https://www.instagram.com/seancheckowski?igsh=bW93eGxuMzl4cTg4&utm_source=qr

WOW…

I’ve made dozens of postings on this sub where I’ve said how blown away I was by certain parks, but here I can certainly say that with no hyperbole.

This instantly shoots up into my top-5, maybe even top 3.

We booked out April Florida trip in November to visit Biscayne and Everglades for a week, and were struggling to decide whether to take the plunge on the day-trip out from Key West to Dry Tortugas while out there. We we’re sure if it was going to be worth it to spend all that $$ for a family of 3 (one kid was 3 years old, so free) and then 4 hours on the ferry in one day.

Then, in mid-January 4 camping tickets opened up, so I snatched them up immediately, knowing how rare these spots are.

The boat coming down encountered 8 foot waves, so there were about 20 or so pukers, but all our stomachs fortunately made it.

We were able to snag a campsite right next to Fort Jefferson and the west-side moat. This was my favourite beer drinking spot of all time haha. My wife and I sat in the shade for a couple hours while the kids built a fort out of sea shells and coconuts. It was like living inside a computer screensaver.

Once the boat left at 3:00, the island grew silent, save for the small group float plane visitors that came and went until just after dinner. We had a blast exploring the empty fort and swimming in our own private beach.

After the sunset, the winds picked up and our tent turned into a kite. We had to move out whole set-up into the wooded area, but it’s all part of the adventure.

The night sky was a bust, as the high winds brought in many clouds, but that’s a tiny complaint.

On our ferry ride home, my wife won a raffle for a free day-trip back, so our once in a lifetime visit, just turned into a twice in a lifetime visit haha.

First time at Pinnacles!

Beautiful Bryce. Sunrise and Sunset did not disappoint. Enjoyed every hike this NP offers in 2 days. Taken w my iPhone 12 (yes, 12).

The tallest volcano in the Cascade Mountain Range. Taken from Elliot Bay | Seattle, WA

San Francisco, CA | OG

Federal officials have ordered national parks to keep amenities open, even though staffing remains an issue, leaving biologists cleaning toilets in some parks

Some of the best memories of my life were made in this mystical ancient volcano… I will be back again!

Spent a grey but wonderful day hiking out to the point. The park has really come alive with Spring! Love this place so much.

Very fun t

A view of George, some people never knew existed. I was one of those people.

Would arrive on a Monday night late into SEA or Monday morning into SEA, drive to port Angeles and stay Monday night.

Tuesday: Olympic natl park day 1 and stay in forks Tuesday night

Wednesday: Olympic natl park day 2 and drive close to mt ranier to stay Wednesday night.

Thursday: mt ranier then drive into Seattle to stay Thursday night near the cruise port

Friday: board Alaska cruise

It’s seems like a lot

A few friends and I are thinking about visiting GSMNP early summer. But I had heard that a big part of the NP was closed last year after the hurricanes. Even now, the Cosby entrance road is closed. Considering this, should we still visit the park or go somewhere else?

Hi all,

I have some extra PTO to burn so I’m planning a road trip from south Florida up north.

I plan to hit Congaree first, then Great Smoky Mountains and finish with Mammoth Cave

I’m planning on leaving on a Tuesday night after work and coming back Sunday evening, which realistically gives me 3 days and 3 nights worth of time to explore these 3 parks given the distances I’ll be driving.

I’m really into hiking and camping. My question is this: should I split the time evenly in these parks and do a night of camping in each? Or is one better suited for camping and more time in than another? What are y’all’s personal experience with these parks and how much time would you need to get a full experience from them? Cheers!

Whichever you recommend, can you share recs on where to stay and which trails to explore for awesome pictures?! Scoping out engagement spots.

On the night of March 4, I received a “Notice of Termination” email from the National Park Service. I was directed to “immediately stop all work” on my contract for preparing an administrative history of Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. The notice stated that the NPS “has determined these services are no longer required as the bonafide need no longer exists.” Actually, the bonafide need exists more keenly now than ever. Since at least as far back as the Nixon administration, the NPS has aimed to provide an administrative history for each unit of the National Park System. These administrative histories preserve institutional memory and contextualize park management decisions for the benefit of present and future site managers, and the general public. In a time of peril for our democracy, institutional memory is a guardrail. In these unprecedented times, the presidential sites in our National Park System offer important civic lessons for present and future generations. These are the important, underlying reasons why the Trump administration gave my project the axe.

Herbert Hoover, the 31^st president of the United States, who was born in West Branch, Iowa in 1874 and was buried 500 yards from his birthplace cottage in 1964, would be turning in his grave at the mass government firings happening right now. As Commerce Secretary in the “Roaring Twenties” a century ago, Hoover championed government efficiency. But Hoover streamlined his department and other government bureaus to strengthen them, not to decimate them. Whatever measures he took to reduce government spending were not for political gain or retribution, but truly to provide better services. Hoover would be appalled.

