-
Fort Lauderdale, Miami, & Biscayne National Park
For the past two winters, we’ve explored the desert southwest. We love the grandeur and the wildness, but it was time to do something completely different. So I dragged Michael to southeast Florida, which was actually plan b after I wasn’t able to get any state park reservations in the Florida Keys. There was so much to do…south Florida has three national parks and plenty of city spaces to explore. It’s the most urban area we’ve ever experienced for this amount of time in our lives. We’ve felt crowded and a little claustrophobic. The traffic is way worse than imagined. But the weather has been way better. It’s hard to…
-
Hot Springs National Park
Hot Springs, 50 miles southwest of Little Rock, AR, was our 15th and final National Park visit of 2022! We stayed at the park’s campground, Gulpha Gorge, in a lovely creekside site with full hookups. I think we would return to this park just to stay in one of these campsites again. We had beautiful fall weather during the first week of November, except for the hour we spent in a tornado shelter on Friday night. From American Indians to visitors during its 19th and 20th-century heyday (including baseball players for spring training), people have believed in the therapeutic power of the water in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Rain and snowmelt…
-
Finding Fall In Southwest Colorado
Visiting Mesa Verde National Park, located in the southwest corner of Colorado, was a last-minute idea. I’d been researching our 2023 route, which may include a late spring visit to Colorado, and realized the ranger-led tours of the cliff dwellings would not yet be open for the season. We found a great boondocking spot on Forest Rd 316 in the San Juan National Forest, halfway between Mesa Verde NP and Durango. It was the first week of October and the little oak trees around us were turning colors and we could see snowy peaks out in the distance. Unfortunately, it rained almost the entire week, which kept us stuck inside…
-
Three Moab Parks
We spent the last week of September in Moab, a small town/big playground in southeastern Utah. It was still too hot for comfortable hiking and dry camping and I think October would have been better. The BLM lands around Moab have developed campgrounds (but without hookups) and are not free. We stayed at Ken’s Lake because it was the only one I could make a reservation at in advance and knew that Moab is popular and crowded. It’s popular for good reason. There are two National Parks – Arches and Canyonlands. But I think most visitors are there for the world-famous mountain biking and jeep trails. Arches National Park We…
-
Capitol Reef National Park
Capitol Reef is located in the red rock country of south-central Utah. We think its remoteness, rather than lack of beauty, is what makes it one of the least visited of Utah’s 5 National Parks. Several people have told us it’s their favorite in Utah (we struggle with ranking them but think it’s our second, behind Zion). We scored a fantastic free boondocking spot on Beas Lewis Flat Road 10 miles west of the park’s entrance. We visited the 3rd week of September and had perfect weather temperature-wise, but were a bit too early because of a persistent monsoon season. Some roads were closed from a storm the weekend before…
-
Grand Teton National Park
Grand Teton is just south of Yellowstone so obviously, we headed there next. It was pretty much a “love at first sight” kind of experience. The Tetons are one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world, with jagged peaks and no foothills to obstruct the view from the Jackson Hole Valley. Add in the meandering Snake River and you have Ansel Adams material… Our campground, Gros Ventre (pronounced grow vont), was at the southern end of the park, just 15 miles from the town of Jackson, WY. If you asked us what was most memorable about our week here, we’d both say moose! We’ve been on the lookout for…
-
Yellowstone Staycation
We started planning our 10-day Yellowstone vacation over a year ago so that we could get reservations to stay inside the park. Michael took time off work and we were calling it our Yellowstone vacation until he said “Wait, isn’t this our Yellowstone staycation since we live here?” There are 12 campgrounds, but a 30 ft travel trailer pushes the size limit of how many campsites actually fit us, so planning ahead was key. Originally, we were splitting our time between 3 campgrounds, Mammoth (north entrance), Madison (west entrance), and Fishing Bridge (east entrance). Sadly, Yellowstone suffered major flood damage in the northern loop earlier this year and those entrances…
-
Glacier National Park, Part II
After 10 days on the west side of Glacier National Park, we moved over to the east side to finish out the week. We stayed at St. Mary campground, a no hookup national park campground. Michael took a few vacation days, plus it was his birthday! The St. Mary entrance is connected to the west entrance via the Going to the Sun Road but since our truck alone is over the length restrictions, you obviously can’t tow any kind of trailer, and we took a long way around. The east side of Glacier is bordered by the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and it feels less crowded and very remote. The prairie…
-
Glacier National Park, Part I
One of our main summer destinations this year was Glacier National Park and it was perfect. When I was planning over 6 months ago, I was worried that we’d be dealing with haze and wildfire smoke that frequently occurs in the area. But we had beautiful clear days for the 3 weeks we were there. Ironically, a wildfire increased our time at the park from 2 to 3 weeks when one broke out at our next destination, Flathead Lake. Our Alltrails app tells us that we paddled for 8.5 miles and hiked for 88 miles over 3 weeks (and Michael took nearly a week of vacation over that time). We…
-
The North Cascades
We arrived at the North Cascades National Park the last week of June during a 3-day 95-degree “heat dome” AND a park ranger told us that all the hikes I had planned to do were covered in snow and that we should have winter hiking skills and carry an ice ax. Interesting. One paved road, the North Cascades Highway/20, runs east-west through this lightly visited National Park. Most of it is a wilderness that can only be accessed by backpacking or taking a ferry across Ross or Chelan Lakes. There isn’t a lot of infrastructure for visitors and most only see overlooks along Highway 20, which is technically part of…
