PARALLEL QUESTS

Jubilation after visiting my final U.S. National Park

In the traditional hero’s quest, the hero knows the objective of his quest when he embarks on it. In contrast, I recently completed two parallel quests that began and indeed proceeded for much of their duration without any intention or even awareness on my part. This proves that I am in fact no hero.

Further proof is provided by the way I defined my quests once I decided I was on them. In essence, I defined them in a manner that made them relatively easy to complete, a bit like drawing the bull’s eye around the arrow.

Let me explain. The quests I have completed consisted of visiting all the national parks in Israel and the lower 48 states of the United States by the time I turned 60. I started visiting national parks in the United States and Israel with my parents and brother when I was a child. I continued visiting national parks in both countries as an adult. Six years ago, as articles started to appear about the impending centennial of the U.S. National Park Service in 2016, I saw a list of the U.S. national parks, and realized that I had already visited at least half of them. I thought it would be fun to visit all of them.

However, as I started researching this quest, I learned that the five national parks in Alaska that I hadn’t already visited were extremely remote and undeveloped. Getting to them would involve expensive seaplane flights, unmaintained dirt roads, and camping out. Furthermore, another national park I hadn’t visited was in American Samoa, and was largely underwater. While I was dedicated to this quest, I wasn’t that dedicated. Thus, I decided to define my quest as visiting the national parks in the lower 48. This meant I could achieve my objective without the hassle of getting to the remote national parks in Alaska and American Samoa, as well as the somewhat less remote park in the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Of course, I would include the three national parks I had visited in Alaska, and the two national parks I had visited in Hawaii, in my master list of parks visited.)

Additionally, I decided the quest would only include the full-fledged national parks, which are designated by an act of Congress. I would not attempt to visit the over 400 properties maintained by the National Park Service, which include national monuments, historic sites, and battlefields, in addition to the parks. That would require a level of commitment (and time) I just didn’t have.

At the time I launched the quest, there were 59 U.S. national parks. Subtracting the five parks in Alaska, and the parks in American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands, I needed to visit a total of 52 national parks. By then, I had already visited 32. After I started the quest, Congress designated two additional parks — Gateway Arch and Indiana Sand Dunes. Fortunately, I had already visited the Gateway Arch so I only had one additional park to visit. (I decided that if I had visited a place before it had been designated as a national park, it still counted, because I had visited the place, and the place had not changed by virtue of the designation.) If all this sounds a bit legalistic, well, I’m a lawyer. (Just after I completed the quest, Congress designated another national park — White Sands in New Mexico. I had visited it, too, before it became a national park.)

A couple of years after I embarked on my U.S. national park quest, I went on a business trip to Israel with my wife Leesa. After my meetings, we decided to visit Apollonia, Crusader ruins on the Mediterranean coast just north of Herzliya. We had never been there before, and its close proximity to Tel Aviv fit into our schedule. The weather was wonderful — clear blue skies and a brisk breeze off the Mediterranean. The ruins perched dramatically on a cliff above the sea, and paragliders soared overhead. (That inspired us to go paragliding in Netanya later in the afternoon, but that is another story.) As we were heading back to our rental car after an unexpectedly delightful visit, I looked at the back of the brochure provided when we paid our admission. There was a list of the national parks in Israel, including Apollonia. I realized that I had already visited most of them over the course of my life. We decided that the next time we were in Israel, we would go to the remaining parks. It’s such a small country — and the parks are so small — that we figured we could visit the remaining parks in less than a week. Thus, the quest to visit all the U.S. national parks in the lower 48 evolved into two parallel quests to visit the national parks in the United States and Israel.

While it was easy to come up with a definitive list of the U.S. national parks because of their Congressional designation and the high level of organization of the U.S. National Park Service, it was much more difficult to find a definitive list of the Israeli national parks. The Israeli national parks are under the jurisdiction of a government body, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. The Authority is responsible for both national parks and nature reserves. The Authority’s Hebrew website has several parks not included in the English website, and vice versa. A printed list of parks on the Authority’s letterhead treats as national parks several sites that the website classifies as nature reserves. Several archaeological sites labeled as national parks in Wikipedia do not appear on any of the Authority’s lists. I suspect that there are archaeological sites that technically are national parks but haven’t been included in any of the official lists because they have not yet been developed for tourists. I decided that if a park wasn’t on the Authority’s website or printed list, I would not include it in my quest. I also didn’t include parks on the West Bank, more for reasons of safety than politics.

When I first committed myself to these two quests, I didn’t set a deadline for completing them. But after I turned 59, I realized that I would be able to visit the remaining parks by my 60th birthday, so that became my objective.

I visited the national parks, both in Israel and the U.S., in four phases. The first phase was when I was a child, and I was taken to the parks by my parents. The second phase was when I was in college and law school. The third phase was when I was adult, and visited the parks with Leesa and one or both of our children. The fourth and final phase was once I decided to visit all the parks. Because these parallel journeys have lasted my entire life, recounting these journeys is in effect an autobiography.

Phase One — Childhood

United States

I grew up in Beverly Hills, California. My father Arnold was a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UCLA, and my mother Ora taught at the L.A. Hebrew High School and later at the University of Judaism. My brother David was three years older than me. David passed away eleven years ago of cancer, and my mother died of Alzheimer’s last year. This means that my description of this phase of my journey must rely principally on my childhood memories supplemented by my father’s memories. Obviously, it would have been helpful to have my mother’s and brother’s recollections.

I can’t say for certain which national park I visited first, but it likely was in California. It may have been Joshua Tree, which was then a national monument. Joshua Tree is just a couple of hours from Los Angeles, and close to Palm Springs, where we sometimes went in the winter. On one trip to Palm Springs we went to Joshua Tree. I don’t have distinct recollections of the visit, other than that there were lots of Joshua Trees, and I wasn’t impressed.

(At the end of January, 2020, after I had finished the park quest, I went back to Joshua Tree NP. Over the years, friends reported on wonderful visits to Joshua Tree, and I began to wonder what I had missed. I needed to go to Los Angeles to put my parents’ house on the market, so Leesa joined me and we headed out to Joshua Tree before attending to the house. The park was far more impressive than I had remembered. The Dr. Seuss-like Joshua Trees were the least of it. The surreal rock formations jutting out of the desert floor were enormous, and as we hiked the Hidden Canyon loop, I couldn’t understand why we hadn’t visited there more often in my childhood. David and I would have enjoyed clambering over the rocks, playing Cowboys and Indians (an acceptable thing to do in the 1960s!). It could be that the road network in the park was not as extensive back then. After hiking to Barker Dam and exploring the area around Skull Rock, Leesa and I drove to the southern entrance, transitioning from the high Mojave Desert to the low Colorado Desert. The boulders disappeared, replaced by vast arid panoramas. The Joshua Trees also disappeared, and instead we saw groves of flowering chollo cacti. We took a quick walk through a small oasis of date palms in Cottonwood Springs, an enticing preview of the longer hike we would take the next day in the Palm Canyon.)

I have a much clearer recollection of Death Valley, which also was a national monument at the time. We went in the winter, so we didn’t have to worry about it being one of the hottest places in the world (the highest ambient temperature on the surface of the Earth was recorded there — 134 degrees). Although Death Valley is the lowest point in North America (282 feet below sea level), by then I had already be to the Dead Sea in Israel, which is the lowest point in the world (1,412 feet below sea level). Putting these records aside, I was struck by the stark beauty of the desert from the Zabreskie Point lookout. (I didn’t remember these exact numbers more the 50 years later — I found them on Wikipedia as I was writing this piece. But you can be sure that David and I knew them at the time. We read all the time — we had all the How and Why books — and were curious about the world around us. I studied the Guinness Book of World Records and volumes of the World Book Enyclopedia, which I borrowed from the Markovics across the street on LaPeer Drive.)

Our parents took us to Lassen Volcanic National Park, further north in California. David and I enjoyed the concept of Lassen because it was an active volcano. (After we stayed there, the lodge was closed because of volcanic activity.) We climbed an inactive cinder cone, where we slid down one step for every two steps we climbed.

We also visited Yosemite National Park. I was amazed by the grandeur of Yosemite Valley, with Half Dome on the south and El Capitan on the north. We hiked up to Vernal and Nevada Falls, which was unusual for us. On our family visits to national parks, we typically did not hike. We’d stop at viewpoints along the road, and walk along the flat nature trails, but rarely would go on hikes longer than a mile or with any serious vertical rise. But I remember Vernal and Nevada Falls. The volume of water flowing over the falls made a huge impression on me — Southern California, where I grew up, is a desert, so that volume of flowing water was outside of my experience. Yosemite was also my first encounter with the enormous sequoia trees. We drove out of the Valley to Tuolome Meadows, where David and I played in the stream. We then continued over Tioga Pass to the barren landscape around Mono Lake.

I went to Yosemite on school trips towards the end of eighth and twelfth grades. Both of these trips were in May, so there still was some snow in the Valley. The programs were run by the Yosemite Institute, with hikes led by naturalists who explained the geology as well as the flora and fauna. On the eighth-grade trip, we all bought brightly colored “Go Climb a Rock” t-shirts sold by the Yosemite Mountaineering School. Mine was sky blue. My mother sent me on the trip with a loaf of cinnamon bread, one of my favorite snacks. I stored the loaf in a plastic bag inside a vinyl Pan Am hand-bag, in our cabin in Camp Curry. One day when I returned from a hike, I saw a raccoon scurry out of our cabin. The raccoon had gnawed its way the Pan Am bag and the plastic bag, and eaten my cinnamon bread!

The twelfth-grade trip was much more social than educational. One night we camped out rather than sleep in the Camp Curry cabins. The temperature dropped after sunset, and someone joked that we would be warmer if we doubled up in the sleeping bags. The next morning, my friend Greg implied with a smirk that he had kept warm with Liza in her sleeping bag.

When David and I were teenagers, perhaps the summer after my sophomore year in high school, we went on a family trip to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, just south of Yosemite. I remember the sequoias in Sequoia (obviously), but not much from Kings Canyon, because we spent so little time there. Kings Canyon didn’t have a lodge, and we didn’t hike on any of its trails — I believe we just drove into Kings Canyon, took some pictures, and drove out again. During the trip, I wrote a long letter to a girl I was interested in, describing a hike David and I took. While in high school, I had dreams of being a famous novelist, and I spent much of my spare time writing short stories — typically thrillers. I thought my detailed description of the hike would capture the girl’s heart. It didn’t.

During my childhood, we went on two trips to national parks outside of California. First, over one winter break, our father was giving lectures on Hebrew Literature at synagogues in Albuquerque and Phoenix. We flew to Albuquerque, drove up to Santa Fe and Taos, then headed west to Arizona. We stopped at Petrified Forest (a national monument at the time), but I couldn’t visualize the trees. Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, in Colorado, which I visited years later with Leesa and the kids, actually has much better preserved petrified tree stumps. We continued on to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon National Park, which lived up to its name. The canyon was so large that we could see the shadow cast by rim move on the canyon walls. We walked along the rim because it was flat.

In the summer of 1969, when I was nine and David was twelve, we took an extended trip to the national parks throughout the western states. My father taught at a program at the University of Indiana in Bloomington that summer, and the national parks were more or less on the way. By this time, David, who ultimately became an astrophysicist, had a much better understanding of geology than the rest of us, and throughout the trip he would explain the differences among sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic formations. We drove in our blue Peugeot 404 from L.A. to Zion National Park in Utah. We hiked on the Narrows trail at the bottom of the deep gorge carved by the Virgin River, which was quite adventurous for us — although flat, the trail crossed through the river several times, resulting in wet feet. It could be that David and I went through the water, and our parents stayed behind. Another short hike led us to a curved cliff from which water seeped. It made no sense to me that water could be flowing from rocks in the middle of a desert in the middle of the summer.

After Zion, we drove to Bryce Canyon National Park. We walked along the (flat) trail at the rim of the canyon, with views of the eerie hodoos. We debated whether to hike the two-mile Navaho Trail that descended into the canyon, and I’m pretty sure we did, because I have a recollection of standing at the base of some hodoos. We continued on to Arches National Park, and I was flabbergasted that the arches were naturally formed and could remain standing for millennia. Those natural arches may have inspired my eighth-grade science project on bridges.

We then drove on to Mesa Verde National Park. As we climbed among the ruins, I told my father that I was amazed that the cliff dwellings were 800 years old. My father, in his Euro-centric manner, responded that in Europe, the great cathedrals were being built at the same time. We drove north to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. Looking at the deep, dark, narrow canyon, I thought, nice, but not the Grand Canyon. Next, we visited Rocky Mountain National Park. As we drove over the Trail Road — the highest continuous road in the United States, reaching an elevation of 12,183 feet — snow began to fall. I was astounded that it could snow in July.

