15 National Parks in 47 Days (June - July)
Crater Lake • Lassen Volcanic • San Francisco • Yosemite
We began at Crater Lake in Oregon, in what proved against all odds to be mid-winter.
Most of the facilities were still under a bit of snow, and only a short portion of the rim drive was open.
Of course the lake itself was jawdroppingly beautiful - jewel-like and perfect.
We walked as far as we could go, looking at reflections...
...and at Wizard Island, whose crater (not the caldera in which the lake itself sits) is the reason for the park's name.
But, that done, there was little to do but hang in the first of many National Park lodges we'd be staying in.
It was a beautiful, cozy place to pass the time...
...though apparently in its heyday it was a rattrap, with dangling wires and cardboard walls.
Usha found a bridge game to hustle; I felt shut off from the world, in new and curious company.
On the way down to civilization we stopped for a look at the roiling Rogue River.
And we headed south down the line of white-capped volcanoes that runs from Canada to California
...past the grandest of them all, Mount Shasta, which isn't even a national park.
The next big volcano below Mt. Shasta was Mt. Lassen, which erupted in 1915.
Its beautiful slopes are scarred with steam vents and mud pots, which melt off the snow.
Like this one, for instance.
The peak itself looked remarkably serene, though its 1915 eruption was seen 150 miles away.
A Mr. Loomis, who photographed the eruption, spent the rest of his life on the slopes instructing visitors.
The explosion hurled this rock six miles; it was still hot when visitors reached it two days later.
We stopped a few days in the Bay Area with (for starters) Aunt Usha and young Sinjin Orpilla.
It was the first of many idylls with family and friends scattered along the way.
We're always glad to see a little of San Francisco...
and the odd, intimate and spectacular vistas it always manages to offer.
We ferried out to Angel Island with friends Jay and Elaine, waving to Alcatraz on the way.
The weather was beautiful; there were sailboats all across the bay.
Jay is one of my oldest friends, whom I've known since I was four.
Elaine and Neeta took turns wearing my hat, until the wind blew it off them.
And so we bid a fond farewell to the Golden Gate
...and to my new bud, Sinjin Orpilla.
The road up to Yosemite was appealingly twisty.
We arrived at the park full of energy and ready to hike until we dropped.
Winter had been unusually wet; even streams that were usually trickles were raging.
And the famously pacific Merced River was swollen and wild.
We stayed at the lodge near Yosemite Falls
...and spent a good deal of time watching the way light played in its spray.
To get a better view, we hiked a steep trail to the top of the lower falls.
(This was one of the more colorful plants we saw along the way.)
The views were spectacular...
...and Usha (past age seventy) was gamer than we had a right to expect.
The waterfall did its part, in reward for our effort.
We congratulated ourselves with dinner at the Ahwahnee Hotel...
...the most luxurious and stylish of all national park lodges.
The next day we drove up to the high country, source of the great waterfalls
...a land dotted with still lakes...
...waterlogged meadows...
...and dramatic rocks, which at least a few brave people determined to scale.
There were great vistas here too, like Glacier and Washburn points...
...from which the tourists looked like insects...
...and the climbers (on top of Half Dome) looked like black specks of lint.
Heading south, we stayed at a lovely (if ill-managed) Victorian-era resort...
...near which we saw the first of many giant sequoias, largest trees on Earth.
The Mariposa Grove was full of peace...
...and the trees rich in individual personality.
They say "the groves were God's first temples," and it rings true even for an atheist like me.
Kings Canyon • Sequoia • Bakersfield • Los Angeles • Joshua Tree
If you want to see what Yosemite was like before the crowds, hotels and buses...
...you must go to the park they almost called John Muir National Park.
We drove out on a long, lonely road to this mouth of a tight canyon...
...along the ragingest river we had ever seen.
Kings Canyon has a wide, bucolic glacial valley...
...magnificent granite walls and temples...
...powerful roaring waterfalls...
...and peaceful forests, but no people.
All the rolling stones gather moss here (well, lichen actually).
The park was originally created to protect the Grant Grove of sequoias.
Each trunk seemed to tell a long, idiosyncratic life story...
And after death the trees went on to serve other purposes...
This one served many years as both a bar and a hotel.
Of course the greatest home for sequoias was right next door, in Sequoia National Park.
A wonderful park, with dramatic vistas of the High Sierra...
...and the sort of brilliant wildflowers we had seen up and down California...
These sequoias were so massive they dwarfed the historic Giant Forest Museum...
