Thursday, June 17, 2010

National Parks, a Meme!


Lockwood started it and I've seen it on numerous sites now. I can't resist peer pressure, so I must also participate in the meme. Says Lockwood: Bold the ones you have visited, and italicize the ones you’ve never heard of before.

Most visited:
10: Glacier - See it before the glaciers are gone: a few decades at most...it will still be pretty, but...different
9: Acadia
8: Grand Teton - Easy to get to if you visit Yellowstone, and more spectacular vistas, especially if you hike into the mountains, above the valley floor.

7: Cuyahoga Valley
6: Rocky Mountain - many, many years ago
5: Olympic - looked at it from across the Puget Sound, though
4: Yellowstone – Weird and strange, and deserving of being the first national park. Lots more to it than Old Faithful, though. Quite a few geysers are bigger, and of course all the geothermal features are sitting on one of the biggest calderas on the planet (I refuse to call it a supervolcano).
3: Yosemite – Well, okay, I've been there a couple of times
2: Grand Canyon - It's grand. That's all I have to say. I get there whenever I can
1: Great Smoky Mountains

Least Visited:
10: City of Rocks NR, Idaho
9: Cumberland Island NS, Georgia
8: Florissant Fossil Beds NM, Colorado
7: Chiricahua NM, Arizona
6: Tonto NM, Arizona - got close to it, but late in the day, so we visited Besh-Ba-Gowah in Globe instead
5: Dry Tortugas NP, Florida
4: Katmai NP & Preserve, Alaska - learn about rangering at Katmai with one of our newest geobloggers - Watch for Rocks
3: Kalaupapa NHP, Hawaii
2: Hagerman Fossil Beds NM, Idaho
1: Russel Cave NM, Alabama

I'm noticing that very few of the memists so far have been to many of the parks on the "least visited" list. If you have, I hope you will participate and include pictures!

3 comments:

Gaelyn said...

Like you, I visited some of the parks 30+ years ago, and have no pictures. Really need to get out more.

Randy Adsit said...

I'd like to suggest a third category: National Park units that are visited less than one would expect.

Number 1 in that category is a National Park that can actually be seen from Los Angeles (on a clear day from a good vantage point). This NP can be reached in a day trip for tens of millions of people around Southern California. And this NP is beautiful, interesting and offers a wealth of recreational activities. But it's practically unknown!

I'm talking about Channel Islands National Park.

Garry Hayes said...

Channel Islands are beautiful, even if from a distance. I was in Santa Barbara for four years, and saw them on most clear days. Only made it out to Anacapa Island, though, but it was a great day that we spent there.