Welcome to the Hardcore Husky Forums. Folks who are well-known in Cyberland and not that dumb.
Favorite National Park you have visited
Comments
-
Yellowstone - BRB, Old Faithful
Knew hear?Pitchfork51 said:National parks are basically white supremacy.
Haven't you seen the articles on black people not going as much as white people? -
Other
It's mostly Chinese and (dot) Indians at the West Coast National Parks.Pitchfork51 said:National parks are basically white supremacy.
Haven't you seen the articles on black people not going as much as white people?
@dnc I think you really screwed the pooch by not taking in Crater Lake. Took the fam down there on Sunday as I haven't been since 1989. North Entrance is about 90 mins from my house.
Just fucking stunning as there's no other view like that on Earth.
For my money, the Mt Rushmore of National Park (US) views is Grand Canyon, Crater, Yosemite, and then Rainier. Zion and Bryce are honorable mention. -
Glacier - Bobby Hauck and Jeff Choate KGI grew up in the wilderness between the Cascades and the Rockies. In a log house. Didn’t have a phone until I was 8 and that was a party line.
Yellowstone as a kid felt very urban to me, it had paths. And stores and shit. But Glacier was wild and pristine, true beauty. And as I recall Lewis and Clark caverns were nearby and totally worth the side trip. -
Mt Rainier - DoogItUp.gifWell it's good to know @dnc is still alive.
-
Yellowstone - BRB, Old FaithfulI still owe you guys a breakdown of my trip last year. Will try and get on that soon.
Just stumbled across this story. Super cool. #Goals -
Yellowstone - BRB, Old FaithfulAlright so the grand 2022 trip report is going to fill up multiple posts but I'll get started with one here. Will probably structure it something like this:
Rocky Mountain parks (Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier, Banff)
WASHINGTON parks, dammit (North Cascades, Rainier, Olympic)
Cali forest/mountain parks (Redwood, Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon)
Other Cali parks (Pinnacles, Channel Islands, Joshua Tree)
Canyon parks (Zion, Arches, north rimGrand Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches)
Colorado parks (Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison) -
Yellowstone - BRB, Old FaithfulSo for context we spent 41 days on the road and I think ended up seeing bits and pieces of 21 American National Parks plus one primary Canadian park (Banff) plus sort of passing through about 3 other Canadian parks. Big quantity over quality trip, we wanted to see as much as possible. It was the wife, myself and three kids, then aged 7, 6 and 2. We put almost 12,000 miles on the minivan round trip. Left Memphis day before Memorial Day, spent about 12 days getting to Seattle (up through TN, AR, MO, KS, started site seeing in Colorado, NW Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Alberta and BC), 8 days in Seattle, a couple nights on the Oly peninsula, and another 20 days getting home (through Oregon, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, then basically done siteseeing and just hustling back through NE NM, TX panhandle, OK, AR, and TN to home).
Rocky Mountain Parks
Grand Teton: We sadly didn't have much time set aside for Grand Teton, it was kind of just a "passing through" station for us. One of the big goals of this trip was to see as much wildlife as possible for the kids (the older two had Bingo sheets made up with 25 animals each they had selected that they were hoping to see on the trip and the first one to fill their sheet up first won - this was both brilliant and a little too brilliant. At one point we saw a humpback whale and my then 7 year old shrugged because it wasn't on his list). With wildlife a big goal we targeted a lot more tim in Yellowstone than Grand Teton. I can't reiterate strongly enough how big of a mistake this was.
So Grand Teton...holy shit! I knew the mountains were spectittilytacular. We had been there a couple times as kids and my little brother and I called them the Grand Tittytons because that's what middle school boys do. Little did we know how historically accurate our horniness was but I digress. I did not realize what a wildlife sanctuary this place was. We passed through on our way into Yellowstone and came across a massive bunch of cars parked hastily on both sides of the road. We knew something big was up. So I dropped the wife and kiddos, drove down to find a place to park and came back to find this.
