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Take Advantage of Our National Parks

Written by Ken McAlpine

Posted Sep 26, 2008

Taking a vacation in a tight economy can be an adventure in itself but there are alternatives. A trip to a National Park is a great way to get away from the stresses of your day and spend some time with friends, family, and nature.

On certain full-moon nights, when the sky is clear and the moon throws off enough light, Yosemite Falls and the gauzy mists raised by its cascading thunder produce a fairytale moment beyond this world. The moon’s rays reflect off the mist and, voila, a moonbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue – a shimmering arc of elfin brushstroke across the plummeting Falls. Your heart soars and your mind strains for a handhold, because honestly, it is too much to grasp. Happily too, in these tight economic times, the price of admission is very nearly free. In the case of Yosemite National Park, a park admission fee ($20 per car, good for seven days) and perhaps (or perhaps not: see below) a campsite fee, and you are set loose in an amphitheater like no other. Of course, money has nothing to do with it.Wrote Henry David Thoreau: “It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies.” Here’s your chance, along with a few tips to enhance the experience…

Channel Islands National Park - CA

(805) 658-5730; www.nps.gov/chis

Five islands off southern California's coast - Santa Cruz, Anacapa, Santa Barbara, San Miguel and Santa Rosa - comprise Channel Islands National Park, and, thanks to the buffer of water, they remain largely untouched. Here you can hike empty beaches, kayak through dripping sea caves, witness tumultuous spreads of mating, pupping, honking sea lions, or scuba dive in sunlit kelp forests swollen with life. Each island has its own face. Santa Cruz, the largest (22 miles long), has a historic ranch, rugged mountains and one of the world's biggest sea caves (Painted Cave). Remote Santa Barbara Island is a grassy tableland where you might end up camping alone. Island Packers (www.islandpackers.com) runs boats out to the islands. Most island visitors opt for day trips in summer, making camping - offered on all five islands - in spring and fall a wonderful opportunity for solitude.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park - HI

(808) 985-6000; www.nps.gov/havo

No surprise, this park is best known for its volcanoes, including Kilauea, the world's most active volcano (the park's Web site has an eruption update). Best place to see the lava is generally from the end of Chain of Craters Road. Best place to escape the gawping crowds is along the Mauna Iki trail (picked up from Hilina Pali Road), wending into the Ka'u desert and past the far less overrun volcanism of Twin Pit Craters and Cone Crater. Any hikes on the 13,667-foot Mauna Loa (the earth's most massive volcano) are also good for shedding humanity and reveling in black lava. Further escape is offered via beautiful coastal backcountry campsites. Try Halape, for starters.

Death Valley National Park - CA, NV

(760) 786-3200; www.nps.gov/deva

Death Valley is the largest national park in the continental U.S., a hard-to-wrap-your-head-around 5,000 square miles. Dry figures (sorry) don't translate the sheer beauty and weirdness of the place. Beauty in the sinuous slot canyons, palm-shaded oases and extinct volcanic craters; weirdness in the velvet-smooth dunes whose sliding sands, under certain wind conditions, produce a strange booming song. You can camp at the tents-only Mahogany Flat campground (elevation 8,200 feet), securing yourself the highest tent-flap view in the park. The trail to 11,048-foot Telescope Peak, the highest point in the park, also begins here; from the summit you can see over 100 miles. Or leave the freeze dried meals behind; stay at the posh Furnace Creek Resort (www.furnacecreekresort.com) and golf the lowest elevation course in the world.

Yosemite National Park - CA

(209) 372-0200; www.nps.gov/yose

Ansel Adams described Yosemite as "a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space." Obviously he never had to stand in line for a restroom (or anything else) on the valley floor. To escape, head for the high country, and even in summer, you'll find the wilderness you want (though spring and fall are emptier, and cooler, too.) For a taste, enter the park through the east entrance, over Tioga Pass, and drive into Tuolumne Meadows to the Snow Creek Trail. Five miles of downhill hiking and you arrive at the valley rim. There are hundreds of high country hikes-cum-escapes, and no one knows them better than Yosemite Mountaineering Guides (www.yosemitemountaineering.com). Yes, the valley's campgrounds fill up months in advance, but there are also first-come, first-serve campgrounds like White Wolf (in a lodgepole pine forest at 8,000 feet) and Porcupine Flat (situated 38 miles from Yosemite Valley, it's often the last campground to fill up).

Yellowstone National Park - WY, MT, ID

(307) 344-7381; www.nps.gov/yell

Yellowstone in winter is peculiarly beautiful. Geysers belch billows of sulfur smoke that the wind rips away, thick ribbons of gray strafing low across the creamy snow. Waterfalls cascade over steep dropoffs, their ice-white mists freezing to the overhanging trees. Club Med it isn't. But the same inclement weather that scares visitors off drives Yellowstone's abundant wildlife down to the valley floors to forage for food. In summer, sighting a single bull elk across a meadow is cause for celebration. In winter, you can gaze (from your cross-country skis or a comfortable snowcoach tour) upon countless elk and bison, coyotes and bald eagles. Avoid the noisy West Entrance and head for the park's northeastern area, home to the Lamar Valley and, if you are lucky, glimpses of gray wolves (best odds at dawn and dusk, or by signing on for a wolf-tracking trip with the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, www.jhalliance.com).

Grand Canyon National Park - AZ, NV

(928)638-7888; www.nps.gov/grca

Hiking is obviously an option, but rafting through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River is a must. There's a reason every adventure list includes a raft trip down the Colorado. For one thing, rafting through the Grand Canyon allows access to places otherwise reached only with great difficulty or a very long fall; plus there are adrenal rapids like Crystal, Hance and Lava Falls. Here is a place where rapids rage, sun and moon touch rocks 1.7 billion years old, and slot canyons hum with silence and mirror-still turquoise pools. Though the park service establishes a limit to the number of rafts on the river, in summer it can seem like everyone but Johnny in his water wings is proceeding downstream. Take a river trip in the fall. Wilderness River Adventures' (www.riveradventures.com) 16-day "Grand Tradition" trip is as good as it gets.

Acadia National Park - ME

(207) 288-3338; www.nps.gov/acad

There's beautiful Mount Desert Island, where you can mountain bike 45 miles of superb crushed-stone carriage roads or hike to the top of lesser known Sargent Mountain to watch the sunrise. But true escape is found on the water. You haven't lived until you've inhaled Maine from a kayak, its sea and pine tang salty-sweet. Spring is particularly lovely, the local seals are pupping and the crowds haven't yet arrived. Best to kayak with someone who knows the place. Coastal Kayaking Tours (www.acadiafun.com) offers multi-day kayak/camping/island-hopping trips.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park - NC, TN

(865) 436-1200; www.nps.gov/grsm

Spring is your season, the park's south entrance (via the Blue Ridge Parkway) your portal to hiking paradise. Great Smoky has over 850 miles of trails, almost as many as Yellowstone, on a quarter of the acreage. Be sure to make camp at Balsam Mountain, the highest (5,300 feet) and one of the least crowded of Smoky's campgrounds. Late April brings a rush of ground flowers. Kanati Fork Trail offers a particularly stunning mass of silver bell, fraser magnolia, painted trillium and wild blue phlox. Don't know a trillium from a tribble? A naturalist-led indoctrination courtesy of the Smoky Mountain Field School (www.outreach.utk.edu/smoky) will help.