State and National Parks

It's been a great vacation.

Custer State Park, SD

I’m home. After two weeks, 5,643 miles, and more money than I’d like to admit, I’ve pretty well accomplished my goal. I still haven’t read a newspaper or checked twitter. I don’t know what’s happening in the world at large, but I’m still in awe of the one I’ve just experienced.

In Minnesota, I got a bit of peace with three days of solitude, exploring state parks and campgrounds by myself. After that, my two younger children and I started our adventure in the Badlands, soaking in a landscape that resembles the surface of Mars more than anywhere in North Carolina. In Custer State Park, we traversed Needles Highway, a narrow road of switchbacks surrounded by stunning rock formations and breathtaking vistas. With the sun setting behind the Tetons, we saw a mother moose and her calf emerge from dense undergrowth to feed in a small patch of marshy grass. In Yellowstone, we watched a pack of twelve wolves swim across the Yellowstone River to surround and harass a grizzly bear protecting a carcass.

It’s an amazing country. I spent time in three national parks and three state parks. My $80 Senior Lifetime Pass gets me into all national parks for free and half off campgrounds. It also got us into the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument for free. The pass has already more than paid for itself and I’ve only had it a month.

Our national parks are truly the country’s crown jewels. They protect a network of natural habitats that are as spectacular as any place in the world. They are also essentially huge living museums. They preserve ecosystems that could not survive the pressures of the modern world without the intervention of governments.

Yellowstone is the most precious of the gems. With the reintroduction of wolves in the 1990s, the Park Service revived an ecosystem that was largely extinct. It’s the only place in the continental United States where the country’s largest and most aggressive predators live without fear of being destroyed by people. Bears, wolves, and mountain lions keep herds of elk and bison in check, providing a natural balance that probably has impacts throughout the food chain.

The draw of the drama with wolves and bears is powerful. We met a father and son from Portland who make the 14 hour drive at least twice a year to observe the packs. Another man and his wife told us they moved to Gardiner, MT, at the northwest entrance to Yellowstone because “the vacations just got longer and longer.” They are in the park with their scopes and cameras at least three days a week looking for predators.

While the national parks protect our most stunning natural treasures, the state parks fill in the blanks, offering access to smaller tracts of land that preserve often spectacular natural phenomenon or culturally significant sites. In North Carolina, Great Smoky Mountains National Park gets national recognition but the waterfalls and vistas in Dupont State Park are equally impressive, just on a smaller scale.

In Minnesota, Itasca State Park protects the headwaters of the Mississippi and preserves acres of pristine lakes and old growth forests. At Crow Wing State Park, the Crow Wing River flows into the Mississippi and marks the site of a trading path used for hundreds of years by Native Americans and became a thriving community with as many as 600 people in the mid-1800s. A couple of hundreds miles south, Minneopa State Park lies along the Minnesota River near where Menneopa Creek drops seventy feet before emptying into the river.

Custer State Park preserves a section of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Calvin Coolidge spent a summer there in a lodge that now serves as a visitor center. A wildlife loop provides refuge to a herd of buffalo, pronghorns, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep. Dramatic pointy rock formations define Needles Highway where two jagged tunnels appear to have been hacked through the mountain with picks and chisels. At the top of the drive, we ate dinner at a lodge that provides sunset views that rival any in the country.

The patchwork of state and national parks offers a brief escape from the toils of daily life. They show us what life was like before western expansion reshaped North America. They should also keep us humble, reminding us that for all our great accomplishments, we’ve yet to match what was here before us.