My father wasn’t interested in driving across the Great Plains to Indiana — he said there was nothing to see. So, we put the Peugeot in storage in Denver and flew to Indiana. But before we left Denver, my mother had to have her hair done. This was a perennial source of conflict between my parents. My mother never learned how to wash and dry her hair, so she had to go to a hair salon once a week for her hair to be washed, dried, and set. In Beverly Hills, that wasn’t a problem, because she always went to Marcella, the Filipina hair stylist. But when we were on the road, it was obviously more difficult to find a hair salon that met my mother’s standards and that wasn’t too expensive. My mother was by no means a Jewish American Princess — this was her only extravagance. But an extremely inconvenient one when we were travelling. In Denver, she found a hair stylist college where she could have her hair washed and cut for free. When she didn’t return to the hotel after a couple of hours at the college, we went to find her. She was sitting in the chair crying because she didn’t like the way the student had cut and set her hair, and the instructor was attempting to salvage the situation. I couldn’t see anything wrong with her hair, but I did learn an important lesson — you get what you pay for.

We spent the summer term in Bloomington, Indiana. I took summer school classes, and became friendly with the boy next door whose last name was Boozer. It was hot and humid — a preview of the past 37 summers in Washington, D.C. While in Indiana, we visited Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky — the longest cave system in the world. We passed through Frankfort, Kentucky’s capital, and my father asked a policeman for directions. (This was long before GPS.) The policeman’s drawl was so thick that my father had to ask him to repeat himself several times before my father could comprehend the directions.

That summer, David was preparing for his bar mitzvah, and he would often practice his haftorah (for Parashat Beshalach, the longest haftorah of the year) in the car. My father was his tutor, so he’d correct David whenever he made a mistake. I’m not certain whether it was on the trip to Mammoth Caves or to the air force museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, but David was practicing his haftorah as we were driving through a rainstorm. My father pulled over to the side of the road, and we listened on the radio to the broadcast of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. David and I were obsessed with the Apollo missions. David had constructed a large model of the Saturn V rocket, and we both knew in detail all the stages of the lunar landing, which we explained to anyone willing listen. I was convinced that the lunar lander would crash into the moon’s surface. (I always was a pessimist.) Thus, I was shocked that the lander landed safely on the moon. Later that evening, we watched the television broadcast of Neil Armstrong walking on the face of the moon.

After my father finished teaching his course, we flew back to Denver to pick up the Peugeot. One of my father’s cardinal rules was never to go back the way he came. He had one route to UCLA in the morning, and a different route home in the afternoon. This was dictated by traffic, his aversion to left hand-turns, and a desire to avoid monotony. That summer’s trip was a perfect example of my father’s rule. Instead of driving directly back to L.A. from Denver, we went the very long way via Seattle. First we drove to Grand Teton National Park, where we rafted down the Snake River. The river guide instructed us to keep our voices down so as not to startle the wildlife we might see. As we passed a beaver on the riverbank, my mother pointed and yelled excitedly, “There’s a beaver!!” The beaver promptly dove into the river. “There’s a beaver” became a family expression for getting over-excited about something.

We continued north into Yellowstone National Park. I was skeptical that Old Faithful would erupt on schedule, but it did. I also was fascinated by the colors of the hot springs, and the bubbling mud of the mud pots. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone wasn’t as deep or wide as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, but it had two large waterfalls, so I didn’t begrudge it its name. We climbed to the bottom of the falls, even though the trail had many stairs.

From Yellowstone, we drove northwest to Seattle, Washington. We visited Olympic National Park, to which I felt a special affinity because our house in Beverly Hills was half a block north of Olympic Boulevard. Olympic also contained the first rainforest I ever visited, although it wasn’t obvious to me how a rainforest differed from other forests — it certainly wasn’t raining while we were there.

We then drove south to Crater Lake National Park. The lake was beautiful, but it didn’t make sense to me that a lake could form in a volcano’s crater. I knew it was an inactive volcano, but I still thought that the lava in the volcano should boil the lake a way.

We crossed back into California, and visited Redwood National Park. I could tell that they were very large, but didn’t understand the difference between the coastal redwoods and the Sequoias. We finally made it back to Beverly Hills in time for me to start fifth grade.

Israel

As I mentioned, my father was a professor of Hebrew Literature, so we lived in Israel when he had sabbaticals or research grants. Thus, I attended nursery school, second grade, and sixth grade in Jerusalem. We also spent a summer there, perhaps after I completed eighth grade. Because Israel is such a small country, we visited the major national parks multiple times — at least once each trip to Israel.

While the national parks in the United States tend to be very large, and protect places of natural beauty, the national parks in Israel are small, and primarily protect archaeological sites. The archaeological sites span the 3,000-year history of civilization in Israel. As I child, I preferred the more recent ruins such as Crusader forts because they were far larger and in better condition, therefore giving me a much better concept of the original structure. Also, they were much better venues for David and me to pretend we soldiers fighting one another. Many of the archaeological sites are in scenic uninhabited regions, such as seashores, deserts, or defensible mountaintops. Some of the national parks are natural sites such as beaches or springs. The springs in particular are modest by U.S. standards, but in an arid country, the desire to celebrate relatively small streams and ponds is understandable.

We always lived in the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood of Jerusalem, either on Rehov HaPalmach or within 100 yards of it. On Shabbat, we would often would drive around the Judean Hills, and visit national parks such as the Crusader ruins at Ein Hemed (Aqua Bella) and the 1948 War of Independence fortifications at the Castel. When the weather was warmer, we’d visit the beach — and Roman ruins — at Ashkelon. Our Shabbat drives could take us to my mother’s family in Ramat HaSharon. From there, on occasion we’d go to the massive Roman and Crusader ruins at Caesaria.

As we’d visit a site, my parents would explain the history of what we were seeing. My father always took a historical approach to literature, so he had studied Jewish history in depth. He also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1949–50, so he had personal experience with the challenges Israel faced soon after its establishment. My mother had been born in Tel Aviv in 1931, and lived under the British Mandatory rule until 1940, when she moved to the United States. In Boston, she became very active in the socialist Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair, and returned to Israel in 1949 to live on a kibbutz. After a few months, she became disillusioned with the socialist lifestyle on the kibbutz and returned to the United States. Thus, my mother could provide personal insights into that transformative period in Israeli history.

The history we learned on our tiyulim was supplemented by the conversations around the dinner table. My father always talked about his research and his classes, and our guests for Shabbat dinner typically were other scholars of Jewish studies, who talked about their work.

During second grade, I attended a neighborhood public school. The conditions were primitive, to put it mildly. The classroom was a wooden shack without central heating. In the winter, the teacher would forget to bring matches to light the kerosene heater, so my parents would send me in with matches. The school didn’t have a mimeograph machine, so there were no handouts, as in the United States. Instead, the teacher wrote everything on the blackboard, and we had to copy what she wrote into machbarot, stapled notebooks.

The single most memorable event of that year, and indeed my entire childhood, was living in Jerusalem during the Six Day War in June 1967. I was seven years old, and finishing second grade. David was nine, and finishing fourth grade. We both were interested in military history, so experiencing a war was enormously exciting. Fortunately, the war was so short that it hardly disrupted our lives. When the Jordanians started shelling Jerusalem on the morning of June 5, my teacher herded the class from the wooden shack to the ground floor of an old Arab building built of stone. We huddled on the floor as volunteers escorted us home one by one. A man I didn’t know drove me to the bottom of the hill on which our apartment building stood. We crawled along the stone walls lining the sidewalk until we reached my building. A different volunteer brought David home. We spent two nights in the ground floor apartment of one of our neighbors because our apartment, which was on the third floor, wasn’t considered safe. At the same time, the risk wasn’t so great that we had to sleep in the shelter in the basement, which would have been much less comfortable. Other neighbors also stayed in the ground floor apartment, so it was crowded, but there was plenty to eat. The radio was always on, and the song “Jerusalem of Gold,” which had been released just a few weeks previously, played repeatedly. On the first night, the sound of machine gun fire kept me up, but I imagine that I eventually fell asleep. On the third day of the War, we heard the announcement on the radio that the Old City of Jerusalem had been liberated from the Jordanians, and we were allowed to return to our apartment.

The main impact of the Six Day War on my national park visits is that it increased the number of national parks we could see on short day trips from Jerusalem during our next sojourn in Israel in 1970–71, when I was in sixth grade. Our Shabbat drives would now take us to Old City Walls, the mosque at Nebi Samuel, the hilltop excavations at Herodian, the Essene ruins at Qumran, and even as far as Masada towering above the Dead Sea and the Judean Desert. (Masada isn’t on the West Bank, but the most direct route cuts through the West Bank.) One time, we drove to Mount Gerizim above Shechem (Nabulus).

On school vacations in second and sixth grades, we’d drive north to visit my mother’s aunt and uncle, Chaya and Levi, in Kiryat Chayim, just north of Haifa. On the way, we might stop at the First Temple ruins at Megiddo (I liked to climb through the water tunnel) or Mount Carmel. Sometimes Chaya and Levi would join us as we’d tour the Western Galilee, including visits to the Rabbinic tombs at Bet Shearim (more climbing underground) or the beach as Achziv. If it was warm, we’d swim in the springs at Gan HaShloshah (Sachne), and then marvel at the Byzantine-era mosaics at Bet Alfa. We’d visit the church on top of Mount Tabor, the Crusader fort at Belvoir, the Roman theatre at Bet Shean, the Roman baths at Hamat Tiberias on the Shores of the Sea of Galilee, and the ancient synagogue at Kfar Nahum (Capernaum). We’d stay overnight at the kibbutz guest house at Ayelet HaShahar, and the visit the adjacent ruins at Tel Hatzor. We’d continue north and stop at Hurshat Tal after visiting the nearby nature reserve at Tel Dan. In 1970, after the Six Day War, we visited Nimrod’s Castle in the Golan Heights.

Although I greatly enjoyed seeing the national parks in the Galilee, the real highlight of the trips north was spending time with Chaya and Levi. They had two daughters, but neither of them married or had any children. Thus, Chaya and Levi viewed David and me as their grandchildren. David and I, in turn, viewed them as our grandparents. My father’s father died before we were born, and we spent very little time with our other grandparents because they lived in Boston. Chaya and Levi lived in a small house with a large yard. Levi grew fruits and vegetables in the sandy soil of his garden. When we would visit, David and I enjoyed exploring and digging in the garden as the adults sat on the porch drinking tea from glass tea-cups.

School vacations also gave us the opportunity to drive south to the Negev. We explored the Nabatean ruins at Avdat and the spring at the end of the narrow gorge at Ein Avdat. On the way to Eilat, we’d pass through Makhtesh Ramon. When I was in sixth grade, sometime during the winter, we joined an organized tour of the Sinai Peninsula. We didn’t see any national parks, but it was amazing trip nonetheless. We drove in a truck with seats installed on the truck bed to St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. We slept in the monastery, and woke up before dawn so that we could climb to the top of Mount Sinai by dawn. The colors of the surrounding mountains changed from purple to red to brown as the sun rose. After we descended, we continued in the truck to the Suez Canal. When then drove south to Sharm El Sheik, which at the time was just a small naval base. We then drove back north to Eilat, completing our triangular journey.

At the end of sixth grade, I went on a trip north organized by the Scouts. During the school year, the Scouts met on Wednesday and Shabbat afternoons at a clubhouse in Emek HaMatzlevah — the Valley of the Cross. The scout troops were organized by school class. I was in the Masada Tribe (named after a national park!), and I received an award as the outstanding scout in the tribe by virtue of my rope-tying and tent-building skills. On the end-of-the-year trip, we hiked around Mount Carmel. One area was called “Little Switzerland.” I had been to the real Switzerland, so I knew that Little Switzerland was nothing like the real (and much larger) Switzerland. I forgot my toothbrush, so my counselor taught me how to brush my teeth with my finger. Almost all the boys and girls in my class had paired up as couples, and on the trip my classmates encouraged me to pair up with the smartest girl in the class who had moved to Jerusalem that year. My classmates, boys and girls, argued to both of us that we were well-matched because we both were smart and were new to the school. But we both were also relatively shy, so resisted their entreaties.

That year generally was challenging socially. Although I knew Hebrew from our previous stay in Israel, it was the Hebrew of a second grader, not a sixth grader. There were two other Jonathans in my class, and both were very popular. (One was the nephew of Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem; the other was the son of the attorney general.) Thus, girls and boys were always calling out to Jonathan, but never this Jonathan. In Israel in those days, students remained together from grade to grade, for the purpose of social integration. That made it more difficult for a new student, particularly one who did not speak Hebrew fluently, to break in and make friends.

Additionally, at the beginning of the year, I was overwhelmed by the amount of homework assigned. The reading and writing in Hebrew was especially difficult. My mother patiently helped me with the assignments. Once the other students figured out that I was doing my homework, and did it well, they asked to copy my notebooks before class began. I let them, thinking it would make me more popular. Then the vice principal started patrolling the classrooms before school started, looking for students copying homework. I didn’t want to risk having the vice principal confiscate my notebooks. At the same time, I didn’t want to refuse to allow my classmates to copy my homework. My solution was to arrive at school just a moment before class started, thereby avoiding the problem.

The summer after I graduated from Beverly Hills High School, three high school friends and I traveled throughout Europe. After the European phase ended, I continued with one friend to Israel for a week. We started our adventure in London, then made our way to Paris, where we rented a car for a month. The car had a manual transmission, and I was the only one of the four of us who knew how to drive stick shift. However, I was only 17, so I could not drive the car legally in France. The plan was that I would teach the other three, who were 18, how to drive a stick shift. But we picked up the car in Paris, and I couldn’t teach my friends to drive a manual transmission car on the busy Paris streets. Thus, I had to drive the car (illegally) out of Paris before starting to teach my friends. Before GPS, it was incredibly difficult to navigate through large European cities such as Paris, even with maps. Moreover, the car was new, so it was hard to get into second gear. Therefore, I had to race the engine in first gear to build up enough speed to shift into third gear. Finally, after perhaps the most stressful hour of my life, I got us out of Paris and turned the car over to one of my friends.

