You’ve probably car-camped in one with your family, contemplated rock formations with friends in another while high as a kite, or hiked through their ancient trees and desolate peaks. Our national parks are turning 100, and today this vast network of rugged landscapes, biblical weather swings, and roving wildlife represents some of the last places where we can still come face-to-face with a vision of America as it once was. Here, a few vocal partisans (some of them from our archives) testify to the parks’ continued power to shock and awe.
Russell Banks, September 1994
On Everglades National Park, Florida
“Out on the Anhinga Trail, the only sounds you hear are the wind riffling through the saw grass and the plash of fish feeding on insects and one another and the great long-necked anhingas diving or emerging from the mahogany waters of a sluggish, seaward-moving slough. You hear a hundred frogs cheeping and croaking and the sweet wet whistle of a red-winged blackbird. A primeval six-foot-long alligator passes silently through the deep slough to the opposite side, coasts to a stop in the shallows, and lurks, a corrugated log with eyes. An anhinga rises from the water and flies like a pterodactyl to a cluster of nearby mangrove roots and cumbrously spreads and turns its enormous wings like glistening black kites silhouetted against the noontime sun. It’s mid-May, yes—but what century?”
Terry Tempest Williams, April 2012
On Grand Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, and Arches National Parks
“In the end, it may be solitude that the future will thank us for—the kind of solitude our ancestors knew; solitude that inspired in their imaginations the creative acts which made our survival as a species possible.”
Sue Halpern, September 2009
On Yellowstone National Park, Montana
“A few years ago, my daughter and I hiked up Mount Washburn. It was a glorious summer day, and although we had planned to climb no more than halfway, the top of the mountain beckoned. Standing at the summit, we had a tremendous sense of accomplishment—and if the adventure had ended there, it would have been sublime. But mountains and mountain weather have a way of changing the story, and almost as soon as we started down, dark clouds sizzling with lightning charged across the valley like an advancing army. The rain arrived first, sheets of it, and then the wind picked up, sending those sheets sideways. We joined hands and ran down the trail, counting the seconds between a flash of lightning and the sound of it, until they were the same thing. We were well above tree line, completely exposed, running for our lives and feeling hunted—the most primal fear. We made it, obviously, but just barely. As soon as we reached the parking lot and dashed into the car, a bolt of lightning shot by overhead, entered the ground, ran up the roots of a nearby pine, and exploded out of the earth like a missile. And so, instead of leaving the mountain triumphant, we left it feeling grateful and stupid and humble and rightfully small in the face of the powerful, wild, spectacular indifference of the natural world.”
Guy Martin, April 2010
On Joshua Tree National Park, California
“Through the netting, we can see the Milky Way stretching in a symphonic arc east into high, bright space, a staggering view of the cosmos, but as we see it, fighting to sleep in God’s own aerodynamic test tunnel, the cosmos is a huge joke of which we are the butt.”
Francine Prose, August 1993
On Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee
“To enjoy the park in summer requires submission to the idea that one’s fellow humans are also part of nature. You learn to seize your quiet moments. Now the Grotto Falls trail was ours alone, and I was walking briskly, partly out of concern that my solitude might prove short-lived. Just then I heard my husband hurrying to catch up, breathing considerably harder than the steep trail should have warranted. He said, ‘Keep walking.’ He was deliberately jangling his keys. He said he’d seen a small black bear ambling with her two cubs beside the trail. A little later we headed back down and there she was, the bear, coming up the path with her cubs. This was not the benign teddy my husband had described. This bear was enormous. We walked—very calmly—back to the falls. The bear kept coming. Until at last we ran into a large group of hikers babbling with excitement: They’d just seen a bear and had startled it off the trail. How my heart went out to them now, how dear they suddenly looked—my noisy fellow humans.”
Geoff Dyer, June 2016
Author of White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, on viewing America's national parks as an outsider
“The best way to convey what the American national parks mean to someone from my little island—Britain—is to see one of our own parks from the point of view of a visitor from North America. Finding herself in England, a character in a story by Canadian writer Kate Pullinger notices that “there are a few lakes, somewhere, but they are all kept in the Lake District, as if one can’t allow lakes just anywhere.” This makes it sound like the natural equivalent of some zoned 'entertainment district'—especially since so much of its allure (Wordsworth, the Romantics) is marinated in that special British preserve, 'history.'
