades or less, severely impacting all the downstream ecosystems. Still, it’s my favorite park for moss.
Of course, Olympic also has mountains, including Hurricane Ridge and Mount Olympus, which feeds the Hoh and Queets Rivers. There’s a Hot Springs resort at Sol Duc and boating at Lake Crescent. The Olympic Peninsula also has Native American Reservations which help manage the coastal wilderness, wildlife refuge and marine sanctuary. For me, their crown jewel is their large temperate rainforest, but the other areas are also stunning. Some artists are painting the glaciers before they melt, but wouldn’t it be better if we all did our part to reduce our carbon footprints?
Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home has maps and mementos from Lewis & Clark’s expedition all over his front hall, showing how interested he was in the Native Americans, geography, flora & fauna, and other discoveries. He also had strategic interests in mapping both the huge Louisiana territory he purchased from France and the further lands to the Pacific. Having read Captain Cook’s voyages, he was interested in discovering any practical, cross-country trading routes.
And there was plenty of competition. De Anza had explored up the coast to San Francisco in 1776, and the Spanish were busy establishing missions in California. The Russians staked their claim in Alaska before 1800 and were beginning to explore down the coast. The Scottish explorer Mackenzie had already followed Native American travel routes to the Arctic along the river later named for him and crossed the continent in 1793, arriving within months of the naval expedition of Vancouver. The British made no secret of their intention to expand their fur trading to the Columbia River.
So Jefferson scraped together $2,324 from an uncooperative Congress and gave the money to Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, younger brother of the famous war hero. Jefferson personally tutored Lewis in geography, hiring experts to assist in medicine, navigation, botany and taxidermy, giving Lewis full access to his legendary library, likely the largest private one in the US. Jefferson was fascinated by the reports of the expedition, following it closely, but he spoke little about the full plan publicly—except to justify the expense to Congress—to keep the reports from foreign rivals.
The first boat was completed in Pittsburgh, and Lewis launched into the Ohio River there at the end of August, 1803, with some crew, arms from Harpers Ferry, 200 lbs of dried soup, tobacco, wine, trade goods, med kit, and his Newfoundland dog, Seaman. He met up with Clark’s team in Louisville, KY, including Clark’s slave York, who became the first African American explorer known to cross overland to the Pacific. They traveled down the Ohio to the Mississippi and then up the Missouri, past Ste. Geneviève and St Louis, where they spent the winter. Then they paddled up river past the confluence of the Niobrara to Knife River (see photo), ND, where young Sacagawea joined the expedition with her French husband and their baby, after the expedition wintered nearby.
In the spring, they continued up river past what would become the Fort Union Trading Post, past the Milk River confluence, and each time they came to a fork, they would need to decide which was the Missouri River, often exploring both forks. Eventually, they reached the headwaters and traveled overland past what would later be the Big Hole Battlefield, before finding their way down the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia Rivers, with help from the Nez Perce. Mapping that Native American trade route over the Rockies was one of the expedition’s key accomplishments. Finally, they reached the Pacific and wintered at Fort Clatsop, beating a Russian explorer who arrived that spring.
On their way back, Lewis took a more northerly route, close to Glacier, and Clark southerly, along the Yellowstone River, before meeting again on the Missouri. The Spanish sent troops to arrest them, but couldn’t catch up, as traveling downriver back the way they came was much quicker. Jefferson was very pleased with the expedition’s success, grew corn samples at Monticello and reported Lewis & Clark’s scientific discoveries to Congress.
Jefferson appointed Lewis Governor of Louisiana Territory, but many hated Lewis for protecting Native American rights and spread conspiracies against him. Lewis’ territorial secretary and rival smeared him in letters to Washington, causing the government to refuse to reimburse Lewis for expedition expenses, which bankrupted Lewis, only two years after the expedition returned. On a trip to Washington to clear his name and his debts, he was likely murdered on the Natchez Trace, suspiciously described as a ‘suicide’ despite multiple injuries. Seaman survived the expedition, but the faithful dog refused food and died immediately after Lewis’ mysterious death.
Sacagawea, their teen interpreter and diplomat, died at 24, but Clark helped support her children. Clark was less generous with York, who had expected to gain his freedom but was refused. Clark lived longer than Lewis and was Governor of Missouri territory from 1813 to 1820. A credible report later placed York in Wyoming, living among natives as a Chief.
Panorama Point above is about 1,500’ above the Paradise parking lot, halfway along the 5 mile ‘strenuous’ Skyline loop trail, just under halfway up the mountain. In July, there were waterfalls, snow on sections of the trail, wildflowers and marmots. Mts St Helens, Adams & Hood all visible in the distance. The northwest and southeast corners of the park both have old growth forests, along the Carbon River Rainforest—which is open for bicycling on the first few miles—and the Ohanapecosh River Grove of the Patriarchs Trails respectively. I understand why Muir extolled Rainier as the best of the volcanic peaks in this area.
“Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.
John Muir
For me, it’s another return trip after several decades since my brother and sister and I took a hike and a photo up here somewhere. I was pleased to see the forest looking healthy, the clear streams near the top, the glacial gray rivers on the way down and the blue glacial lakes below, as I remember. Of course, when the rapidly receding glaciers disappear, the whole ecology will be severely disrupted. But for now, I’m happy to visit a place like this when the rest of the country is under a carbon fueled heat dome.
This photo looks down from the High Bridge at the end of the road 11 miles from Stehekin (rent an e-bike) on Lake Chelan. Here the bridge connects to the Pacific Crest Trail which cuts northeast across the southern wilderness on the last leg to Canada. The northern wilderness section of the multi-park complex is across the Skagit Wild & Scenic River and west of Ross Lake up to the Canadian border.