We had no set itinerary. We would wake up in the morning, look at the map, and decide where to go that day. Ultimately, we made several loops, driving as far west as Mont St. Michel and as far north as the Ardennes Forest (which is not much of a forest any more). We spent a few days in Switzerland at the house of one of my friends’ relatives, and then headed south into Italy. My three traveling companions became increasingly adept driving stick shift, and when we were on highways, they tried to set the “land speed record” — to see who could drive the fastest. One of them got up to 160kmh, or 100mph. It’s hard now to image the freedom our parents gave us then.

After we dropped the car off in Italy, Jimmy Hellinger and I flew to Israel. We stayed with my parents, who had an apartment in Jerusalem for the summer. I showed Jimmy around the Old City, and I remember we went north to Haifa so that he could visit one of his cousins. I imagine that we also visited some national parks, but don’t remember which.

Phase Two — College and Law School

Israel

After graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1977, I attended Harvard College. I joined pro-Israel groups on campus, and during my sophomore year, decided to spend my junior year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The summer before that year abroad, the summer of 1979, I worked as a counselor on a two-month program that brought teenagers from Los Angeles to Israel: the L.A. Ulpan. The program, run by the Los Angeles Board of Jewish Education, had two groups: the Hebrew High group, consisting primarily of Conservative kids who had gone to Camp Ramah and the L.A. Hebrew High School; and the Confirmation group, consisting primarily of Reform kids who had gone to camps such as Hess Kramer and Hilltop, and had been confirmed at their temples. In theory, the Hebrew High kids knew more Hebrew and generally had a stronger Jewish background, but in reality, there was little difference between the groups. There were roughly 80 kids — two busloads — in each group. We were based at the youth village in Shfeya, near Zichron Yaakov. While in Shfeya, the kids went to Hebrew classes and did a small amount of agricultural work. Every morning there was t’fillah — prayer — which the kids barely tolerated.

From Shfeya, we went on day trips to Caesaria and Mount Carmel. We also went on week-long trips to the Galilee, the Negev, and Jerusalem. I don’t remember the precise itineraries of these trips, but we visited many of the same national parks I had already seen as a child, as well as those that involved more hiking, such as the Crusader fort Monfort and the cliffs at Arbel in the Galilee. I believe I first visited the ancient synagogue of Bar’am near the Lebanese border with Ulpan. In the Negev, we visited Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s Gravesite in Sdeh Boker. Because Israel still controlled the Sinai Peninsula, went to some of the Red Sea resorts south of Eilat, as well as Yamit, on the Mediterranean coast. In Jerusalem, we walked through Hezekiah’s Tunnel, now part of the City of David National Park. Near Jerusalem, we explored Ein Kerem as well as the Byzantine ruins at Bet Guvrin.

Professional guides licensed by the Israeli government led the tours. However, because I was bursting with information about each site we visited, I often added “footnotes” to the guides’ explanations. I now realize that this must have been incredibly annoying to the guides and to the kids, who just wanted to get to the snack bar then back on the bus.

After the first summer working on the L.A. Ulpan, I stayed in Israel for my junior year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I shared an apartment in Kiryat Shmuel, near Rehov HaPalmach of course, with Joel Suldan, my roommate from Harvard; Susan Coskey, a friend from Beverly Hills High School; and Charlotte (Charlie) Beyda, a woman Susie had met at the ulpan at the Hebrew University who also happened to have attended Beverly, but we didn’t know her at the time. Before classes started at the University, we went on a trip to the Sinai, where we climbed Mt. Sinai.

When we returned from the Sinai, a friend of Susie’s from Stanford, Leesa Fields, was waiting in the apartment. She was wearing a skirt and long sleeves, so I assumed (incorrectly) that she was Orthodox. She had just graduated from Stanford, and was spending a gap year at Pardes, a co-ed yeshiva, before starting graduate school. She stayed in our apartment for a few days as she looked for an apartment. She eventually rented an apartment with a couple of other Pardes students in Kiryat Modechai, an Orthodox neighborhood within walking distance of our apartment.

We quickly became friends, but at first there was no romantic spark. She was almost three years older — 22 to my 19. She also had completed college and knew she wanted to pursue a master’s degree in International Affairs, while I still had no plan. We bonded while exploring Jerusalem. Neither of us had classes on Fridays, so every Friday morning I would show Leesa around a different neighborhood. She often stayed for Shabbat dinner with my roommates and me and the revolving cast of characters we invited to join us. We began taking walks together in the evening, and during one of those walks, we started holding hands. Jerusalem, especially at night, can be a very romantic city.

Leesa’s sister Pam, who was studying in Italy, visited during Passover. We had a chaotic Seder where everyone had a different hagaddah and read in a different language. Susie, Leesa, Pam, and I rented a car and drove to the Galilee. I was the driver and tour guide, and took them to my favorite parks in the north. Whenever we reached a site, I would stride ahead and the three would follow behind. Pam joked that they were like chicks following the mother hen. We also stopped at Kiryat Chaim do that I could introduce Leesa to Chaya and Levi.

One Shabbat, Leesa and I visited a friend of Leesa’s from Stanford who had become Orthodox, made Aliyah, married, and lived with his wife (and child) on an agricultural settlement in the Gaza Strip. Whenever they walked around the moshav, including on Shabbat, they needed to carry a Galil assault rifle. From the perimeter fence, we could see the Palestinian city of Khan Yunis. Leesa and I thought they were insane to be living there. Another Shabbat, we went to a shabbaton at Tirat Zvi, an Orthodox kibbutz in the Galilee. We also once went to the beach at Ashkelon.

That spring, Leesa, Joel, and I joined an overland bus tour to Egypt, along with our friend Rhea Siers. This was one of the first tours organized in the wake of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt signed the previous year. The bus drove directly though Gaza Strip into the Sinai. Near El Arish, we went through passport control and switched to an Egyptian bus. The bus took us to the Suez Canal, which we crossed in a poorly maintained ferry. On the other side, another bus drove us to Cairo. When we reached the outskirts of Cairo, everyone on the bus became very quiet. The apartment buildings were tall and the boulevards wide. The city was much more developed than I expected, and I suspect the other passengers had the same sentiment. We all had seen Arab towns and villages in Israel, and we imagined that Cairo would be at the same level of development, only larger. Instead, Cairo looked far more sophisticated than Tel Aviv.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Giza, which seemed ridiculously incongruous. We visited the Pyramids, the Sphinx (the Egyptian guide pronounced it “Sphin-kus”), the Egyptian Museum, and several of the major mosques. After every stop, the guide ordered, “To the bus, to the bus.” There were armed Egyptian soldiers everywhere, which was unsettling for us given that the Egyptian Army had always been Israel’s main adversary. (Leesa and I took the kids to Egypt more than 20 years later. In addition to Cairo, we visited Abu Simbal and cruised on the Nile from Aswan to Luxor.)

Leesa and I had an amazing year together in Israel. As the academic year came to an end, we decided to continue seeing each other when we returned to the United States. But first, I spent another summer working on the L.A. Ulpan. Israeli law required that every bus of touring youths be accompanied by two armed guards. The program organizers asked me to train to carry a gun. The training consisted of an instructor providing a short explanation of how to operate a World War II vintage semi-automatic M-1 rifle, followed by my shooting a clip of 10 rounds at an abandoned quarry. The rifle was much louder, and the recoil more powerful, than I expected. This training qualified me to walk at the front or the back of the column of hiking teens. I was well aware that with my inadequate training, I certainly couldn’t defend anyone; rather, I would be the obvious first target of any terrorist who decided to attack us.

The itinerary the second summer was similar to the first. Once again, I visited many of the national parks in the Galilee and the Negev, and tried to infect teenagers from Los Angeles with my enthusiasm for Israel. The main differences between this summer and the last were that now I had to carry a heavy rifle on hikes; and I missed Leesa deeply. Email had not yet been invented and telephone calls were very expensive. So, I wrote several letters a week, as did she. She spent the summer working as a lifeguard at Camp Ramah in Palmer, MA and the Brandeis Camp Institute in Simi Valley, CA. (The director of BCI was Dennis Prager, before he became a conservative radio talk-show host). I looked forward to mail call every day. I was disappointed when I didn’t receive a letter from her; and elated when I did.

In the fall of 1980, I returned to Harvard and Leesa started her program at the Columbia School of International Affairs. She lived at home in Scarsdale, and commuted into the City. One a month, she would drive up to Cambridge to see me. Once a month, I took the train down to see her. By the spring, the long distance strained the relationship, and we broke up.

In 1981, I returned to the L.A. Ulpan for my third and final summer. I was promoted to Rosh Kvutza, the head of the Hebrew High group. My good friend Paul Abrams was the head of the Confirmation Group. We both had worked the previous two summers with Danny Spitzer, the head of the Ulpan and one of my father’s former student at UCLA, so we functioned well together as a team. The itinerary was similar to the last two summers, and I saw many national parks in the Galilee and Negev yet again.

Leesa was working that summer at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. She invited me to visit her on my free Shabbat. We walked from her apartment in Kikar HaMedinah to the Yarkon National Park. We sat on a bench by the stream, and discussed our situation. We missed each other, and agreed to resume the relationship. We spent my remaining days off that summer together, and in the fall restarted the shuttle between Cambridge and Scarsdale. That continued until our graduations the following spring, in May 1982.

United States

The last national park visits with my parents occurred after my freshman year at Harvard. I spent the summer at home, working in Senator Alan Cranston’s office in Westwood. My parents wanted to attend the music festival in Aspen Colorado, so we decided drive there. Unlike on the previous national park trips, I did most of the driving. Also, David wasn’t with us; he was spending the summer in Boston, where he attended MIT. On this trip, our first park was the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. It was more remote than the south rim, was less developed, and had far fewer visitors. In those days before cellphones (this was the summer of 1978), my parents had a long conversation with David from the payphone in the parking lot of the lodge about his housing situation. David had hoped to move out of his fraternity for his senior year at MIT, but was having difficulty finding a roommate. He was very upset at the prospect of spending another year in the fraternity. My parents calmed him down, and he accepted his fate of another year at AEPi.

We made a short detour to see the colorful rock formations at Cedar Breaks National Monument. We drove through Capitol Reef National Park, which at the time didn’t make a deep impression. I enjoyed it far more when I visited it years later with Leesa, probably because we did more hiking. I can’t remember whether we went to any additional parks on that trip.

In the summer of 1982, after I graduated from college and before I started law school at Yale, Leesa and I went on a three-week road trip up the West Coast and into British Columbia. (In the spring of 1982, Leesa graduated from Columbia’s School of International Affairs, and was starting a job in Washington DC in the fall.) On the trip, we went to several U.S national parks that I had been to with my family, as well as several Canadian national parks. We borrowed one of my parents’ cars, a powder blue Chevy Malibu. Starting in Los Angeles, we drove up through the Central Valley to Mount Shasta, then cut into Oregon and stopped at Crater Lake National Park. We continued north into Washington State and visited Olympic National Park. After a short stay in Seattle, we crossed the border into Canada and visited Bouchart Gardens and Victoria on Vancouver Island. We took the ferry back to the mainland and spent a couple of days touring around Vancouver. We headed east towards the Canadian Rockies, stopping at a motel in the Okanagan Valley.

Because it was Friday night, we lit Shabbat candles in an ashtray, assuming that it could withstand the heat of the candles. Soon after we fell asleep, we heard a sharp cracking sound and saw fire spreading across the dresser where we had left the Shabbat candles burning in the ashtray. The burning candles had caused the ashtray to snap apart, and the molten wax caught fire as it spread across the dresser. Fortunately, we quickly extinguished the flames and the motel did not charge us for the damage to the dresser. Since then, we have never lit Shabbat candles while we are on the road. Moreover, when at home, I always put out the Shabbat candles before we go to sleep.

However, I did not completely learn my lesson about unattended fires. About ten years later, we had some company over for lunch during the festival of Sukkot. After Kiddush and Motzi in the sukkah on our deck, we went indoors to eat lunch because there were yellow jackets scaring the kids (and the adults). I left a citronella candle burning on the table in sukkah the hope that we’d be able to eat dessert in the sukkah. As we were eating lunch, we heard yelling coming from the deck. One of the sukkah’s sides, made of a sheet decorated with the kids’ hand and footprints since they were infants, had blown into the citronella candle and caught fire. A neighbor saw the fire and was calling out to us. It was an old sheet that was not flame resistant, so it burned quickly. By the time I got outside, the sheet had almost entirely burned away. Because the sheet burned so quickly, the fire hadn’t spread to the more flame-resistant pressure-treated lumber frame of the sukkah. Every year at Sukkot, Jeremy loves to tell guests how I almost burned the house down while destroying an important part of his childhood. After this incident, Leesa had the kids start decorating a new sheet, which is now full of their hand and foot prints, as well as those of their cousins.

