Why I Love National Parks

Working our way upstream through the aptly named Narrows—a slender, water-filled gorge with towering walls in Utah’s Zion National Park—I suddenly felt energized. It had been one heck of a week, and I’d spent the bulk of it fighting an uphill battle on a work project I didn’t completely understand. But here I was in my element. With each careful step, I made my way forward, battling the occasionally strong current and river levels that at one point reached waist-high. 

I’d come to the small town of Springdale to check out its new Red Cliffs Lodge Zion,(Opens in a new window) a comfy hotel in the shadow of Zion’s majestic sandstone precipices. However, my real reason for the trip was the chance to enjoy the national park itself: rappelling down its nearby red rocks; e-biking along Highway 9, Zion’s incredibly scenic main artery; and hiking the Narrows, one of the park’s most popular treks. 

American writer and historian Wallace Stegner once called U.S. national parks “the best idea we ever had.” The author described them as “absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” In 2009, filmmaker Ken Burns echoed Stegner’s sentiment with his six-part mini-series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea(Opens in a new window). I couldn’t agree more with both of them. For the last 30 years, our national parks have been the places where I’ve turned to recenter myself. Amid their natural beauty and often larger-than-life landscapes, I’m reminded that the world is so much more than my latest work project. Just being in Zion felt like home. 

I didn’t grow up visiting national parks as a kid. In fact, my first introduction to Yellowstone was a Disney animated short called Good Scouts. My dad set out a giant projection screen in our living room, and together my brother and I watched as Donald Duck led his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, on a camping trip through the park’s bubbling, otherworldly environs. By the time the film was over, I knew that was where I wanted to be. 

However, it wasn’t until nearly 20 years later that I took the opportunity to work a summer in a national park. I’d filled out applications to work in hotels in Yellowstone, Yosemite, and along the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, but it was Montana’s Glacier National Park(Opens in a new window) that I really had my eye on. More specifically, the Many Glacier Valley on the park’s east side, a remote world of alpine lakes, snow-capped peaks, and waterfalls that was unlike anything I’d ever seen growing up in South Jersey. 

I scored a job working as a server in the Many Glacier Hotel’s Ptarmigan Dining Room, which looked out onto the shimmering blue waters of Swiftcurrent Lake. Occasionally, there’d be moose meandering along the lakeside while I was taking an order, or a mountain goat in the distance on the slopes of one of the nearby peaks. On mornings when I didn’t have a shift scheduled, I’d set out on lengthy hikes like the 10.6 mile out-and-back Grinnell Glacier Trail(Opens in a new window), or up to the waters of Cracker Lake, a milky green-colored waterbody, passing marmots in the sub-alpine meadows en route.  

On weeks where I had a couple of days off in a row I’d join my co-workers on backpacking adventures, winding our way up mountain trails through fields of flowering beargrass and purple fireweed, and across the Continental Divide to our campsites. There was always something new to discover, and so many sections of the park to explore. Every so often I’d find myself thinking, “I can’t believe that a place like this exists. And even more so, I’m living in it.”

The Birth of American’s National Parks 

When congress established Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 1872, America’s first national park was born. Parks like Sequoia National Park(Opens in a new window)​​—home to some of the largest trees on the planet—in California, Oregon’s Mount Rainier, featuring the most glaciated peak in the U.S. lower 48, and Colorado’s Mesa Verde, which contains some 5,000 archeological sites, including the former homes of the cliff-dwelling Ancestral Puebloans, soon followed. But it wasn’t until 1916 that President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service, consolidating management of the 35 national parks and monuments then managed by the department, as well as those yet to be established, under one agency.

Today the U.S. National Park Service manages 433 individual units covering more than 85 million acres across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and US territories. There are 63 national parks in total, including the subterranean caves of New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns and the mangrove forests and coral reefs of Biscayne National Park(Opens in a new window) in Florida. 

Becoming a national park isn’t easy. According to Outside Magazine(Opens in a new window), “Federal lawmakers must first enact a law requiring the Park Service to perform a feasibility study looking at the site’s cultural, historical, and environmental significance, as well as management options.” Then, of course, there’s opposition, often over concerns about the impact on resources such as farmland and timber. Out of the country’s more than four-dozen national parks, only five (including the newest, New River Gorge in West Virginia) have been established within the last 20 years. 

In the years since I worked at Glacier, I’ve found myself exploring national parks every chance that I can get. I watched in awe as a grizzly sow and her cubs made their way across the open meadows of Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley, caught the  sunrise over the layered rock formations and rust-colored buttes of South Dakota’s Badlands, and basked in the beauty of a California condor soaring overhead as I made my way along the switchbacks of the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Trail(Opens in a new window). On Hawaii’s Big Island I navigated the loose lava rock of Volcanoes’s Mauna Loa Trail, and later hiked among the massive boulders and Flintstones-like yucca plants of California's Joshua Tree, then embarked on a solo road trip among Death Valley’s undulating sand dunes and parched salt flats. 

But there’s still so much more to experience. 

I dream about navigating the Rio Grande waters through Big Bend’s steep limestone cliffs, climbing to the top of  20,310-tall Mount Denali, North America’s highest peak, and soaking in the thermal waters of Arkansas’s Hot Springs National Park(Opens in a new window), where eight historic bathhouse buildings (two of which are functioning) offer a glimpse into the early 20th century heyday of these mineral-rich springs. 

National Parks Matter 

From the towering tidewater glaciers of Alaska’s Kenai Fjords(Opens in a new window) to the flooded grasslands of Florida’s Everglades, the only place in the world where both alligators and crocodiles co-exist, national parks are home to some of America’s most iconic and varied landscapes. They also help keep our world in balance. 

National parks safeguard diverse habitats, serve as anchors for wildlife corridors, and provide protected habitat for threatened and endangered species like the odd-looking sawfish, with a toothy nose extension that makes it especially susceptible to getting caught in fishing nets, and the black-footed ferret, of which there are only about 300-500 left in the wild. By keeping biodiversity in check, their ecosystems act as natural carbon sinks, which absorb and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to reduce the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and ward off the worst effects of climate change. 

Best of all, they encourage us to get outside and reconnect with nature. 

And perhaps more importantly, with ourselves.

Photo Credit: Laura Kiniry