Academy Award® Winner, Robert Redford, is the narrator of “National Parks Adventure”, his second film with MacGillivray Freeman Films
LIFEST YLE TRAVEL
Reenactment of John Muir and President Teddy Roosevelt’s camping trip in Yosemite Valley to discuss the future of a National Park system. Photo by Barbara MacGillivray
Steam rises from the Sapphire Pool in Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Photo by Brad Ohlund
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Shore 2016 |
LIFESTYLE
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hand, Aniakchak National Monument in the Aleutian Islands attracts less than 150 visitors per year because of its remote location. Visitors to America’s national parks will find many bearing names of presidents. Of the 35 parks and sites named for presidents, Theodore Roosevelt tops the list, followed by Abraham Lincoln. The reason for Roosevelt’s selection is obvious: it was his 1903 camping trip with naturalist John Muir that convinced him of the need to protect and preserve the nation’s stunning and sprawling wilderness areas — even though he had to battle lumbermen and developers intent on cutting down every forest they could find. Roosevelt went on to create five new national parks, four game preserves, 51 bird refuges, and 18 national monuments in addition to creating or expanding 150 national forests. He extended federal protection to a total area of 230 million acres. Roosevelt’s legacy lives both in the National Park system and at the American Museum of Natural History, where a memorial was completed in 1936 (and renovated in 2012) in honor of “the conservation president” and his passion for nature. Since Roosevelt was in the White House, the park system has multiplied exponentially, creating a diversity almost too vast to describe. Steamtown, the top tourist attraction in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, is the only national park with moving parts. But it is hardly the only one with features crafted by man. Mount Rushmore, marking its 75th anniversary this year, also fits that description. Perched in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, it showcases the presidential heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and — surprise, surprise — Theodore Roosevelt. Capitol Reef National Park, in south-central Utah, is one of seven in the U.S. and 22 in the world embraced by the International Dark-Sky Association. Such dark-sky places are ideal for visitors who like the solitude of star-gazing and guided moonwalks. The sounds of silence are even more evident in Glacier National Park — especially during the windswept winters when the seven-mile road to the century-old Many Glacier Hotel is closed. Not all parks are quiet: Old Faithful and the other geysers of Yellowstone erupt with a hiss of steam and scalding water — some of them on a schedule more reliable than New Jersey Transit. Volcanoes, even more vocal, are the main attractions in Hawaii, home of seven national parks. Visitors are invariably amazed at the black-sand beaches their lava flows left behind. And it’s not easy to find Lassen Volcanic National Park, tucked into a corner of northeastern California 50 miles from the nearest interstate and three hours from the closest airport. More than 40 volcanoes can be found in its 106,372 acres. Other must-see parks on the West Coast are San Juan Islands National Monument, in Puget Sound of Washington State, and the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, home to a major wildlife habitat despite proximity to the 13 million residents of Greater Los Angeles. Neither gets the publicity of Cape Cod National Seashore, the hook-nosed crown of Massachusetts, but maybe that’s because their crowds are thinner. The first national park in the northeast was Acadia, an idyllic slice of Maine that gets the first sunlight in the nation