After surviving the fire at the motel in the Okanagan Valley, we drove through a series of national parks in the Canadian Rockies: Mt. Revelstoke, Glacier of Canada, Yoho, and Banff. We turned south through Kootenay National Park and proceeded back into the United States in Idaho. On the route back to Los Angeles, we did not see any more national parks. We did, however, stop in Sacramento to attend the wedding of one of Leesa’s friends from Stanford.

We had very limited funds on this trip because I had just graduated from college and Leesa had just graduated from her master’s program. Accordingly, we stayed at the most inexpensive accommodations possible, often Motel Sixes in the United States. At the time, a Motel Six charged $18 a night, plus 50 cents extra for the key that would turn on the black and white television. The Motel 6’s often had the same layout. One night, after dinner at a nearby restaurant, I pulled the car into the parking space next to our room. Leesa asked me why I was parking there. I responded that this was our room. She replied that this had been our room the previous night, about 250 miles back! Now we were staying on the other side of the motel.

The jagged peaks of the Canadian Rockies were as spectacular as we had hoped, and we greatly admired the high level of organization of the British Columbian tourism authority. It provided detailed guides that clearly indicated the precise location of all attractions and accommodations — much appreciated information in pre-GPS days. Our relationship did not survive the trip, however. Whether it was too much togetherness, or anxiety concerning the upcoming transitions in our lives — Leesa was moving to Washington to start a job with the U.S. Information Agency, and I was moving to New Haven to start law school — we (actually Leesa) decided we should take a break. I remember our discussing this at the very end of the trip, as we drove through Beverly Hills on the way to my parents’ house. A few weeks later, Leesa said that we should start seeing other people.

Like our previous break, this intermission didn’t last long. We started to see each other again during the fall of 1982, and were engaged to be married by the next fall. We married in Washington, DC, on March 18, 1984, during the spring break of my second year in law school. We planned on taking a long honeymoon in Japan after I graduated, so we decided to take a mini-moon locally — at the Peaks of Otter Lodge on the Blue Ridge Parkway, just south of Shenandoah National Park. To get there, we drove along the Skyline Drive through the park. That summer, Leesa was assigned to temporary duty at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi for two months. I joined her for one month. Every weekend we traveled out of town; we visited Kolkata, Kashmir, Rajasthan, Agra, Varanasi, and Kajarahu. We saw many monuments, but as far as I know, none of them were national parks.

Phase Three — With Our Children

United States

I spent my final year in law school as a visiting student at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. After the bar exam in the summer of 1985, Leesa and I went on our honeymoon in Japan, where Leesa’s sister Pamela was living at the time. We traveled all over the island of Honshu with Pamela, who was fluent in Japanese. One of Pamela’s jobs was recording English language dialogues that were broadcast on an NHK radio station. During our visit, I once substituted for her male counterpart. That was the extent of my career as a radio broadcaster! After we returned from Japan, I started working at the D.C. office of a San Francisco law firm, Morrison & Foerster. Leesa continued working at USIA until our son Jeremy was born in 1986. We moved from the District to Silver Spring, MD when Jeremy was nine months old. Our daughter Jessica was born soon thereafter, in 1988. When the children were young, we often visited Leesa’s parents, who had moved to Boca Raton, Florida. Probably the first national park the kids visited was Everglades National Park. We walked along the Bobcat Boardwalk near the Sharks Valley Visitors’ Center, but saw neither bobcats nor sharks. We also took a boat from Everglades City into the park along waterways full of mangrove trees.

It was around this time that I developed my theory that exercise was unhealthy for adults. One of the other associates at my law firm was a serious runner. He once went running when on a business trip. As he jogged passed a freeway on-ramp, he was struck by a car. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured. After he recovered, he resumed his running routine. One day he appeared at the office, bent over like an old man. He had hurt his back running. I started to catalogue in my mind all my other friends and acquaintances who hurt themselves exercising. I then recalled Jim Fixx, the author of The Complete Book of Running, who at age 52 had died of a heart attack while he was running. It was obvious to me that exercise was extremely dangerous to adults, and was to be avoided at all costs. The experiences of friends since then has reinforced this belief. Many friends who are runners have had serious injuries to their ankles, knees, and hips. Other forms of exercise are equally perilous. One friend training for a triathalon fell asleep while he was riding a bicycle and plowed into a parked car, and was in a wheelchair for six months. At least two other friends have had bicycle accidents. Leesa, an avid swimmer, has had surgeries to repair rotator cuffs in both her shoulders. Her brother Ric broke his hand doing karate, and also had a serious spill off his bicycle. One of my law partners took so much ibuprofen to combat the pain from playing basketball that he needed to be hospitalized for a bleeding ulcer. The list goes on and on.

By shunning exercise, I have managed to avoid all these injuries. I do, though, play golf from time to time. Of course, many people would not consider golf to be exercise, particularly if one rides a golf cart. But to the extent that golf is exercise, in my defense, I started playing because a Japanese client wanted me to play with him. In other words, I did it somewhat under duress. When my client returned to Japan, I stopped playing golf. I recently started playing again voluntarily with friends, and have developed tennis (golf?) elbow, confirming the danger of exercise. My motivation in playing is not exercise, nor male camaraderie; rather, golf is a great excuse for being outdoors for two hours on a nice day (I get bored after nine holes). Also, I enjoy the aesthetic experience of the rolling fairways, the manicured greens, the ponds and streams that attract my golf-balls, and the singing birds.

There are three exceptions to the no-exercise rule. First, any sort of exercise with your children is permitted. The no-exercise rule applies to adults, not kids, and it is perfectly acceptable to assume the risk of injury in order to spend time with your children and to encourage them to be physically fit. Thus, I spent a lot of time riding bikes with our kids, particularly Jeremy.

Second, it is permissible to ride a bike when it is transportation. In other words, if you are going from point A to point B, riding a bike is fine. But this is true only within reason, that is, only when the door-to-door time of cycling isn’t significantly longer than that of other modes of transportation. An hour-long bike ride instead of a ten-minute drive (assuming you have a car) is exercise, not transportation.

Third, and most relevant to this discussion, it is permissible to engage in physical activity when the primary purpose of the activity is spending time in nature. (In essence, the primary purpose test applies to all three exceptions — is the primary purpose of the activity exercise, or spending time with your children, getting somewhere, or enjoying nature? If the primary purpose of the activity is not exercise, then the activity is not exercise.) Hence, my hiking in a national park does not constitute exercise because I am not hiking for the purpose of developing my cardio-vascular system; I am hiking to be in nature.

A hike that is so rigorous that you can’t enjoy the nature falls out of the exception and becomes exercise. For this reason, I have carefully avoided hikes that were too long or involved too much of a vertical climb. Moreover, when the kids were young, I avoided even moderate hikes if it meant having to carry them long distances. Aversion to exercise wasn’t the only reason I didn’t carry the kids on hikes, though. They both were always fussy in the snugglies or baby backpacks, making even short hikes with them unpleasant.

When the kids were young, we started taking them to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park — not a full-fledged national park, but a treasure nonetheless. It is the perfect way to experience nature. It was only half an hour drive from our house in Silver Spring, and fifteen minutes from our house in Rockville. There is ample parking (if you know where and when to go). The towpath is flat. And its beauty is mesmerizing: the water surging over Great Falls; the canal reflecting the verdant foliage, as in a Monet painting; the blue heron stalking fish; the turtles basking in the sun. The roar of Great Falls and the singing of birds drown the sounds of distant traffic, and you forget that five million people live nearby. When the kids were young, we would walk out over the footbridges to the viewpoint of Great Falls, or ride bikes along the towpath. Once Leesa and I took them on the “A” section of the Billy Goat trail. Somehow we had the impression that the path was child-friendly. It most decidedly is not. Billy goats, of course, can easily scramble over rocks, and a mile-long stretch of trail through the Mather Gorge involves the constant scrambling over rocks. It is what seasoned hikers would call “technical.” In one place, we had to climb along a narrow ledge high above the Potomac. The scenery was beautiful, and the kids didn’t complain (I think they were having fun), but Leesa and I were terrified that one of them would slip and have to be med-evaced. Since then, we have hiked the easier “B” and “C” sections numerous times (particularly the C section), but not the “A” section.

We’ve explored many other parts of the canal, including the Paw-Paw Tunnel and the Monocacy Aqueduct. But our standard walk is from Pennyfield Lock south. For much of the walk, the canal is cut into bedrock, and the towpath is flanked by the canal and the Potomac River. We walk along the canal about once a month — including on sunny days in the winter. The absence of leaves in the winter provides clearer views of the river. Jeremy sometimes joins us, and Jess and Yon, when they are in town. For the past five years, Leesa, Jeremy, and I have walked out to Great Falls on New Year’s Day. Significantly, none of these walks are exercise; there primary purpose is enjoyment of nature.

Back to the main story. During one winter break after both kids had started school, we drove down to Hilton Head, South Carolina. We then drove to Atlanta, where we stayed with a family whose son had been in pre-school with Jessica before they moved to Atlanta. After a couple of days there, we started driving back north, passing through Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From a viewpoint, we were able to see a series of ridges through the haze that gives the park its name. We continued to Asheville, North Carolina, to see the Vanderbilt mansion.

During the long drives on this trip, and all other trips since, Jeremy occupied himself by reading books. In the days before ebooks, Jeremy filled his suitcase with books so that he would have enough to last the trip. Often we had to stop at bookstores to supplement his supply. We had to exert more effort to keep Jess occupied. Without recourse to videos on iPads, we sang, played games, and listened to Raffi CDs. When the kids were older, they both listened endlessly to Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera.

Jeremy had a particular diet. Throughout his childhood, he would eat two Eggo waffles and a banana for breakfast and dinner, and a peanut butter sandwich (without jelly) and an apple for lunch. When we traveled, if waffles or pancakes were not available for breakfast or dinner, he would eat a peanut butter sandwich. In other words, he might have a peanut butter sandwich (with a banana or apple) for all three meals. On any trip, we first stopped at a grocery store to buy a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of whole wheat bread. The one food he’d eat in restaurants, besides waffles or pancakes, were French fries (particularly from McDonald’s).

Jess also was a picky eater, but not nearly as rigid as Jeremy. She’d eat plain pasta, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, and Pizza Hut pizza.

On hikes, we would keep the children preoccupied by encouraging Jeremy to tell stories. Jeremy had an incredible memory for mythology and the plots of books he read and movies he watched. He would recount these stories with great enthusiasm, and forget that he was hiking. When young, Jess would listen to Jeremy with rapt attention, and also forget the hike. When older, Jess would tune Jeremy out. Years later, when Jeremy and I visited national parks together, Jeremy would still tell long, intricate stories on hikes.

Leesa’s brother Ric lives near Vail, Colorado. In the summer of 1994, he married Kim. For many years, we used their house as a starting point for visits to national parks and monuments in the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau. After the wedding, we visited Dinosaur National Monument. Jeremy at the time was obsessed with the animated dinosaur movie Land Before Time, so Dinosaur National Monument was particularly appropriate. After Dinosaur, we met my parents, my brother, his wife, and his kids at Aspen to celebrated my parents’ 40th anniversary.

In the summer of 1997, we went to Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. The park, consisting of giant sand dunes in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, was truly astounding. The kids tried to climb the dunes, but quickly abandoned the effort; the dunes could reach 750 feet high! We also stopped at the nearby Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, which had well-preserved petrified tree stumps.

In the spring of 1998, after the Passover Seder with Ric and Kim, we went to Arches and Canyonlands National Park. As we drove, we sang songs from the Passover Seder. At Canyonlands, we hiked up a huge stone mound that looked like a whale. From Deadhorse Point State Park, we saw the much-photographed horseshoe bend in the Colorado River. I returned to Canyonlands in 2001, when I rafted down the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon. My friend Dani Barkan organized a rafting trip of about 10 male friends and family members to celebrate his 40th birthday. We rendezvoused in Moab, Utah, where we joined the outfitters. We rafted on the Colorado for five days. Each night we camped on sandy beaches. The outfitters did most of the work — paddling the rafts and cooking the meals — but we set up our tents and helped load and unload the rafts. The first four days were flat water, as the Colorado silently flowed through the steep red rock canyon it had carved. At a couple of stops, we climbed steep trails to viewpoints high on the canyon wall. Once we hiked through a narrow side canyon to a waterfall. But mostly we just sat in the rafts, marveling at the colors and shapes of the canyon walls, and enjoying the remoteness from civilization.

On the fifth day, however, we reached the rapids that gave Cataract Canyon its name. I had rafted through rapids several times before, but this was a completely different experience. I had never run rapids on a river as large as the Colorado, so the sheer volume of water was astonishing. Additionally, my previous rapids were class II and III, while these were class IV and one class V. The rafts would drop through troughs, careen off submerged boulders, and twirl with the changing currents. I never felt afraid, however, because I had complete confidence in our river guide. For one set of rapids, I left the security of the large raft and the professional guide, and rode with Dani’s brother Ze’evi in a two-man “ducky,” an inflatable kayak. Ze’evi had been a commando in the Israeli Navy, so I felt secure. At one point, we became stuck in a trough, but Ze’evi was able to paddle us out. We later heard that the guides had become anxious when they saw where we were stuck, and thought we would capsize. They expressed relief and surprise when they saw us emerge from the rapids intact.

