In the mid-1960s, I visited Gettysburg National Military Park. I wasn’t even 10 years old at the time. In the early 1970s, my father and I backpacked through the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. During Spring Break of my senior year at Miami University (1979), I visited a cousin who was working at Rocky Mountain National Park. We traveled back east together, stopping at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. By now, I had fallen in love with the outdoors and the vast system of the U.S. National Park Service.
Over the next 20 years, I visited several other sites, culminating in a three-week trip in 2006. This trip “out west” saw stops at ten different units of the NPS system, and introduced my 7-year-old daughter to the same. She completed “Junior Ranger” programs at all 10 sites and, though most of the memories have faded for her, hopefully the trip gave her an appreciation of the national, state, and local parks that we are lucky to have.
It also solidified a dream I had toyed with over the years: a desire to visit every unit of the NPS system. There were over 400 official units at that time (and numerous other areas administered by the NPS but not considered “official”). By the end of that 2006 trip, I had visited over 50 sites in my lifetime, so only around one-eighth of the total! Over the next 15 years, the dream evolved into a retirement goal.
I retired from Fresche Solutions of Montreal on July 30, 2021. Two years earlier, the day after my 62nd birthday, I had obtained my “America the Beautiful Lifetime Senior Pass”, giving me admission to all fee areas for not only the NPS parks, but several other federal recreation sites. When I bought my pass at the nearby Saylorville Lake near Des Moines, I proceeded to make one of the poorest jokes of my life.
Senior Lifetime Passes cost $80, the same as a normal one-year pass. I commented to the person selling me the pass that I only needed to survive for one year and it paid for itself. Six weeks later, I’m sitting in a doctor’s office finding out I have lung cancer. I had visions of my grand adventure ending before I even started. Good news is it was caught early, and I have been cancer-free for over two years now.
So, armed with my pass and now retired, the dream could slowly become a reality.
Can I actually visit all 423 units (the official count as of retirement date) before my permanent retirement date at some unknown point in the future? Well, the answer is “No”, because at least one unit is not currently open to the public. There are also units located in Guam and in extreme northern Alaska. We will put them on the “wait and see” list. I’d love to visit them, but it just may not be feasible. But all of the others are.
I wanted to have somewhere to keep track of my travels and share them with anyone interested. To do so, I created a website where I hope to have lots of details of the trips already taken and the trips yet to come. Yes, it says “hope to have”! The site is under construction as I write this, though I hope (there’s that word again) to have it functional by the end of the year. I also set up this blog, where I will try to write thoughts not only on each place I visit but on side trips I may take to other parks. I’ll also have thoughts in general when it seems fitting.
As I write this back-dated entry, my first trip is already completed and my second trip has just begun. I was able to get blogging software installed on my website just prior to the start of the second trip. This means I will be retroactively reacting (retroreacting?) to the places visited in that first trip. Improving the “theme” of the blog site is also on the to-do list. It is currently a plain vanilla theme that functionally does most of what I need but looks ugly.
I welcome comments to my blog entries and comments about the website in general or any specific trips. Please do wait until I declare the sites “complete” before commenting on them!
Steve