Both the north and south roadless wilderness areas have many high peaks with receding glaciers, so the hiking isn’t easy. And the wildlife includes black bears, cougars, gray wolves and grizzly bears. Careless campers closed one campsite by leaving food for bears to find, and another was closed due to grizzlies fighting over a nearby carcass. Being long of tooth and short of courage, I just hiked the short Agnes Gorge Trail on the edge of the wilderness to catch some more glimpses of rushing Stehekin River.
Wilderness, of course, has now ended. Now that our carbon pollution is changing the climate globally, there is nowhere on earth unaffected by humans. With that change comes responsibility. Since we no longer allow nature to keep itself in equilibrium, we must act to restore balance. We broke it, so now we own it. The park has increasingly fierce wildfires, which we exacerbated. So the extra damage is our fault, and we must fix it.
I have dreamed of Voyageurs since childhood. Imagine, a park dedicated to canoeists, fur trappers, traders and explorers, with remote boat-in campsites along the Canadian border in Minnesota! The Kabetogama Peninsula is almost an island with only a short portage around some rapids connecting it to the mainland. To the north lies the large Rainy Lake. Kabetogama, Namakan, Sand Point & Crane Lakes lie to the south, with three visitor centers open in summer.
Time limited, I focused on Ash River and took a tour boat out to Kettle Falls, where the southern lakes flow north on their way to the Arctic Ocean. There’s an old hotel there with a wide porch & lawn for enjoying sandwiches & summer sun. There’s another busier portage here, along with a dam and one of the few places in the states where you look south to see Canada. The highlight of the tour for me was going through the islands and stopping briefly at an old resort (see photo).
The park is on the old trading route from Montreal to Great Slave Lake all along the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. Glaciers pushed most layers of soil and rocks south, revealing some of the oldest bedrock in the US at 2.8 billion years ago. The Ojibwe are the traditional gatekeepers of the lands northwest of the Great Lakes. After the Voyageurs, or French fur traders, came miners, lumberjacks, and eventually a few hearty resort owners tried living here. Huge blocks of ice were cut and dragged out of the lake and stored through summer. Logging was massive and filled the coves with timber to be loaded on rail.
Now the forests have begun regrowing, and some wildlife, like elk, have mostly moved north due to climate change. I saw maybe a dozen bald eagles total, including juveniles flying high. The few remaining moose are rarely seen, preferring the swampiest areas far from trails.
I hiked a scenic trail out to Kabetogama Lake Overlook from the Ash River Visitor Center, and there are a couple of other boat tours, one which goes to a rocky garden. I stayed in Chisholm to be near a CCS charger (Combo Adapter needed) and a delicious ‘supper club’ called Valentini’s (order the Walleye). The biggest improvement opportunity would be to have more electric vehicles. There are a lot of noisy gas-powered fishing boats, some being towed by large houseboats. Sound carries far across the lakes, so they definitely detract from the natural setting (and pollute with carbon). Houseboats, slow-moving, sitting in the sun for long periods with large flat roofs, would convert well to solar-electric.
I recently completed visits to all national park units in the Rocky Mountain region by electric vehicle, including 3 in North Dakota, 5 in South Dakota, 5 in Montana, 6 in Wyoming, 10 in Colorado and 12 in Utah. I count multi-state parks where I spend my time, and I pick a favorite from each state at the end.
North Dakota’s parks are each glorious. At Knife River early Native American life is revealed in middens, plants, a round earthlodge, and living exhibits. At Fort Union the early interactions between Native Americans and fur traders also come to life. And Teddy Roosevelt’s 3 park areas protect both wildlife and the formative experience of our greatest conservationist president. And the state has the only affiliate in the region, International Peace Garden.
South Dakota’s parks cluster in the southwest corner, but they are varied. Wind and Jewel Caves give entry to the subterranean world, Badlands to the wall across the wide foreboding landscape, Mt Rushmore to the Black Hill cliffs, and Minuteman to the Cold War apocalyptic thinking.
Montana has two powerful parks describing our tragic history of brutal war against Native Americans: Big Hole and Little Bighorn. Grant-Kohrs preserves a piece of the old cowboy west, and Bighorn Canyon has striking views and wild horses. Glacier is stunning, rugged and a great place for horse riding, backcountry camping, kayaking and hiking.
Wyoming has parks in each corner, but the best are in the northwest. Fossil Butte does an admirable job of illustrating the full scale of evolution on earth, Devils Tower evokes some otherworldly monolith, and Fort Laramie recalls the days of wagon trains and unjust war on Native Americans. But Grand Teton, the Rockefeller Parkway and Yellowstone, in particular, are spectacular.
Half of Colorado’s parks preserve some of its impressive scenery, and half preserve the past. Black Canyon, Great Sand Dunes and Rocky Mountain National Parks are self-explanatory and awesome. Curecanti and Colorado also have dramatic canyon views. Bent’s Old Fort is a trading post out of a western movie, and Florissant protects fossilized trees, plants and animals from eons ago. Mesa Verde National Park (one of four in the state) and Yucca House preserve early native dwellings and artifacts, and Sand Creek preserves a shameful massacre of Native Americans by US troops and volunteers.
My favorite parks in each state are wildlife refuge Teddy Roosevelt, starkly scenic Badlands, dramatic drive & trails Glacier, geyser popping Yellowstone, native dwelling etched Mesa Verde (see Cliff Palace photo above) and stunning hikes Zion. While other regions may have more total park units, Rocky Mountain has many of the most spectacular parks in the system.
Zero Carbon Travel 