Trekking the Planet National Parks Overview

Our next journey, beginning in March 2017, will take us to 27 of the U.S. National Parks, over a 4 1/2 month period! Most people are aware of the iconic parks of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Our goal…

Camping is a main component of our U.S. National Parks journey, as we travel to 27 parks over four-and-a-half months. In fact, we plan to camp over 100 nights while driving round the United States. We decided to simply convert…

If you have been following us for any length of time, you know that we are planners. We like to know where we are going, and what we will be doing for each day of a journey. Our upcoming United…

The focus of our Trekking the Planet NPS journey is to venture to new and lesser known U.S. national parks. However, for our first park we chose a familiar place: Joshua Tree National Park, which is only a one hour…

There are four deserts in North America: the Mojave, Great Basin, Chihuahuan and Sonoran. The Sonoran Desert is the most complex and diverse of its counterparts, with its physical features ranging from mountain ranges to arid plains to grassy plateaus…

Although petrified wood can be found in all 50 U.S. States, Petrified Forest National Park has some of the highest concentrations in the world. We spent two days exploring this park as well as taking two overnight backpacking trips in…

The Colorado River is a major waterway of the western U.S. It is 1,450 miles long and flows through five states. The Green River is the Colorado River’s chief tributary. Beginning in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, the Green…

Arches National Park is home to over 2,000 arches etched in Entrada sandstone. It also has the highest density of natural stone arches in the world. We had been to Arches 21 years ago when our daughters were 2 and…

When we researched national parks to include on our Trekking the Planet NPS journey, we were surprised to discover sand dunes in the middle of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Great Sand Dunes contains the highest dune in North America,…

​Carlsbad Caverns, located in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico’s Guadalupe Mountains, is the first of three “cave” national parks we plan to visit on our TTP NPS journey (the other two parks are Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and Wind…

​Over 200 million years ago, the Guadalupe Mountains were a marine reef under a tropical sea. When the sea evaporated, the Capitan Reef was buried in sediments and mineral salts. Later, an uplift created the mountains that today tower above…

​We were in the state of Texas for 17 days, and most of our time was spent in one place: Big Bend National Park. Big Bend, established in 1944, is the 15th largest national park by area (801,000 acres). We…

Hot Springs National Park, in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, has the distinction of being America’s smallest national park at just 5,500 acres. Its protected status predates Yellowstone, commonly considered to be the world’s first national park created in 1872….

With over 400 miles of surveyed passages, Mammoth Cave National Park is famous as the longest known cave system in the world. We not only ventured into the cave on two occasions while visiting, but also had the opportunity to…

Everglades National Park protects the largest tropical wilderness in the United States. It is a mosaic of marshes, creeks, prairies, and forests, with a abundance of wildlife. And it is the only place in the world where the alligator and…

Twenty-one miles east of the Everglades and just north of the island of Key Largo lies Biscayne National Park. It is the largest protected marine national park in the United States. With 95% of the park on the water, we…

A high-speed catamaran voyage of 70 miles each way along the Gulf of Mexico, exploration of a massive brick fort complete with a moat around it, and snorkeling underwater among the tropical coral and fish? We spent a day doing…

Congaree is one of America’s newest national parks, becoming the 58th such protected area in 2003. Comprised of 26,276 acres, Congaree protects the largest intact old-growth bottomless hardwood forest in the U.S. We spent two days in the park’s swampy…

One of the largest protected areas east of the Mississippi River, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a hikers paradise lying in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. Within the park boundaries, there about 900 miles of hiking paths, including…

Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park sits on the top of the Appalachian Mountains’ Blue Ridge Range. Skyline Drive runs for 105 miles through the park along the crest of the Blue Ridge, and the views from its 75 overlooks are more…

In 1604 French explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed along the coast of today’s central Maine and noted an island that he called “Isle des Monts Deserts” because of the barren appearance of its mountains. Today, Mount Desert Island is the…

Ohio’s 85 mile long Cuyahoga River flows between Akron and Cleveland and into Lake Erie. Meaning “crooked river” in the Mohawk language, the river area was home to Native Americans. By the 20th century, the Cuyahoga River became one of…

Lake Superior is the northernmost of the five Great Lakes. The largest freshwater lake in the world by area, it seems more like an ocean or an inland sea, measuring 350 miles wide and 160 miles long. In its northwest…

In the 18th century, French Canadian adventurers, known as voyageurs, traveled by canoe on today’s boundary waters between the United States and Canada. Today’s Voyageurs National Park, established in 1975, encompasses 56 miles of the former trade route. In order…

Seventy five million years ago a shallow sea covered today’s Great Plains area. Sea creatures that died sank to the bottom of the sea and became fossils, as well as a gray-black layer of sedimentary rock. This layer is just…

Wind Cave, in the southern Black Hills of South Dakota, was created as America’s eighth national park in 1903 and was the first to protect a cave. During the three days that we visited, we took two tours in the…

Theodore Roosevelt in North Dakota is the only one of America’s 59 national parks to be named after a person. While in the park, we spent time in all three units, united by the Little Missouri River flowing through them.

The Cascade Mountains run from south British Columbia to Northern California. The highest peak in the Cascades is Mount Rainier. At 14,410 feet, it is the fifth tallest mountain in the lower 48 states and the 17th highest in the…

America’s newest national park is Pinnacles, established in 2013, and located about 80 miles southeast of San Jose, California. During our two days in the park we hiked 17.2 miles, scrambled in two talus caves, and scanned the skies for…

Off the coast of California, between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, lie the Channel Islands. There are eight islands in the 160 mile archipelago, and five of those comprise Channel Islands National Park. Our visit to the 27th and final…

We recently completed an interview, summarizing our favorite parks, challenges we faced, what worked well and our final thoughts from our Trekking the Planet National Parks Roadtrip Adventure. If you missed any of our stories from the parks, you can…

Our ‘Best of’ Trekking the Planet wallpaper features 46 of our favorite photos from the national parks, national monuments, national memorials and national seashores we visited on our recent journey. The photos in this theme will automatically be rotated every…