But despite their drama and magnificence we were gradually distracted...
...by bears.
Neeta had said she didn't want to see any bears, until we happened on a mother and her cubs
From that point we kept bumping into them everywhere.
One morning we found one cub waiting for his brother on the roadway.
We could have sworn they were showing off for the camera.
They gave each other what I can only report as a kiss...
...and then tussled like siblings do everywhere as they ran after their mother.
We drove down to a luxurious side of Bakersfield for a day with our friends Gurvir and Rishma...
...whose son Armand was off in his own dreamy world.
Our hotel in Los Angeles was luxurious and modern...
...with a clear view of Frank Gehry's Disney concert hall out the window.
We came to see cultural touchstones like the Getty Museum...
(where the gardens and architecture were more alluring than the art)...
...and Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House.
But for me it turned into a warm return visit to my childhood...
My dad and I used to ride Angels Flight up Bunker Hill on Saturdays in the 1960s...
We would start the day here at Bob's Doughnuts, and then go to the park or a movie...
...while my Mom and I would go to the L.A. arboretum when we wanted to think.
They were all still there, as I'd left them, waiting for my return.
The road past Palm Springs, however, had become a forest of windmills.
I had practically grown up in our next park, Joshua Tree.
It's the only desert in the United States with open palm oases...
...and the fantastical shapes of the joshua trees catch everyone's imagination.
I used to spend days climbing the rock formations.
Neeta felt it was one of the places she'd most like to come back to (when it was cooler).
Beyond the joshua trees there are spiny luminous cholla...
...and ocotillo that look like ballet dancers reaching skyward...
...and there is a viewpoint from which you can see Mexico on a clear day (so we're told).
Hotels (in theory) aren't important but I fell in love with the one at Joshua Tree.
It wasn't as grand as the one in Los Angeles; in truth, it was a little funky...
...but it felt to me like the simple, Stoic luxury of an earlier age. It allowed us to stretch out under the desert palms...
...and drink beside a pool that felt like its own oasis.
They had local artwork on the walls, and in the evenings an old desert couple played jazz piano and trumpet.
...and now and again, a roadrunner would stop by.
Saguaro • Tombstone • White Sands • Carlsbad Caverns • Albuquerque and Santa Fe
If there's any desert plant more iconic than the joshua tree, it's the saguaro in Arizona.
In the 1930s the forests were as thick around Tucson as a maple forest back East.
What the sequoias express with their trunks, the saguaros express with their arms...
...although the message is often hard to interpret.
We saw a few cactus flowers and fruits as we took a stroll around...
...and we also saw why the fruits don't last very long.
I had wanted to see wild javelinas; we finally found them lazing against the visitor center wall.
This lizard had more dignity (and a quirky sense of humor).
We saw the rest of the desert's wildlife at the great Arizona-Sonora museum.
The small creatures seemed to be in, let's say, high spirits...
...while the larger ones seemed dispirited by their fall from the wild state.
The gila monsters just seemed stylish, what can I say?
It was here Neeta began what can only be called her obsession with hummingbirds.
As a fan of Western movies, the desert made me feel right in my element.
All the moreso when we took a detour to Tombstone, site of the O.K. Corral
The town was a bit too gussied up for its own good...
...and you could tour it by stagecoach at two-and-a-half miles an hour...
...and watch the West's most famous gunfight twice a day, on the hour.
It was a weird, desaturated mixture of real history and bland exploitation.
But now and then, from the right angle, it felt like a ghost town after all.
The highway rest stops in New Mexico had a certain expressionist charm...
...and the desert often smoked mysteriously from fires, dust devils...
...or in this case, like a vision from the 1950s, a lone American car.
The national parks tend to be weird variations on the ordinary...
...as at White Sands, common sand dunes of an uncommon color.
That single change made it one of the most beautiful, evocative landscapes we'd ever seen.
The white color comes from gypsum (rather than the more common silica).
But some of the atomic-era, SciFi weirdness is purely manmade...
...a result of the park's proximity to the site of the world's first atomic explosion.
We passed through Artesia, N.M., home of the bulldogs (and evidently, numerologists)
Carlsbad lay not far beyond - quite an ordinary place, on the surface.
Its entire 30 miles of limestone caves are tucked in this hill, above the level of the plain.
You walk down through a natural entrance from which bats swarm out just after dusk.
The rooms just beyond it are grand as a cathedral, soaring as an airport.