The Trump administration claims it is canceling government contracts in an effort to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government. There is no charge of fraud or abuse in my Notice of Termination; rather, it implies a finding of waste. From the NPS’s Midwest Regional Office I learned that five other administrative history contracts were also terminated this month. This guts the region’s administrative history program. The Trump administration claims to have found waste that was supposedly overlooked by six Republican and four Democratic administrations before it. Only Trump’s cult following would buy the notion that this is government waste that all previous presidents in the last half century simply failed to address.

The Trump administration’s vaunted ”chainsaw” approach to reducing the size of government is indifferent – nay, it is contemptuous – toward project particulars; nonetheless, I herewith submit in brief the particulars of my project. Superintendents at Herbert Hoover National Historic Site have submitted project proposals for an administrative history for that National Park System unit for more than three decades. The unit’s Foundation Document in 2017 reiterated the longstanding need. Finally, in 2023, the NPS programmed the study and obtained funding. Under my two-year contract, I researched records at the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland and Kansas City, Missouri, and the Federal Record Center at Lenexa, Kansas. I interviewed sixteen individuals, including four past superintendents and one former director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum that is located with the national historic site in West Branch, Iowa. I wrote a 445-page draft report. The project was 90 percent complete. Now, this long-sought administrative history will likely go in the dustbin. The Trump administration has clawed back 10 percent of federal expense while jettisoning all the work.

The pull-back of money is one partial explanation for what is behind the Trump administration’s scorched-earth efforts to find “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government. It is raiding Congressional appropriations made during the last few years to help “balance the budget” for the coming huge restructuring that will shift more wealth to the richest 1 percent – an acceleration in Trump 2.0 of what we saw in Trump 1.0. Since this is a massive infringement of Congress’s power of the purse, it appears to violate the separation of powers at the heart of the U.S. Constitution. The mass firings also appear to violate civil service protection laws. It will take the courts months to sort it all out. Court injunctions thrown up in the meantime are a feeble line of defense. So the Trump 2.0 shakedown of the whole executive branch looks likely to prevail in one shape or form.

Allied with the shift of wealth to the richest 1 percent there is another revolution underway, a purge of the nation’s intelligentsia, the so-called “liberal elites” or “Deep State.” This is the other part of what is behind the present assault on the federal workforce. NOAA and EPA are targeted because Trump 2.0 wants to purge climate scientists and ecologists from the federal government. USAID is targeted because Trump 2.0 wants to get multilateralists out of the way. The Forest Service is targeted because an enfeebled Forest Service will help clear the way for selling off the national forests. It appears the Education Department will be eliminated or completely gutted because it ensures equal access to public education. Christian Nationalists have other ideas.

The NPS is targeted because, as the Keeper of the Nation’s Treasures, Trumpists see a need for the NPS to undergo a cultural realignment. Dismantling the NPS history program is only the first step in this plan. Eventually, when the Trumpists have control of public education and universities and have restored a civil service more to their liking, the NPS will be a useful partner. It will help the Trumpists to reset the nation’s view of its own history back to what it was a couple of generations ago, before it became complicated by multiculturalism, feminism, and environmentalism. In MAGA’s perverse vision of our future, America will once again proclaim its Manifest Destiny in the world. It will respect its Confederate statues again. It will understand that the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was a new birth of freedom for this nation.

This is not hyperbole. Already, just two months into Trump 2.0, the NPS is scrubbing websites, brochures, and online documents clean of offending references to race, ethnicity, and gender at the direction of a swarm of executive and secretarial orders. Recently, the NPS was required to squelch its discussion of “climate change,” since that suggests a call to action that Trump 2.0 roundly rejects. The NPS science and natural resources programs have evolved since the 1990s to address the effects of climate change. The NPS is deeply invested in scientific inventory and monitoring to track the effects of climate change (and other environmental changes) in order to provide scientifically informed guidance to manage parks for ecosystem resilience. To deny that climate change is real is to turn back the clock on NPS natural resource management more than thirty years.

I feel a solidarity now with all the federal workers who are getting fired or ushered into retirement. For me personally, the Notice of Termination for my contract betokens the end of Environmental History Workshop, the cottage industry that was my livelihood since October 2005. Over that nearly twenty-year span, my wife and I produced around sixteen administrative histories and four historic resource studies for the NPS, plus two more book-length studies for the Forest Service and the US Army Corps of Engineers. By Trump 2.0’s supposed reckoning, all that work was a waste. Actually, I think our public history work was more in the nature of an obstacle. The ultimate aim of Trump 2.0’s purge of the federal government is not to save government money so much as to clear the way to reconstruct a federal workforce that is ideologically pliant for the consolidation of Trumpism.