When we reached the last set of rapids, the guides encouraged us to jump off the rafts and ride through in the water with out feet first to absorb any impact from hidden boulders. The sensation of surging through the water was an exhilarating way to end our trip on the Colorado. We emerged into the calm expanse of Lake Powell. After disembarking the rafts, we flew back to Moab, where the group dispersed. The group reunited 10 years later in Vermont to celebrate Dani’s 50th birthday.

In 1998, we went to St. Louis for the bar mitzvah of a son of former neighbors in Silver Spring. While there, we went up the gleaming, stainless steel Gateway Arch. (The Gateway Arch became a national park in 2018.) We rode up in the kind of small train used in amusement park rides. The top of the arch was cramped, with narrow slits for windows. We also crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois to visit Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, which includes dozens of mounds constructed by Native Americans. The tallest is approximately 100 feet high, and is the largest mound built by Native Americans north of Mexico. In the twelfth century, Cahokia’s population may have exceeded 40,000. I was taken aback by the mounds; I had never heard of Cahokia, and had no awareness that Native American mounds that large existed in the United States.

In the spring of 2000, after Seder with Ric and Kim, we visited Mesa Verde National Park. Ric and Kim decided to join us with their daughter Maddy. Before we left Vail, Ric placed his custom-built bicycle on a rack on top of his car. Ric drove Kim’s car with Kim, Jess, and Maddy, and Leesa drove Ric’s car with Jeremy and me. Several hours after leaving Vail, Ric pulled into a drive-through restaurant with numerous bays covered by an awning. As we pulled in next to Ric, we heard a grinding sound; the bicycle on the roof of our car had collided with the awning. Kim jumped out of the other car, yelling at us furiously. Terrified by Kim’s anger, Jess hopped into our car. Ric, however, calmly dislodged the bicycle, which had sustained some damage. Leesa had completely forgotten about Ric’s bicycle on the roof of our car, and had simply followed Ric into the drive-through. Ric understood that it was an accident. Kim, in contrast, barely spoke to us for the rest of the trip. (They divorced a few years later. As far as I know, the bicycle accident was not a contributing factor.) When we arrived at Mesa Verde, the cliff dwellings were as picturesque as I remembered. The kids enjoyed climbing on the ladders to reach the upper stories of the dwellings.

In the spring of 2002, after Seder with Ric and Kim, we met the family of one of Jessica’s friends (the Oliners) in Salt Lake City and went skiing at Alta and other nearby ski resorts. We then drove down to Bryce and Zion. In Zion, we went on a horseback ride on a beautiful trail at the foot of the towering canyon wall. In Bryce, I stopped at every viewpoint along the scenic road. After a few viewpoints, Leesa and the kids stopped getting out of the car. That drive clearly established in everyone’s mind that I had a profound case of FOMO — fear of missing out. I needed to stop at every viewpoint because I didn’t want to miss anything, and I didn’t know which viewpoint provided the best perspective. Leesa and the kids, by contrast, felt no such compulsion. FOMO also necessitated a quick stop at Kodachrome National Monument — no colorful rock formation could be left unseen.

That summer, we took the kids on a cruise to Alaska. The cruise started in Vancouver and proceed along the Inside Passage to Ketchikan. We explored the town on bicycles we rented. Then Jessica and I tried to fish for salmon from a bridge over a stream filled with enormous salmon. All we caught, however, was seaweed. We proceeded to Juneau, where we landed on a glacier in a helicopter. The cruise continued to Skagway. We rented a car a drove across the Canadian border into the Yukon. Our ship then continued into Glacier Bay National Park, where we saw many glaciers flowing slowly into the Bay. The ship landed in Seward. We rented a car and drove to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. When we returned from a short hike to the glacier, one of the car’s tires was flat. After I changed the tire, we exchanged the car back in Seward. We then drove to Denali National Park via Anchorage. The town of Denali at the entrance to the national park is an unattractive commercial strip along a highway. Private vehicles can only drive twelve miles inside the park, which was not far enough to get a view of the mountain. To actually see the mountain, we would have had to join an all-day excursion on a Park Service-run school bus. And there was no guarantee that we would see the mountain because of cloud cover. Even I, with my FOMO, realized that the all day school bus ride didn’t make sense for us. Instead, we took a short hike after driving in as far as we could on our own. We also saw a dog sled demonstration, and went horseback riding. In contrast to the docile horses in Zion that followed the trail in an orderly manner, these horses spread across the tundra and did not heed the kids’ efforts to direct them. Both kids grew frustrated, and that may have been the last time Jess went horseback riding.

We cut our stay in Denali short, and stayed instead at the Princess Mt. McKinley Lodge, which actually was much closer to the mountain than the town of Denali. The clouds lifted as we arrived at the Lodge, so we had a clear view of Denali (the mountain) as well as the other jagged peaks in the Alaska Range.

The next day we drove to the town of Talkeetna. Because the sky was clear, we decided to take a sightseeing flight that would approach the mountain. The plane was small — just the four of us and the pilot. As the pilot prepared for takeoff, he detected a problem with the plane, and aborted the flight. An hour later, the mechanic had fixed the problem. Because of the delay, the pilot decided to throw in a free landing on one of Denali’s glaciers; the plane had skis as alternate landing gear. Landing on a glacier in a small plane was exhilarating; as I climbed out of the plane, I felt that I was in the middle of a National Geographic documentary. Denali loomed above us, reaching into the clear blue sky. The white snow glistened in the sun. A toilet had been set up about 100 yards from where the plane landed, so could attend to our needs while enjoying a spectacular view.

During the kids’ spring break that year, we decided to escape the cold while visiting Phoenix and the Grand Canyon. In Phoenix, it was warm enough to swim, but there was snow on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, which is almost 6,000 feet higher in altitude. Still, we were able to hike along the rim. On the way to the Grand Canyon we stopped in Sedona, where we enjoyed a Pink Jeep Tour. Also, while hiking along a stream in a narrow canyon, Leesa slipped into the stream, which the rest of us thought was pretty amusing. However, Leesa was sufficiently traumatized by the fall that ever since, she been extremely wary whenever walking near water.

In the spring of 2004, we took the kids to Hawaii. Leesa and I had spent two days in Oahu in 1985 on the way back from our honeymoon in Japan, and we wanted to see more of the island chain. Alyssa, one of Jess’s friends from Camp Yavneh, was living on Maui at the time. Alyssa’s father was training for the Ironman, so he moved his family to Maui for six months. We joined the family for a community Seder at the synagogue on Maui. Early one morning, we drove to the top of Haleakala National Park, where we enjoyed the volcanic landscape until thick clouds rolled in. We also went whale watching, where we saw a humpback whale breech. We flew to the island of Kauai, where we drove through the Waimea Canyon (considered the Grand Canyon of Hawaii).

We then flew to the Big Island of Hawaii. At Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, we explored a lava tube and I stopped at every viewpoint for every crater we passed. After a few viewpoints, Leesa and the kids stayed in the car. I was eager to see lava flowing, and the ranger at the Visitor Center identified a trail where he said we could see lava flowing in the distance after dark. Along with many other people, we hiked on a rugged two-mile trail at dusk to a viewpoint where we could see absolutely nothing. Some people claimed to see a red glow in the distance, but I think it was just a reflection of the setting sun. (Over the winter break that year, we took the kids to Costa Rica, where we stayed at the foot of an active volcano in the Arenal. We were told that one could see the glow of lava on the top of the volcano at night, but clouds enshrouded the volcano for our visit. A few years later, while on a work trip to Nicaragua, I climbed to the top of an active volcano. Through the smoke at the bottom of the caldera, I saw a very faint red glow. I still hope someday to see flowing lava.)

Jess spent six summers at Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire. While Jess was in camp, we took Jeremy on two trips to national parks. During the summer of 2004, we visited Acadia National Park in Maine. To be candid, I was a bit disappointed; it was not as dramatic as the national parks in the West. It also was very crowded. I’m sure some would argue that Acadia displays a more subtle beauty than the Western parks. Jess visited Acadia with Yavneh a couple of year later.

In the summer of 2005, Leesa and I took Jeremy to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons. Just as during my previous visit to Yellowstone when I was nine years old, I was shocked that Old Faithful actually erupted on schedule. The area around Old Faithful was crowded with tourists and developed with hotels and parking lots, so we headed to more remote areas of the park as soon as possible. There was a herd of bison grazing along one stretch of the road. The enormous bison casually walked among the cars, completely indifferent to our presence. We went horseback riding near the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; the horses were much more compliant than in Alaska. We stayed in the historic Lake Yellowstone Hotel, and every evening walked along the lake.

After a few days in Yellowstone, we went to the Grand Tetons. The mountains were even more overwhelming than I had recalled from my previous visit. We hiked along String Lake, with dramatic views of the mountains. We went swimming, but the water was so cold that we could stay in only for a few moments. We stayed at a condominium in the ski resort at Jackson Hole, and took a chair lift up to a vantage point from which we could see the Tetons and the lakes at their feet. At another ski resort, we rode an Alpine slide. We also went white water rafting on the Snake River south of the Jackson Hole.

The last trip the four of us took together to a national park was in the summer of 2007. Jess graduated from high school in February of that year. She then went with her class to Poland and Israel. After she returned, the four of us flew to Seattle. After visiting our friend Susie, who introduced Leesa to me, we drove down to Mt. Rainier National Park. We went on a hike from the visitor center, but the trail was very steep and thick clouds obscured the top of the volcano. By the next morning, however, the clouds had lifted and we had a clear view of the snow-covered mountain. From Mt. Rainier we drove to Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, where we could still see evidence of the destruction caused by the cataclysmic 1980 eruption. The trunks of downed trees filled lakes created by streams dammed by landslides. From the Windy Ridge Viewpoint, we could see the side of the volcano blown away by the eruption.

Here is a classic example of my FOMO. There are two viewpoints of Mt. St. Helens — Windy Point, approached from the eastern side of the monument; and Johnson Ridge Observatory, approached from the western side of the monument. I asked the ranger at Mt. Rainier which viewpoint she recommended (it would take almost three hours of additional driving to go to both viewpoints). She suggested Windy Point, and we followed her advice. It turns out that the Johnson Ridge Observatory provides a head-on view of the missing side of the volcano, while Windy Point provides a side view. To this day, I regret not going to the Johnson Ridge Observatory; I feel that I missed the clearest perspective on the devastation caused by the eruption.

After the Windy Ridge Viewpoint, we drove to the lava tube on the southern side of the monument. The lava tube is the longest in the continental United States. Because we didn’t have flashlights (this was before smartphones equipped with flashlights), we didn’t go very far into the tube. We proceeded to Portland, where we went on a long bike ride along the Willamette River and visited the Japanese Garden.

In these trips to national parks with Jeremy and Jessica, we didn’t have any particular intention of instilling in them a love of nature or exposing them to a world different from suburban Maryland. Rather, we thought of these trips as fun things to do as a family. The kids had very different interests, and the park visits provided a common activity. Additionally, I loved going to the parks when I was a child, and I hoped Jeremy and Jessica would enjoy them as well. At the very least, they would tolerate going somewhere Leesa and I wanted to go.

Israel

After my third summer working on the L.A. Ulpan in 1981, I did not return to Israel for fifteen years, until the spring of 1996. I did not intentionally avoid going to Israel, which certainly had been a second home to me from my childhood through college. Instead, I had different priorities. I wanted to finish college and law school and launch a legal career. Also, Leesa and I had started a family, and traveling to Israel with small children would be both expensive and challenging. Finally, in the spring of 1996, when Jeremy was nine and Jess was seven, we decided it was time to introduce them to Israel. Jess was in the first grade at the Jewish Day School in Rockville, where she was learning Hebrew and Israeli culture. By then we had taken them on several trips that involved time zone changes, so we knew they would be able to adjust to the jet lag. Also, I had been made a partner at my firm and felt comfortable being out of touch for two weeks — this was before the widespread use of email.

We wanted the kids to have fun on the trip, but now the fun served an ulterior purpose: fostering a connection to Israel. After the trip, Leesa put together a detailed scrap book for each child, so we have an exact itinerary. After visiting our friends Natalie and Dani in their house in Ramat Efal and my relatives in Ramat HaSharon, we drove up the coast to Caesaria. Ongoing excavations revealed ruins I had not previously seen. The kids pretended to perform on the stage of the amphitheatre, just as David and I had thirty years earlier. We then stopped at the necropolis at Bet Shearim, where the kids climbed through the tunnel filled with sarcophagi and burial niches from the rabbinic period.

We had arranged to stay in a cabin at Kibbutz Ha’on on the Sea of Galilee. The cabins turned out to be rusted out trailers. After one night, we decided to move to the much nicer guest house in the adjacent Kibbutz Ma’agan. Leesa and I went to the Kibbutz Ha’on office prepared to argue that they should refund our money for the remaining nights, and to our surprise they readily agreed. When we went back to the cabin, the children were missing and our belongings were strewn all over the cabin. For a moment, we feared that the children had been kidnapped. We ran outside and saw that the kids had decided to help move us to Kibbutz Ma’agan by packing up the car in a less than organized manner. We were so relieved that they weren’t kidnapped, and touched that they wanted to help switch to the other kibbutz, that we couldn’t get angry at them for moving the suitcases before they were packed.