As you walk you're surrounded by delicate draperies and pillars
...and you continue to descend, from one great hall to another, until...
...you reach the elevators, which seemed like a good idea in the 1930s.
The so-called "Big Room," there at 800 feet down, spreads over an area equal to 16 football fields.
A formation like the "bashful elephant" may be just one foot high...
...while the temples and pillars can be 30, 40, 50 feet high or more.
This one looked like Robbie the Robot, from Forbidden Planet...
This one (or at least the hanging part) made us think of the Fortress of Solitude in Superman...
Sooner or later we saw every shape known to man.
We didn't have time for the UFO Museum in Roswell (but the truth is out there).
We had a wide open state to cross...
...and many windmills to pass...
...to get to the best green-chili cheeseburgers in America, at the Owl Cafe.
From there we went more or less straight to Santa Fe...
...where the wonderful annual international folk art market was in full swing.
More than 100 artisans from 45 countries sell their work under marquee tents on Museum Hill.
The one that captivated me was an old Haitian woman (not this woman) with a dark vision for the quilt market.
We stayed with Ajoy and Sunita in Albuquerque; only Ajoy made it into the photos.
All in all, Santa Fe was a charming mixture of earthiness...
Spanish-cum-native style...
...and greed.
It's also where my best friend Bud and his family live.
Before leaving we took the tramway up Sandia Mountain for a goodbye view of Albuquerque.
Driving north towards Colorado we watched huge forest fires in the mountains.
...and a careless profusion of beautiful hills and mountains...
...and the quirkier sights of the American highway.
Mesa Verde • Great Sand Dunes • Rocky Mountain • Grand Teton
You feel in Mesa Verde like you're crossing eras with an ancient civilization.
Native Americans built entire cities into the indentations in the cliffs of southwestern Colorado.
There's an eerie sense of both presence and absence about them now.
They built ceremonial pits, kivas, that recalled even more ancient houses half-dug from the ground.
Vultures always add to the moodiness of a place like this.
And while we're distracted for a moment, the plants here were beautiful too...
...and the feral horses, which long ago escaped from their native owners.
I learned that the native Americans had a well-developed sense of the spectacular...
...that their cities could be huge, like Cliff Palace...
...or so tiny as to induce claustrophobia, even from across the valley.
(We came here shortly after a fire that burned away a 600-year-old pinion-juniper forest.)
...and then one day the natives simply left. The age set aside for cliff dwellings was over.
Most of the mountain valleys in Colorado could be national parks if they wanted to be.
It's a state blessed with evocative clouds and lovely hills.
Several storms passed over us as we headed east.
They would rain spectacularly in the distance and then vanish.
And the day finally ended with a gorgeous sunset in a faraway corner of the plains.
The next morning we awoke to hummingbirds and to amazing sand dunes in the distance.
Great Sand Dunes isn't one of those portmanteau national parks, with a thousand wonders and landmarks.
It has 800-foot dunes in front of 13,000-foot peaks. Period.
But it does this one thing very well.
The dunes look like Georgia O'Keeffe paintings as much as like something from the real world.
Next we drove north over 10,000-foot-high plains, past mountain ranges and ghost-towns-cum-gambling-meccas
...until we came to what surprised us as one of the most beautiful parks there is.
Imagine the mountains and forests that John Denver saw in his dreams...
...with lush meadows (called parks) full of wildflowers and rustic cabins...
...dancing waters and deep sleepy forests...
...waterfalls so huge you can barely see the people sitting there on the right side toward the middle of them...
...aspen trees with eyes (this might be from one of John Denver's nightmares)...
...trails leading off into still more beautiful mountains...
...and did I mention elk? Lots of elk. You get the idea.
The park's highlight is the Trail Ridge Road, at 12,000 feet elevation the highest road in the United States.
You climb up to a thinly-oxygenated land of alpine meadows...
...of valleys falling off to nowhere and long strings of peaks...
...of fog and clouds that hang over the land like a blanket....
Of course ther are elk - you can't get away from the elk...
The cliffs dwarf the largest cars Detroit can build...
...and the formations are odd and mysterious, like a SciFi movie set in the Scottish highlands...
It amazed us how the peaks looked comforting and forbidding at the same time.
Neeta wanted to capture lightning on film - and she usually achieves what she aims for.
I simply watched.
Oh, and I became friends with the magpies.
Driving north, we quickly realized that Wyoming operates by different rules...
But it had the attractive quality of stretching on forever...