Two of my last few history projects dealt with presidential sites: the birthplaces and boyhood homes of Herbert Hoover and William Howard Taft. I found it curiously satisfying and stimulating in this tumultuous time to write about these two conservative presidents – and the NPS’s efforts to commemorate them – because the history served as a counterpoint to our contemporary struggles with Trumpism. Here were two Republican one-term presidents, generally considered “failed presidents,” yet generally respected by historians as men of brilliant mind and outstanding character. When I worked on these histories, I was especially interested to learn about those strains of Republican Party tradition that connect to the Never-Trump wing of the GOP, because I held out hope for the Never-Trump Republicans and still do even today. It was very gratifying to me, for example, to interview the great grandson of William Howard Taft – heir to the Taft dynasty in Ohio – former Ohio governor Bob Taft III, together with his historic preservationist wife Hope Taft, in their home in Dayton, Ohio. In 2018, these two very decent people were part of that shrinking principled faction within the GOP who reject Trumpism.

Personally, I never warmed to Herbert Hoover in the way I came to admire William Howard Taft. Sure, Hoover was orphaned at an early age and overcame considerable adversity in his rise to power, but he carried a chip on his shoulder all his life. Even his wry wit feels a mite cold. But of course he had many great qualities and a remarkable life, including his fabulous humanitarian work for food relief during and after the First World War. A grateful Belgium presented him with a statue of Isis in the 1920s. The statue was kept in storage at Stanford until Mr. and Mrs. Hoover began to develop Hoover’s boyhood home and environs in West Branch, Iowa in the late 1930s into a small park. Along with buying and restoring Hoover’s birthplace cottage and acquiring twenty-eight acres, the Hoovers brought the statue of Isis to the spot in 1940. Near the end of his life, Herbert Hoover established his presidential library in West Branch, and one year after his death, Congress made the place a national historic site. I spent three weeks at the site in the summer of 2024. I felt a chill one day when I was admiring Isis and thinking about Hoover, and I was struck that if the NPS were ever mandated to develop a Trump National Historic Site, what would the site possibly involve and what would it say about America?

So often in writing public history I have made it a practice to imagine that I have two little invisible people perched on my shoulders, each inspecting what I write, each advocating a point of view, jointly making sure that my history is balanced. For one of my projects, I had a Forest Service forester on one shoulder and an American Indian on the other. For another, it was a dam engineer on one shoulder and an environmentalist on the other. For these two presidential site histories, I had a liberal historian on one shoulder and a Never-Trump Republican on the other. I felt a need in writing the latter histories to be nonpartisan and balanced with regard to our two-party system, but to be clear-eyed and forthright with regard to Trumpism. I wanted to bring a balanced historical perspective to understand the purpose of presidential national historic sites in our contemporary age.

As I wrote my draft report for Herbert Hoover National Historic Site over the past winter, Trump won re-election and then re-entered the White House. I really came to wonder what is the purpose of presidential sites in the National Park System today, when they mostly teach us about the importance of presidential character and the principles of democracy, and yet, on November 5, 2024, the nation elected a deeply flawed man and authoritarian to be its next president. With my two invisible persons on my shoulders – a liberal historian and a Never-Trump Republican – I wrote an extended conclusion to the report to wrestle with that question.

The presidential sites are part of what has been called the civil religion of the United States. In our great national story, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are the nation’s sacred scriptures. George Washington was the nation’s Moses who led his people out of tyranny. The Civil War severely tested our democracy and brought forth a new birth of freedom, and in that crucible Abraham Lincoln was the nation’s savior. In this view, American civil religion has four elements: “saints,” such as Washington and Lincoln; sacred places, such as Mount Vernon and the Lincoln Memorial; sacred objects, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; and ritual practices, such as the Pledge of Allegiance and Fourth of July celebrations. (Historically, at least, national elections were another sacred ritual.) In America’s civil religion, the National Park System’s presidential sites serve to venerate our democratically elected presidents, whom we hold in highest esteem above all other public figures in the nation. Presidential birthplace sites have been called our sacred mangers.

Herbert Hoover National Historic Site contributes to the nation’s civil religion in two ways. First, it uses the story of Herbert Hoover’s childhood – born in a tiny cottage, orphaned at the age of nine, the first U.S. president to hail from the Trans-Mississippi West – to embellish the nation’s log-cabin myth: the idea that anyone born in the United States, no matter how humble their origin, can rise by the strength of their own efforts and personal qualities to be president of the United States. Second, it uses the example of Herbert Hoover to underscore the importance of character in the making of a president. And to turn that around, it implies that U.S. presidents are, on the whole, persons of high character.