“The American national parks offer an escape from limiting ideas of district and history. It’s not that they are timeless. Rather, you enter a realm of time on a vast scale. You witness non-human or geological time at work as measured by the implacably slow, often incomprehensible processes by which these marvels have been created. It’s as if your watch recalibrates itself and starts measuring time in millennia instead of minutes.
“I’ll never forget seeing the brochures sent back to me in England—I was about ten—from an aunt who was touring the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert of Arizona. Those images of otherworldly landscapes and prehistoric light set a standard for natural beauty that seemed unsurpassable. I finally got to see these places for myself in my early thirties and experienced what has since become familiar: the ease with which the unsurpassable surpasses itself, even in the course of a single visit. The fact that the mind has been blown at Angels Landing in Zion on Tuesday does not stop it from being re-blown at Observation Point on Wednesday. Every time I go to Death Valley I find myself repeating the words of photographer Edward Weston when he came in 1937: 'My God! It can’t be!' But it can. We must make sure that it always will.”
Rick Bass, June 2016
Author of For a Little While: New and Selected Stories, on our obligation to the parks
“Most of us pretty much know one version or another of how the national parks began, as if with the story of an old uncle (in this case the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt), about whom family lore shifts slightly with each year’s retelling. We’ve heard of how the Robust One, doing his manly things on a hunting trip out west, happened upon the caldera of Yellowstone and fell in love with it, and supported the idea—unique at the time—of making it a national park.
“Never mind that the story is apocryphal. (Although Teddy created five national parks, Yellowstone pre-dated him, and it was Woodrow Wilson who signed the act creating the National Park Service in 1916.) The system now includes some 400 parks and historic sites, encompassing over 84 million acres. Some are small (Hot Springs, Arkansas); others, like my favorite, Glacier National Park in Montana, straddle two countries.
“I took my oldest daughter on a daylong hike on the Granite Park Chalet trail in Glacier when she was six months old, toting her in the front pack. At the chalet, I sipped tea—the larch in the valleys far below blazing gold, the blue haze of the smoke from a far-off wildfire softening the mountains, the namesake mountaintop glaciers smaller than in the black-and-white photos from a generation earlier. She doesn’t remember it, of course, and yet I believe also there is a deeper part of her that will always know the shape of that land underfoot as she bobbed in her sling, measuring in that manner each contour and the sound of the wind up high.
“In the beginning, our parks—or the idea behind them—was pretty much solely to serve our hungers, whether recreational (Yellowstone visitors in the late 19th century would supposedly wander out to Old Faithful, shove their laundry down into its sulfurous maw, then wait the 65 minutes for their steam-cleaned if malodorous clothing to be ejected into the sky) or spiritual. (I’m reminded of the great naturalist John Muir in Yosemite: “by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter.”)
“They were our parks, and we celebrated them almost as an object of wealth. Through subsequent generations, however, we have come to see that there is additional value beyond our original impulse to enclose these places, for they now serve as islands, gardens of refugia for our cleanest air, clearest water, and for a biological diversity which far exceeds that of public or private lands lacking such protection. Our parks house the minute, such as endangered butterflies and delicate, carnivorous swamp-plants, and the grand: none more famous than the iconic bison and grizzly bears of Yellowstone, both of which wander that park with freedom but which are now at risk of being hunted if they stray beyond the park’s boundaries.
“Today, we risk failing our legacy in other ways. We built roads and infrastructure into the parks’ interiors, encouraging people to visit them—the parks, in that manner, serving as a kind of cultural currency to be transferred, in story and memory, from grandparents to parents to children, and uniting strangers in the uncommon experience of wonder. But now these systems are defunded and crumbling, as if we’ve forgotten them.
“Conservation biology holds that the larger and rounder an ecosystem is, the more resilient it is against the external forces that would weaken it. Yet we are not protecting the parks’ flanks, the country at their edges, through which the wildlife and entire ecological processes flow. Gold mines, roads, clear-cuts, and livestock gnaw their way right up against the dashed-line boundaries of these sanctuaries.
“What will the future of the parks hold? It is worth noting that the two words economical and ecological share the same Greek root. Beyond the benefits the parks offer us, there awaits a more mature perspective: the idea that beauty can exist beyond our pronouncements of what is or isn’t beautiful. And in that realization, a greater wisdom might be made available to us. It is in the parks and in their nearby wilderness where we can still catch the scent and sight and sound of an older world that was beautiful back before we saw it and called it so, and which will remain so—if we steward the parks carefully—long after we each close our eyes at last.”
Our friends at Pitchfork curated a collection of earthy folk and country tunes, perfect for nights by the campfire.