...and of slapping your face with beauty, when you came right up to it.
Grand Teton was another park that contained one perfect, simple thing...
...this one triplet of mountain peaks, sticking up out of the plains like a sawblade.
Neeta attributed its spanking-new visitor center to Dick Cheney's influence.
Jenny Lake, on the other hand, was a product of geological evolution. Beat that, Mr. Cheney.
We sat at the lodge at Lake MacDonald, drinking margaritas to the beauty.
The mountains seemed to float over it, like a mirage on an imaginary seashore.
There's only a short parkway separating the Tetons from Yellowstone Park.
It was beautiful for the roadside color, if for nothing else.
Yellowstone • Glacier and Waterton Lakes
Many parks had felt small and fragile, but Yellowstone was expansive and robust, a world unto itself.
Its original gate, from 1872, is the most magnificent in the park system...
...on a still-billowing plain, a pledge to the people of the world.
The park is three thousand square miles of things you can't see anywhere else...
...not just waterfalls, but waterfalls among pinnacles...
...not just meadows, but meadows that stretch on forever...
...not just lakes the size of oceans, but lakes with boiling blue springs alongside them.
The wildlife aren't frightened by cars; they take a patronizing attitude.
The landscapes seem to embody some melancholy, wordless truth.
Like the story of an ancient forest now recalled by a single petrified tree.
We stayed our first two days at Mammoth Hot Springs...
...a set of wildly colored terraced hillsides.
They were created by mineral-bearing waters pouring from cracks in the ground...
...and are left barren and white when springs dry up or move elsewhere.
Orange Spring Mound is perhaps the weirdest upshot of the whole fandango.
Mammoth was the first place Yellowstone vistiors used to see; the visitor center is a former army barracks.
The elk here have long grown used to the people they ostensibly share the land with.
For that matter the grizzly bears seem so comfortable as to be almost effete...
...and the bison do as well.
We weren't iconoclasts. We went to see Old Faithful like everyone else.
Unlike most of them, we stayed to the end of the eruption. (They last four minutes or so.)
But there's much more to see in the geyser basins than spectacular columns of water. There are strange lily pad formations...
...and brilliant clear holes that seem to go down forever...
...vents spewing dry steam...
...boiling mud pots...
...and delicate terracing that looks like it was designed by a graphic artist...
...and sometimes filled in with brilliant color. Earth has really gone overboard here.
The Castle Geyser erupted for more than an hour one evening, then threw in a rainbow for good measure.
The Norris Geyster Basin is one of the most active and colorful areas in the park.
It is especially rich in hats, thanks to the wind.
My favorite geysers were the ones that emptied into the cold waters of the Firehole River...
...and Excelsior Geyser, once the world's largest, so powerful it blew itself apart (leaving this pool)...
...and Neeta's favorite, the Grand Prismatic Spring, a thin sea with all the colors of a pop-art rainbow.
Leaving Yellowstone we quickly rejoined the tacky, tawdry world.
Everywhere we drove in the West, roads were being fixed, thanks to the president's stimulus package.
And little towns hung on by a string (Augusta is Montana's taxidermy capital).
Our final park, Glacier, rose out of the distance from the flattest of plains.
It was Blackfoot country - still, as it was a hundred years ago.
Our final national park lodge was one of the classics, in East Glacier...
...built by the Great Northern Railway for a country more romantic and politically incorrect than our own.
Glacier felt like an older, purer, vanishing world - a lost jewel of the frozen north.
We had grown a little jaded and hard to impress, but it tried harder and more unselfconsciously.
There was weather everywhere, hanging over the lakes and mountains
It threw an already wild nature a little more off balance.
Then it would clear and everything would look absurd in its perfection.
You always felt you were hanging at the edge of something sublime and overwhelming.
To geologists, this is one such place: where the Earth's layers folded in crazy ways.
To the rest of us, the landscape just around it is like the destination of a great novel. (The boat makes me think Conrad or Greene.)
On the second-to-last day of our 47-day trip, we let someone else do the driving.
We took a tour of the Going-to-the-Sun Road, carved through the middle of the park.
This river reminded me of a Winslow Homer painting.
It was everything strange and faraway that a national park should be.
No one had bothered to name the valley above Bird Woman Falls. The world was that rich.
We were alone with the cliffs and the snowfields for a few hours longer.
It's amazing how you can feel alone, in an overwhelming Nature, with people all around you.
It's as if a different world lay just under this one, for those who knew how to see it.