We used our improved lodging as a base for exploring the Galilee. We visited the basalt ruins of the town of Katzrin, dating to the Talmudic period. At Belvoir, the kids played in Crusader ruins as my brother and I had when we were their age. I don’t think the kids were too impressed by the mosaics at Bet Alfa, but they loved swimming in the springs at Sachne. When we pulled up to the park at Bet Shean, I expected we would just spend ten minutes at the amphitheater. I didn’t realize that since I had last been there, an entire Roman town behind the amphitheater has been excavated. Jeremy was fascinated by Greek and Roman mythology, so was engaged by the well-preserved ruins.

On the way to Nimrod’s Castle, we passed by the ruins of synagogues at Kursi and Korazim. My FOMO kicked in, so we stopped. The weather in the Galilee in the spring is delightful, with many wildflowers in bloom, so the family did not complain about these unplanned detours.

My parents had told me about the excavations at Tzippori, which had not been open to the public when I had last been to Israel. The kids in particular enjoyed wandering through the deep cisterns carved into the rock.

After driving around the Galilee, we headed to Jerusalem, where we had rented an apartment. We climbed the walls surrounding the Old City, which not surprisingly had changed little over 15 years. We also visited Masada and Bet Guvrin.

During this trip, we decided that we would become Sephardic Israelis, at least for purposes of Passover. Until then, we always celebrated two Seders, did not eat kitniyot (legumes) for the duration of the holiday, and observed eight days. But in Israel, even the most Orthodox Jews only celebrated one Seder and observed seven days. (In the Second Temple period, the Sanhedrin instituted an extra day of observance of holidays in the Diaspora because of the possibility that Diaspora communities wouldn’t receive timely notification from Jerusalem of the beginning of the lunar month in which a holiday would fall.) And the Sepharadim also ate legumes. (Ashkenazim by tradition do not eat legumes during Passover in order to be additionally certain that they haven’t eaten leavened grain be mistake.) We decided that because that we weren’t Orthodox, there was no reason for us to observe Passover more rigorously than many Orthodox Jews in Israel. This has made Passover observance much more pleasurable.

A few years later, I went on a business trip in Israel while my parents were on one of their many sojourns there. I brought Jess with me, and she stayed with my parents when I was in meetings. My most vivid memory from that trip is Jessica literally falling asleep into a plate of French fries because of jet lag. I don’t recall whether either of us visited any national parks on that trip.

In 2007, Jess spent the spring semester after she graduated from high school at a program run by the Alexander Muss High School in Israel in Hod HaSharon. During her Passover break, Jeremy, Leesa, and I visited her. Leesa organized an excursion to Petra with several other Day School families. On the drive down to Eilat, where we would cross the border into Jordan, we stopped at the ruins of the Nabatean city of Avdat. I thought this stop made sense because Petra also was a Nabatean city.

As we hoped, these trips to Israel fostered, at least for Jess, a strong sense of connection to Israel. After she graduated from college in 2011, Jess spent half a year on an internship program in Tel Aviv. That internship led to a career in social media marketing, which now has evolved into recruiting for jobs in the digital sector. More importantly, she met her-now husband, Jonathan Gerafi, while on that program. They have returned to Israel several times; on one of those trips, they became engaged. Their trips, and connection to Israel, are oriented towards Tel Aviv, rather than Jerusalem or national parks.

Phase Four — The Final Push

United States

After the kids headed off to college, Leesa and I continued to visit national parks opportunistically. After the Bat Mitzvah of one of Leesa’s cousins in Park City, Utah, we drove to Capital Reef National Park. By then we had figured out that we could go on relatively long hikes — five to six miles — so long as the vertical climb was less than 500 feet. At Capitol Reef, we went on one hike along a canyon floor that met that criteria perfectly. For most of the hike, we had the red rock canyon completely to ourselves. We also spent a couple of days hiking in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. We drove on a long dirt road to an area full of slot canyons, and experienced first-hand how easy it was to get lost in the desert.

After another of Leesa’s cousin’s wedding in Northern California, we drove up to Redwood National Park. Even more massive than the national park’s redwoods were the redwoods in Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park. We also took a boat ride up the Klamath River, where we watched a black bear feeding nonchalantly on the river bank.

In 2010, Leesa began working on a contract basis for the State Department. She became an International Visitor Liaison for the International Visitor Leadership Program. The IVLP brings rising foreign leaders in different fields to the United States on three week programs to meet with professional networks and learn how we handle similar issues here. As a Liaison, Leesa accompanies these visitors as they travel across the United States. In July 2014, one of Leesa’s work trips ended in Seattle. I flew out to join her, and we proceeded to the Olympic Peninsula for my third visit to Olympic National Park. On the drive out, we stopped at Fort Worden State Park, where scenes of An Office and a Gentleman were filmed. We climbed the steep hill above the parade ground to find a complex network of World War I era fortifications with an amazing view across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Canada. That night we stayed at a bed & breakfast near Port Angeles that was a recreation of George Washington’s plantation house at Mount Vernon. Unlike Mount Vernon were the fields of lavender that surrounded the B&B. During our time at the B&B, we explored nearby Fort Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge, a narrow spit of beach reaching far into the Strait.

In Olympic NP itself, we hiked up to a viewpoint of Hurricane Ridge, where the abundant mountain goats — as well as the jagged, snow-covered peaks — made us feel like we were in Switzerland. We also hiked to a waterfall near Lake Crescent. We then drove to the Pacific Coast, and walked along the rugged coastline at Ruby Beach. We continued to the southwest corner of the park. We spent a couple of nights at a lodge on Lake Quinault, and hiked through the rainforests consisting of enormous spruces and Douglas Firs. On a nature trail I learned how to distinguish the two, but promptly forgot. This happens all the time; I can never retain any of the information I acquire concerning flora. My memory is a bit better concerning geology and wildlife.

Not long after this trip, I began my concerted effort to visit all the national parks in the lower ’48. As I mentioned above, the impetus was seeing a list of parks published by the National Park Service as it began publicizing the upcoming centennial of the Park Service in 2016. It was unfortunate that I launched my quest after the visit to Seattle and Olympic National Park, because I had never been to North Cascades National Park, a couple of hours northeast of Seattle. Had I started the national park quest before the trip to Seattle, we would have visited North Cascades instead of Olympic, and I would have saved myself another trip to Seattle.

While some of the 20 parks I visited in this final push were truly amazing and rank among my favorites, others were less impressive and likely were the result of political deals by powerful members of Congress seeking to promote tourism in their states. With these lesser parks, the cliché that what matters is not the destination but the journey certainly applied. I visited these parks with Leesa, Jeremy, or both Leesa and Jeremy. We always made time for other interesting stops along the way, so we were never disappointed with any of these trips. Leesa and Jeremy were willing participants in these trips; no coercion or inducement was needed.

I had the flexibility to visit the 20 parks remaining in my quest because in 2005 I had left Morrison & Foerster to establish my own firm, policybandwidth. So long as I could respond to my clients’ needs by email, I could be anywhere in the country — or the world. I didn’t need to worry about face-time in the office or answering to a large firm hierarchy.

The planning of these trips was greatly facilitated by the prevalence of Hampton Inns and Holiday Inn Expresses in every corner of the country. We stayed at Hampton Inns or Holiday Inn Expresses located along the route from the nearest airport to the park we were targeting. If there was no lodge in the park we were visiting, we’d often stay at the closest Hampton Inn or Holiday Inn Express. This provided us with a stress-free decent standard of accommodation and free breakfast. On trips I took with Jeremy, we often also made peanut butter sandwiches at breakfast, which we took for lunch. (Leesa preferred a sit-down meal at lunch, if possible.)

Because we were no longer tied to the school calendar, we could avoid the heat and the crowds of the summer as well as the cold and rain of winter. As a result, we often could see the parks at their best. Once I began the national park quest, we used the endpoint of several of Leesa’s work trips as the starting point for visits to national parks. Alternatively, Jeremy and I took advantage of Leesa’s absences from Washington to visit parks Leesa did not care about missing. I also combined national park trips with visits to my parents and in-laws.

In November 2014, Jeremy and I visited Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. After flying to Albuquerque, New Mexico, we drove south to the Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. This array of enormous radio telescopes spread out across a flat plain was as unworldly as it appeared in the movie Contact. It put us in the proper frame of mind for a stop in Roswell, where we didn’t see any aliens, but we did visit Robert Goddard’s rocket laboratory. We stayed at Carlsbad, which we used as a jumping off point for the adjacent national parks. We descended into Carlsbad Caverns through the natural entrance, which felt like a portal to the underworld. The chambers were huge, as were the stalactites and stalagmites. We crossed into Texas to visit Guadalupe Mountains NP, which contains the tallest peaks in Texas. We hiked through McKittrick Canyon, where the creek kept disappearing and reappearing in the streambed. After visiting the parks, we cut through the mountains to the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, NM. Ironically, it was so socked in with clouds that we couldn’t see the valley below. Nonetheless, we could explore the various observatory buildings.

We then proceeded to White Sands National Monument. It’s a good thing we stopped there, because Congress designated it a national park in 2020! We took a nature walk through the snow-white sand dunes with a ranger who explained how plants and animals could survive in the inhospitable environment. We returned the next day to hike through the dunes. We could see how easy it would be to become disoriented and lost among the featureless and shifting dunes. We continued on to the White Sand Missile Range Museum, where we saw the interior of a V-2 missile, as well as displays of the different missiles tested at the range. We then hiked to Dripping Springs in Organ Mountain National Monument. (I enjoyed the hike so much that I returned there with Leesa in 2017 when I met her in Las Cruces before we went to Big Bend NP.) On the drive back north to Albuquerque along the Rio Grande (which is not that grand because so much water is diverted for agriculture), we stopped in Truth or Consequences, Elephant Butte, the El Camino Real International Heritage Center (a great museum about the history of New Mexico), Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument (the ruins of an immense18th century mission built by the Spanish).

The next day, after experiencing a flat tire and exchanging rental cars, we proceeded to Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument north of Albuquerque. The phallic tent rocks were among the most unusual rock formations I had ever seen. We climbed through a winding slot canyon up to a viewpoint from which we could see peaks 50 miles away. We then hoped to take the tram to the top of Sandia Peak, but the strong winds caused the tram to close. Instead, we went to the Balloon Museum; Albuquerque is the site of one of the world’s largest hot-air balloon festivals each year. The following day, before we flew home, we visited Petroglyph National Monument and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History.

In January 2015, Leesa and I flew down to Key West to visit Dry Tortugas National Park. We had never been to Key West before, and enjoyed the town’s ambiance as we rode bicycles to Truman’s Winter White House and Ernest Hemingway’s house. We stopped at a beach from which we could see the cruise ships sail into the Gulf of Mexico. Leesa became obsessed with figuring out where the cruise ships were headed, and searched multiple websites looking for those ships’ itineraries.

The next day we took a boat west to the national park. Ever since I had met her, Leesa had claimed that she got seasick, but I had never witnessed it, even though we had frequently traveled on the water — including cruises to Alaska (described above) and around the Galapagos. As with those other trips, Leesa was concerned about becoming seasick on the way to the national park. I ignored these concerns, convinced based on my experience that she was not prone to seasickness. For the first hour of the 90-minute cruise, the sea was calm and Leesa was perfectly fine. Then the captain announced that we were about to hit a rough patch as we entered the Florida Strait. Suddenly the boat began to pitch and roll. As if on cue, about a quarter of the passengers, including Leesa, started to vomit. I was stunned. I exclaimed in a shocked voice, “You really do get seasick!” She was not amused. Fortunately, she had taken a seasickness bag handed out by the crew, so she was prepared. Soon we left the open water, allowing the boat — and the seasick passengers — to settle down.

Moments later we approached Fort Jefferson, a vast red-brick fort built in the 1850s. On a tour of the fort, a ranger explained the strategic importance of Dry Tortugas: it provided a deep, safe anchorage during storms, and it guarded the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. All shipping between the U.S. harbors on the Gulf of Mexico (e.g., Mobile and New Orleans) and the East Coast had to pass by the island. I was stunned for the second time that day. I had not expected such an enormous, well-preserved fort in the middle of the sea. Additionally, the water close to the fort was a clear turquoise. The contrast of the red-brick, the turquoise water, the darker blue of the deeper sea, and the lighter blue of the sky was visually arresting.

The sea was calmer on the return trip, so Leesa did not become seasick again. (In fact, I have never seen her become seasick since, so this might have been an aberration….) We then drove the length of the Florida Keys to Biscayne National Park, at the southern edge of Biscayne Bay. Most of the park is underwater, and the keys and coral reefs are accessible only by private boat. In addition to the visitor center, a path along some mangrove trees was the only part of the park we visited. We were disappointed that a park so close to Miami was so inaccessible. After our brief visit to Biscayne National Park, we drove to Leesa’s parents in Delray Beach.