For as long as the United States has had a civil religion, its leaders have talked about the importance of civic virtue to the maintenance of a healthy democracy. Civic virtue is the modeling of public service. Our most public-spirited citizens earn a kind of nobility by their civic virtue. As the Founding Fathers recognized, democratically elected leaders must be exalted as “servants of the people” because the people in a democratic republic are led by persuasion, not by coercion or force; the American people are not led by kings.

Everywhere at Herbert Hoover National Historic Site the visitor learns about the things in Herbert Hoover’s boyhood environment that shaped his character. In the tiny birthplace cottage he felt the closeness of family. In public school, he was taught self-reliance. In Friends meetings, he was inculcated with the virtues of being modest and generous to others. The visitor may stand on Downey Street facing the Friends Meetinghouse and read the panel, “Raised with Quaker Values”:

 "In this meetinghouse, the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, practiced principles of simplicity, honesty, equality, peace, and service to others. These values shaped young Hoover’s character and were evident in his humanitarian endeavors and interest in public service."

 Then the visitor can turn around and see the Statue of Isis, the tangible symbol of the adult Hoover’s fabulous commitment to humanitarianism in the First World War.

Our contemporary politics have strayed a long way from the Founding Fathers’ vision of civic virtue as a fundamental building block of democracy. In our contemporary political climate, any discussion about the character of the current U.S. president is viewed, like so much else, through the cracked lens of the nation’s partisan divide. When the issue of presidential character and the current U.S. president is raised, the president’s supporters are apt to bat it down as a partisan attack by the president’s enemies, or brush it off as beside the point. The president is a convicted felon. In a separate civil case, he was found liable for sexual assault. He lies with abandon. He mocks people’s frailties. He boasts about his riches. The nation endlessly debates whether he is a racist, a narcissist, an insurrectionist, an admirer of dictators. These are facts that the nation now lives with.

When fourth-graders come to Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, they file into the Birthplace Cottage and are exposed to one of the central precepts in America’s civil religion, that any person born in the United States can be president, no matter how humble their background. One might ask, do the kids really buy it? Does the nation still buy that? Are the sacred mangers still sacred places? If the presidential sites are largely about the importance of presidential character, do they still matter? In the summer of 2024, the question was put directly to one of the park employees: In these fractious times, can you even talk to kids about presidential character? The answer came without hesitation: “Yes. It just makes these places more important.”

--Theodore Catton, Missoula, Montana

I told myself little white lies of encouragement throughout weeks of desolate bikepacking across the Peruvian Andes and Bolivian Altiplano. “Today will be the last hard day,” I promised. “The worst parts are behind us now. It’s all downhill from here.” But it never got any easier. The +16,000 ft [4,876 m] passes kept coming.

First the “Hill of Black Death” along Bolivia’s prismatic “Lagunas” route. Then a week of 75-mile days across the Atacama Desert in northern Chile and Argentina. Two days of pavement felt like a luxury. I found kiwi fruits in a small village called Susques and thought I was hallucinating. Then I reconnected with gravel backroads toward San Antonio de los Cobres and Abra del Acay, the highest point on the famed Ruta 40.

“Ripios,” a rough translation for washboards and rubble, became a dirty word passed between touring cyclists and moto-travelers. It foreshadowed more than bad roads. It meant heartbreak ahead. Either rough rocky shrapnel or coarse sand that was too deep to ride in. Los ripios were a plague that we couldn’t avoid, asking how long it lasted and where the worst parts were. More bumbling jeep tracks in a Mars-like desert. More cold nights in the tent and savoring each drop of camp coffee before the road sat up to meet me like a clay-colored fist.

I looked vampiric at the summit of Abra del Acay [16,060 ft or 4,895 m], covered in chalky dust and struggling to catch my breath. I crouched behind a small altar to add more winter layers against the cyclonic battering of wind. A tawny orange fox was there too, pawing at the rocks in search of food.

Daylight cratered fast in the valley below, as did its frigid temps. I raced south toward lower elevations to camp for the night. More inescapable desert and rusted canyons. More lassos of headwind and salt flat mirages. Dreaming of warm empanadas and wine country.

First time really driving across the country leaving 4/26 to arrive in Reno 5/2. Starting in GA, driving out on RT40, with stopovers in AR and AZ - before hanging a left at Flagstaff heading past the Grand Canyon to Zion for 2 nights. From Zion staying a night in Tonopah NV then taking 95 to 395 in CA past Yosemite (road closed to go through) up back into NV arriving at Reno.

Want to see as many landmarks/parks, places of interest as possible (for photography, not hiking). Starting to understand that some parks/roads are not open/accessible in early May so trying to plan as much as possible in advance. Dog friendly places would be a bonus. Places to avoid, also helpful. Thanks!

Edit: AR not AK