That's my daughter looking through some binoculars a generous lady let her borrow as they lined up at the ranger established perimeter. Why did the ranger establish a perimeter? Because
there was a Mama grizz hanging out with her three cubs. Sorry for the shitty photography but apparently I was so excited I mostly just got video and no pics so these are screen caps cause this site has no good video function. This was a big deal for us because one of the biggest goals of all for this trip was to see a bear in the wild. I had never seen one. More importantly my dad (not on the trip) had never seen one, so I pumped the kids up before the trip "we are hopefully going to see a bear and when we do we're gonna call grandpa and tell him "we saw a bear before you did". And sure enough this was pretty much our first chance to see one and we got not one but four and grizz rather than black bear at that. Huge moment for us, even though we were aways away and surrounded by people.
We went into Yellowstone for the night and the next day (see below) then came back down through Grand Teton towards a little place we were staying at on the west side of Teton Pass in Victor Idaho. On the trip south we stopped in the park to get something to eat and came across a mama fox and three kits. Again shitty screen caps:
So that was fun.
Then rolling out after dinner we saw another grizz (this one a solo male). Didn't get any good pics of him though but by now we were really on a roll.
We also came back the next day to go to the Visitor Center to get the kids passports' stamped because both ways going through GT we were too late in the day to catch the VC. And on the way back from the VC we saw a baby moose nuzzling under its mom.
Also there are mountains there.
So yeah I guess for some of the better park experiences like this the parks will need their own poast and it won't even work to group them together.
TL; DR: Grand Teton is the tits and you should spend more time there than we did.
-
Mt Rainier - DoogItUp.gifWe drove past the Grand Tetons like the Griswold family
-
How many people here have been to Spray Falls, Comet Falls, or both? (at MRNP)
I still haven’t voted, but Mt. Rainier is getting close. I have a proximity bias against it, but the more you get to know it, the better it is. I used to rank Olympic higher, but after exploring both, I can share more accessible cool things at Rainier.
-
Yellowstone - BRB, Old FaithfulI'll try and keep my Yellowstone recap a bit shorter. This was my fourth time at Yellowstone but my first time a. without my crazy Mom (RIP) who had a massive meltdown each of the first three times we were there b. staying overnight. We drove up through Grand Teton and through the John D Rockefeller Parkway and arrived in Yellowstone pretty late in the day - a bit before 8pm maybe. The first surprise highlight was Lake Lewis which was still frozen over, Ive only ever seen one frozen lake in person before and that was really more of a pond. Frozen Lake Lewis was really spectacular.
We continued northbound to the "8" then headed northwest to Old Faithful where we had a cabin for the night. It was dark by the time we got there so we didn't see much else on the way in but the cabin was pretty nice. I was braced for it to be a dump since it was only $116. The key here was we booked it almost a full year out, these places fill up quickly.
The next morning we called my pops, the kids chanted "We saw a bear before you did, we saw a bear before you did", we all had a great laugh. Personal highlight of the trip for me. Then we set out to see Yellowstone. First thing we did was walk over to see Old Faithful and we literally walked right past it. Had no idea the cabins were so extremely close to it. Once we found out where it was we walked back, found a spot on the benches and waited. I'd seen OF a couple of times before but with my parents we were always in a rush so we saw it behind a behind a mass of people. This time we had front row seats which was really cool.
After Old Faithful and a stop at the VC to get the passport stamps and junior ranger books (huge hits btw if you have kids I highly recommend both) (btw Yellowstone is the only park I've visited that charges for Junior Ranger books) we hit the van to drive around the park. Yellowstone is massive so even though it was only like 10 in the morning at this point we had a long day ahead of us. We stopped to see Grand Prismatic Spring, Mammoth Hot Springs (and ate lunch in Mammoth), had a mostly uneventful drive through the Lamar Valley with not nearly as much wildlife as we expected but we were there in the dead middle of the day so that didn't help, then hit the first of the three significant waterfalls, Tower Fall.
Turning south on the figure eight we hit Lower Falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone then continued southward back towards the Tetons.
We saw tons of bison of course and a few elk with some up pretty close, but the big wildlife highlight was a black bear that we saw along with only 2 or 3 other vehicles (Yellowstone is known for massive wildlife traffic jams) and not real far off the road. I think it was between east of Mammoth but before the Lamar Valley but I am not even 100% sure where it was. But regardless, after having seen the 4 grizz the day before we were feeling pretty blessed at this point.