In March 2015, Jeremy and I flew out to Los Angeles to visit my parents — and Channel Islands National Park. By then, Alzheimer’s had started to erode my mother’s memory. Early on a weekend morning, Jeremy and I drove less than an hour and a half to Ventura Harbor to catch the boat to Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands NP. I had no expectations; although I had lived in or visited Los Angeles throughout my life, neither I nor anyone I knew had ever been visited the national park. I had been to Catalina Island further to the south, and remembered its wild beauty, but not to any of the islands in the national park. Jeremy and I only had a few hours in which to explore the island, which is more than twenty miles long and five miles wide. Obviously, we saw only a small fraction. But what we did see was astonishing. The cliffs plunging into the Pacific were as dramatic as I had seen anywhere in the world. The sun was shining, the wildflowers were blooming, we hardly saw another person, and there was virtually no evidence of human habitation — all less than 90 miles from one of the largest metropolitan regions in the country. I could imagine what the rest of California once looked like. I felt a sense of elation that results from the convergence of perfect weather, spectacular scenery, and splendid isolation.

In January 2016, Leesa, Jeremy and I visited Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas. After flying to Little Rock, we drove to Bentonville to see the Crystal Bridges Museum. The museum’s structure, designed by Moshe Safdie, was far more interesting than the collection of American Art it contained. On the museum’s lush grounds stood a “Usonian” house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It had been moved to Bentonville from its original site in New Jersey. While in Bentonville, we also visited the Walmart Museum, housed in one of Sam Walton’s first stores.

Before driving back to Little Rock, we stopped at the Pea Ridge National Military Park, the site of a civil war battlefield. I found the history of the battle, where the Union succeeded in preventing a Confederate invasion of Missouri, interesting, but my travelling companions were far less enthusiastic. In Little Rock, we visited the gleaming white Arkansas Capitol Building (Leesa collects capitol buildings the way I collect national parks; she has visited many of them on her work trips), the Clinton Library, and the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. The historic site’s visitor center contained a thorough exhibit of the controversy concerning the integration of the high school in 1957. After a white mob protested the attendance of nine African American students at the high school, President Eisenhower sent a detachment of the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into the school and preserve the peace. When the imposing gothic revival structure was built in the 1920s, it was hailed as the most expensive, most beautiful, and largest high school in the nation. Because the high school was a source of great pride to white Little Rock residents, they staunchly opposed its integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.

The following day we drove to Hot Springs. Congress established the Hot Springs Reservation in 1832; it was the first land set aside by Congress to preserve it for recreational purposes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the hot springs were enormously popular, leading to the construction of elaborate bathhouses along what is now called Bathhouse Row. We took a ranger tour of the Fordyce Bathhouse, which also contains the visitor center. The Park Service maintains the bathhouses it owns, but the privately owned hotels and bathhouses have fallen into a state of disrepair reflecting the diminished belief in the curative powers of hot springs. Although I found the history of the hot springs interesting, this definitely was one of the more underwhelming national parks.

In April 2016, I needed to attend a meeting in Berkeley, California. Leesa flew out with me, and after my meeting, we drove south to Pinnacles National Park. The park’s rocky spires did not live up to my expectations. I had heard about the park as a habitat for the California Condors ever since I was a child growing up in Los Angeles, and I suppose in my mind’s eye I saw pinnacles towering high into the sky. We certainly enjoyed our visit, but the pinnacles did not seem as large as I had imagined. After a couple of hikes in Pinnacles, we drove into Monterey, where we walked along the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean.

Jess and Yon married in June, 2016. Since they were going on two honeymoons (a short one to Santa Fe immediately after the wedding, and a longer one to Switzerland several months later), Leesa and I decided that we deserved a trip, too. What better way to celebrate than visit some national parks with Jeremy? We flew out to Bismarck, North Dakota, where we visited the state Heritage Center as well as the Capitol. The Capitol is a 21-story structure built in the 1930s. It is by far the tallest building in Bismarck, and can be seen from great distances. It was constructed in a surprisingly attractive Art Deco style, which I didn’t expect in North Dakota. We also visited Fort Abraham Lincoln, where George Custer was stationed before departing for the Battle at Little Bighorn. In addition to the fort’s structures built in the 1870s, we saw large earth mounds that formed dwellings of the local Mandan Native American tribe.

We then drove west to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The park includes a ranch established by Roosevelt in the 1880s. Roosevelt retreated to this area after his mother and first wife died on the same day in 1884. The park is divided to a northern and southern unit. We first visited the northern unit, where the scenic drive provided us with views of the badlands carved by the Little Missouri River. We then continued to the southern unit, where we stayed in the town of Medora. Virtually all the employees in the shops, restaurants and hotels were young Eastern Europeans with temporary work visas. We wondered about the skewed perspective of the United States these guest workers must have had from their limited exposure to this small town in North Dakota. We drove the scenic loop through the southern unit, where we saw numerous prairie dog towns filled with amusing prairie dogs who chattered and popped in and out of their burrows. We also hiked through the colorful Painted Canyon.

Next, we drove to Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming. This is the 900 foot tower of igneous rock that plays a central role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Ever since I saw the film when it was released in 1977, I wanted to visit Devil’s Tower. Jeremy, who enjoys sci-fi films, also was excited about seeing the Tower. It did not disappoint. The tower stands on a base that itself is 400 feet high, so the Tower juts high in the sky and can be seen from miles away. We hiked all the way around the Tower, then ate lunch at the edge of a prairie dog town.

We continued on to the Black Hills in South Dakota. Until this trip, I had not understood that the Black Hills were distinct from the badlands; nor that there were many badlands — for example the badlands in Theodore Roosevelt NP and the badlands encompassed in Badlands National Park. Part of the confusion arises from the name. The Black Hills aren’t hills; they are mountains with an elevation several thousand feet higher than the surrounding prairies. Indeed, the Black Hills are often described as an island rising out of the Great Plains. In contrast, badlands are formed by rivers cutting through the Plains. The exposed sedimentary rock and clay are inhospitable to the grasses that cover the prairie.

In Spearfish, at the northern edge of the Black Hills, we visited the grounds of the D.C. Booth National Historic Fish Hatchery, established to propagate trout in the Black Hills. We drove through Spearfish Canyon, where cliffs towered above the sinuous road. We arrived at Mt. Rushmore National Monument on the Fourth of July. I’ve seen thousands of images of Mt. Rushmore over my life, and I was prepared to be disappointed. However, it made me feel surprisingly patriotic. The grounds are well-laid out, and the visitors center contained an extensive museum documenting in detail the life of Gutzon Borglum and how he carved the monument, as well as the significance of the four presidents included in the monument. There was an infectious sense of pride and joy among the thousands of visitors who followed the path to the foot of the monument where they gaped up at the carvings. The one negative aspect of the crowds is that I became separated from Leesa and Jeremy, and it took us half an hour to find one another (I didn’t have a cellphone with me).

After Mount Rushmore, we visited the Crazy Horse Memorial. This enormous sculpture will be far larger than Mount Rushmore, if it ever is completed. It is intended to provide a Native American counter-narrative to Mount Rushmore; Crazy Horse was the Lakota warrior who defeated Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. It also reflects the single-minded obsession of the original sculptor, Korczak Ziolkoski, and his family, in undertaking a project of such scale without public resources. Later in the afternoon, we saw the aptly named Cathedral Spires in Custer State Park. That evening, we saw the 4th of July fireworks in Custer, S.D.

The next day, we visited Wind Cave National Park, on the southwestern edge of the Black Hills. Prior to my National Park quest, I had never heard of Wind Cave. Wind Cave is considered to be one of the largest cave systems in the world. Geologists estimate that the 140 miles of the cave that have been explored represent only 5% of the entire cave. Wind Cave contains 95% of the world’s boxwork formations, which are thin blades of mineral calcite that project from the cave walls and intersect at angles. While the cave’s boxwork and other formations were impressive, the cave’s chambers were nowhere near as large as Carlsbad Caverns. However, the extensive maze of both explored and unexplored passages made me wonder about how many more caves lie undetected beneath the surface of the earth.

I wanted to stop at the nearby Jewel Cave National Monument with 160 miles of surveyed passages. However, I realized I would have a mutiny on my hands if I tried to push a second cave on my traveling companions. Instead, we visited the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, S.D. The well-preserved fossils of over 60 mammoths were found in a sinkhole that trapped the mammoths when they came to drink. The visit was fascinating, although it was difficult to take our 12-year old tour guide too seriously.

The following day, we drove to Badlands National Park. On the Window and Notch Trails, we wandered through the narrow canyons and jagged spires formed from clay layered in different colors. Jess and Yon had arranged for us to go on a helicopter ride above Badlands to thank us for their wedding reception. We arrived at the helipad to find no helicopter and no one in the office. After repeated calls, we learned that the pilot was at a staff meeting an hour away. We were told we could return for a ride in the afternoon, but we lost confidence in the operation and just asked for them to credit the refund to Jess’s account. We proceeded to the Badlands Loop Road, which took us to numerous overlooks of the White River Valley and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the distance. After leaving the park, we stopped at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, where we looked into a missile silo with a diffused missile.

In August 2016, Leesa and I flew out to California to help my parents empty the house in Beverly Hills, where they had lived for 53 years. My mother’s Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point where my father could no longer care for her. Because Leesa had no sentimental attachment to any of my parents’ possessions, she decluttered with ruthless efficiency. That October, my parents moved to a senior community near us (and three of their four grandchildren) in Silver Spring.

In May 2017, Leesa ended a project in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I joined her there, and we drove east past El Paso towards Big Bend National Park. On the way, we stopped at the artists’ colony in Marfa, Texas. We enjoyed the varied terrain of the Big Bend, but what made the deepest impression on us was the narrowness of the Rio Grande River and the ease of crossing from Mexico. We visited not long after Donald Trump’s election, and he was talking incessantly about building a wall on the Mexican border. The cliffs and gullies along the river underscored the absurdity of Trump’s objective. A wall could be built in that area only miles inland, leaving the national park on the wrong side of the wall. On one hike near the river, we came across a flat stone on which rested some hand-made dolls. Across the river, we could see a canoe. Evidently, Mexicans would come across the river in the canoe, leave the dolls, and hope hikers would purchase them. Throughout the park, we saw more SUVs belonging to Customs and Border Patrol than the National Park Service. At a small museum near a historic ranch, we learned that until 9/11, the border was open, and Park visitors would often cross the river to eat meals in the Mexican village on the other side.

In June 2017, while Leesa was away on a work trip, Jeremy and I drove out to Cuyahoga River Valley National Park just south of Cleveland, Ohio. A couple of hours after we left Rockville, while listening to a podcast, I saw a sign for the Flight 93 Memorial. We hadn’t planned on stopping there — I didn’t even know where it was — but we decided to turn off the interstate. We had visited the 9/11 Memorials at Ground Zero in New York and at the Pentagon, and were grateful for the opportunity to see this memorial near Shanksville, PA. The museum carefully documented the minute-by minute events on the flight from takeoff to crash, and we were moved by the monument to the brave passengers. We then continued on to the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, commemorating the 2,200 victims of the flood in 1889.

The following day we reached our destination, Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The park stretches along the Cuyahoga River and parallels the Erie and Ohio Canal. The park was pleasant enough, with waterfalls along the edge of the valley and lush vegetation along the river and canal, but it was not nearly as scenic as the C&O Canal and Great Falls, just 20 minutes from our house. Still, it was interesting to learn about the history of the canal and the industrialization of the region.

The next day, we drove south to the William McKinley National Memorial in Canton. The 25th President is buried in a large mausoleum on top of a steep hill. Although he no longer is regarded as a major President, at the time of his assassination, he evidently was revered at least by residents of Canton, where he spent much of his career. We then drove to Akron, where we visited Stan Hywet Hall, the estate of F.A. Seiberling, one of the founders of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The mansion, built between 1912 and 1915, as well as the extensive gardens, reflected Seiberling’s great wealth and the importance of rubber to the expanding automobile industry in the early 20th century.

In August 2017, one of Leesa’s projects ended in Minneapolis. I joined her there and we drove up to Grand Marais, which we used as a jumping off point to Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. We took a ferry to the National Park from Grand Portage, spent a few hours hiking from Windigo, then took the ferry back. The scenery was pretty but not spectacular — pine forests along the lake shore and views of distant highlands. Perhaps we would have been more impressed had we spent longer and hiked deeper into the park. Once we returned to the mainland, we visited Grand Portage National Monument, which we found extremely interesting. The heritage center had a detailed display concerning the fur trade in Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the central role of Grand Portage in that trade, particularly the annual North West Company Rendezvous. Every August, the voyageurs coming from the east with supplies rendezvoused with the voyageurs traveling from the northwest with furs. We also were fascinated by the history of the iron mining industry along the shore of Lake Superior, including the William A. Irvin iron ore cargo ship in Duluth, the multi-level ore loading docks, Split Rock Lighthouse State Park, and the original office of the 3M Corporation in Two Harbors. Additionally, we descended deep underground at the Soudan Iron Ore Mine.

After the mine tour, we reached Voyageurs National Park. As with Isle Royale, we were underwhelmed. The views of lakes and forests were attractive, but the flat topography did not make a deep impression, especially relative to other national parks. We went on a boat tour and canoed on a lake, and crossed into Canada at International Falls. What became obvious to us was the impossibility of truly regulating the border. The international boundary passes through a vast network of lakes and rivers, and anyone with a motorboat could easily cross back and forth undetected.

In July 2018, Jeremy and I visited Congaree National Park near Columbia, South Carolina. The park preserves the largest tract of old growth bottomland hardwood forest left on the East Coast. Basically, it’s a forest in the swampy floodplain of the Congaree River. It contains the tallest examples of 15 species of trees, including the loblolly pine, the sweetgum, and the American Elm, but that was a bit lost on us. We walked along the two and a half mile boardwalk, and had trouble distinguishing the different kinds of trees. Most noteworthy were the cypress trees, which had “knees” — phallic-shaped protrusions that were part of their root systems — sticking above the ground. In places, the forest had a primeval feel and we could imagine dinosaurs suddenly appearing.

As always, we found other points of interest. In Columbia, we visited the State House (with a statue of Strom Thurmond), the “horseshoe” on the campus of the University of South Carolina, the Columbia Canal, and the South Carolina State Museum. On the drive back to Charlotte, we visited King’s Mountain National Military Park, a Revolutionary War battlefield. We had the Park to ourselves, and I enjoyed learning about the War in the Carolinas. My attention previously was focused much more on the history of the Revolutionary War in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. We proceeded to the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden, and then on to the NASCAR Museum in Charlotte, NC. I knew nothing about NASCAR racing, so I was fascinated to be exposed to the culture and technology. The museum had numerous simulations. Jeremy and I did pretty well changing a tire and refueling a stock-car in a pit-stop. We fared much more poorly in a race simulation with other visitors; Jeremy and I finished in last place.

In August 2018, Leesa and I visited Glacier National Park. Although I usually took the lead in planning the national park trips, Leesa had always wanted to visit Glacier, so she took charge of planning this expedition. Glacier is a large, popular park in a remote location with limited accommodations, so the logistics are complex. Further complicating matters is that we also wanted to visit the adjacent Waterton National Park across the border in Canada. After numerous conversations with park rangers, Leesa assembled the ideal itinerary, then started to make reservations at four different lodges more than a year in advance, as is necessary to obtain specific lodging on specific nights. A couple of weeks before our departure, forest fires erupted in Glacier, causing the Park Service to close the famous “Going to the Sun” road which crossed the Park (and the Continental Divide). The Park Service also closed the Lake McDonald Lodge on the west side of the Park, where we were to stay our first two nights. We were on the verge of cancelling the trip when the Park Service reopened the eastern part of the Going to the Sun Road, from Logan Pass to the St. Mary entrance. After consulting with rangers, who assured us that most of the smoke was confined to the western side of the park, we decided to go. We needed to redo the itinerary Leesa had carefully planned, but fortunately lodging availability wasn’t a problem because so many travellers had cancelled their trips due to the fires.

A motivating factor in our deciding to go on the trip notwithstanding the risk of smoke obscuring the views was our need to escape from ongoing crises involving my Aunt Ilana and Uncle Carl. Ilana is my mother’s younger sister. She and Carl have two children, Daniel and Joel. For reasons unknown to us, Daniel hasn’t spoken to them in at least two decades. Joel has psychological issues, and can barely able to take care of himself. Thus, it fell to Leesa and me to arrange for their care when they no longer could care for themselves. For several years, Carl had been showing signs of dementia. Then, in late 2017 and early 2018, Ilana experienced a series of infections that resulted in several hospitalizations as well as increasing dementia. In between Ilana’s hospitalizations, Leesa helped them find a unit in Riderwood, the senior community in Silver Spring to which my parents had moved in 2016. Shortly before they were to move to Riderwood in July 2018, Ilana was hospitalized again, followed by several weeks in a rehabilitation facility. She seemed better after returning home, so we kept the move on track. However, once Carl and Ilana moved into an independent living apartment at Riderwood, Ilana began to deteriorate very quickly. After she lost her car several times on the Riderwood campus, and she once tried to “escape” back to their house in Bethesda, I had to take her car keys away. We hired a care management coordinator, who quickly concluded that they belonged in assisted living. That required a second move, from independent living to assisted living. This also meant that we had another domicile to clear out — the independent living apartment in addition to their Bethesda house. Carl and Ilana had become hoarders as their memory deteriorated — they couldn’t remember what they had — so emptying the house and the apartment were huge tasks. In addition, I needed sort through their incredibly complex finances; they had accounts in over 20 different financial institutions. In short, we needed a vacation, and we weren’t going to let wildfires get in our way.

We flew to Kalispell, Montana, and drove to the western entrance of the park. We reached the tranquil shore of Lake McDonald. The sky appeared clear of haze, so we were optimistic that the fires wouldn’t interfere with our trip. The Going to the Sun Road remained closed beyond the Lake McDonald Visitor Center, so we took a longer alternate route that looped around the southern end of the park and led us to the East Glacier Lodge. The next day we ventured into the Two Medicine region of the park. We hiked to a waterfall, then took a boat back across Two Medicine Lake to our starting point. We hardly saw any other people; the fires clearly had kept visitors from the park. A light haze hung in the sky, but we could still clearly see the peaks looming above us.

The following day we drove along the Going to the Sun Road until Logan Pass. The wind had shifted so we had clear blue skies as we drove past a string of lakes and climbed to the Continental Divide. Almost all the glaciers have disappeared from the Park, but they left behind deep valleys and sparkling lakes. Normally one must leave early in the morning to find parking at Logan Pass, but between the fires and the blocked road, we found few visitors. We climbed a steep trail to the Hidden Lake overlook, stopping along the way to photograph the abundant wildflowers. We then hiked along the Highline, a narrow trail carved into a cliff called the Garden Wall. At some points, we had to hold on to handrails anchored in the rockface to maintain stability. From the trail, we could look across the Continental Divide into the closed western part of the park. We could see thin wisps of smoke rising from distant fires. In the afternoon, we enjoyed the views of St. Mary Lake from Sun Point, which we had to ourselves.

The next two nights we stayed at the historic Many Glacier Lodge on the shores of Swiftcurrent Lake. Mountains surround the lake, and the panorama from the lodge’s deck looks different throughout the day as the shadows and lighting change with the Sun’s movement across the sky. The following morning, as I rushed to the boat that would take us across the lake, I noticed that the smooth lake-surface perfectly reflected the mountains and clouds beyond. I snapped a photograph and continued on my way. That evening, when I looked at the photographs I had taken during the day, I realized the single shot I had hurriedly taken of the lake that morning was probably my best photograph ever.

We sailed across Swiftcurrent Lake, hiked up the glacial moraine to another lake, which we crossed in another boat. There we joined a ranger walk that took us to a third lake, Lake Grinnell. The glacier that carved the bowl in which the lake sat had receded, but a fragment remained high up the valley. We briefly considered hiking up to the glacier, but then remembered that we had hiked on a huge glacier that spring in Iceland. Instead, we returned to Many Glacier Lodge, and drove to the Swiftcurrent Pass Trailhead, from which we hiked to Red Rock Falls. When we returned to our car, we saw dozens of people standing in the parking lot with telescopes and cameras with enormous telephoto lenses staring at the mountainside behind the Swiftcurrent campground. A handful of grizzly bears traversed the slope feeding on berries. We learned that every afternoon, crowds gathered in the parking lot to watch the grizzlies feed. Several of the spectators allowed us to watch the grizzlies through their telescopes. The next day, as we drove out of the park, we pulled over where several cars had stopped on the side of the road. Once again, with their telescopes and telephoto lens, dozens of visitors observed a couple of grizzlies lumbering along the shore of a lake.

We proceeded across the Canadian border to Waterton National Park (I currently have no plan to visit all the Canadian national parks). We stayed at iconic Prince of Wales Hotel, perched on top of a moraine jutting into Lake Waterton. We didn’t realize that two years before, a fire burned most of the trees on the mountainside above Waterton, and threatened to engulf the hotel and the town below. As a result of that fire, much of the park remained closed. And as a result of the ongoing fires in Waterton and Glacier parks, haze obscured the view of the lake when we checked in. However, later in the afternoon, when we walked into town, the winds shifted and blew away the haze, unveiling a dark blue lake framed by imposing mountains.

The next day, we took a boat to Goat Haunt on the southern end of Lake Wateron. A stripe of cleared trees on both shores of the lake marked the border with the United States. When we arrived at Goat Haunt, the U.S. Park Service Ranger informed us that because of the fires, we couldn’t hike farther into the park. The winds kept the haze away from Goat Haunt, however, so we enjoyed the magnificent views of the mountains rising above the lake shore.

Back at Waterton, we hiked through a burnt forest to Bertha Falls. While we would have preferred to hike through a lush forest than a scorched landscape, the absence of foliage afforded uninterrupted views of the lake.

We drove back to Kalispell via the Crowsnest Pass, which allowed us to visit the Frank Landslide. In 1903, a mountainside collapsed into the coal mining town of Frank, killing about 75 residents. The enormous limestone boulders span the valley, demonstrating the enormous force of the landslide.

While in the departure lounge of the Kalispell Airport, I received a telephone call from Carl and Ilana’s doctor. Our vacation had ended.

In December 2018, Jeremy and I visited Saguaro National Park. The park is divided into two units, one on each side of the Tucson, Arizona. We first visited the eastern unit, where we hiked among saguaro cacti more than 50 feet high, as well as other species of cacti. I asked Jeremy to stand near a saguaro so that I could take a picture, and he accidentally pricked his leg on a small cactus nearby. We then drove to the western unit, where we hiked to a mound covered with petroglyphs.

The contrast between the cacti forest in Saguaro and the hardwood forest in Congaree was remarkable. I have no recollection of ever believing in God or any other supernatural force; although I have observed Jewish rituals throughout my life, that has always been more a matter of identity than faith. The closest I feel to belief in a supernatural power is when I observe the diversity of life on earth. I can comprehend the forces of geology. When I see the Grand Canyon, I can imagine the strata of rocks being formed, the Colorado Plateau being uplifted, and the Colorado River carving through it over time. But when I see biodiversity, I have difficulty understanding how so many different complex life forms could emerge. This strikes me whenever I go snorkeling along a coral reef; when we were on safaris in Africa; when we went whale watching near Cape Cod; and whenever I go to an aquarium or zoo. I once discussed this with my brother David, and he was amused. For him, the similarity of the skeletal structure of different species of animals was such obvious evidence of evolution that he had no trouble grasping how it occurred.

After completing our visit in Saguaro, Jeremy and I stopped at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which actually is a zoo focusing on desert wildlife. We were particularly intrigued by the javelinas, a kind of wild boar found throughout the Sonoran desert. The next day, we visited the vast Pima Air & Space Museum, from which we embarked on the “boneyard tour” at the adjacent Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. In the boneyard, the Air Force stores thousands of aircraft it no longer needs. It either strips the aircraft for spare parts, or brings the aircraft into back into service if the need arises, e.g., the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We then drove south to the Titan Missile Museum. This is the last remaining Titan Missile silo. We were able to descend into deep underground to see the launch control center and a missile in the launch duct.

The next day, we visited the Miniature Museum, which had the best collection we’ve ever seen of miniatures and dollhouses. Jeremy was enraptured by the many fantasy displays. On the drive back to the airport in Phoenix, we stopped at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, an imposing four-story adobe structure built 600 years ago by the Hohokam People.

In January 2019, the government shutdown prevented Leesa from working. One weekend, when I was checking my email in the study, it occurred to me that it might be fun to go the Virgin Islands National Park for Leesa’s birthday (February 1), even though it technically was not part of my national park quest because the Virgin Islands are not within the lower 48 states. On Google Flights, I discovered that United Airlines had a nonstop flight from Dulles to St. Thomas. I went into the kitchen to run the idea by Leesa, and it turned out that she too had been having exactly the same thought. We quickly did some research about whether the park had recovered from the damage inflicted by in the hurricane the previous year, how long we would want to stay, and whether accommodations were available on such short notice. Within hours, we pulled the trip together.

We flew to St. Thomas, then took a shuttle to the ferry at Red Hook, which transported us to the island of St. John, 60% of which is Virgin Islands National Park. We stayed in a small hotel in Cruz Bay, the main town on St. John. On Leesa’s birthday, we joined a day-long cruise to the British Virgin Islands. On Virgin Gorda, we walked through the Baths, a labyrinth of beachside boulders. We snorkeled off of Norman Island and had lunch on Jost Van Dyke.

The next day, we rented a jeep and drove to the far end of St. John. We hiked along the clear blue waters of Saltpond Bay to Ram Head. After lunch on the shore of Coral Bay, with chickens running underfoot, we drove to the north shore of the park. We visited the ruins of the Annaberg Sugar Mill, then snorkeled in Francis Bay among sea turtles. The next day, we took an open-air communal taxi to Trunk Bay, where we spent the day snorkeling and reading on the beach. Normally we don’t like just sitting on the beach, but we found the perfect tropical setting impossible to leave. The hurricane has destroyed much of the coral along the snorkel trail, but many colorful fish remained. That evening, we sat on lawn chairs by the beach while watching the Super Bowl projected onto a large screen. (The Patriots defeated the Rams.)

In February 2019, President Trump signed legislation converting Indiana Sand Dunes National Lake Shore into a National Park. So, in June 2019, Jeremy and I flew to Chicago, to which Jeremy had never been. After landing at Midway, we drove to the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park. We then went on a self-guided walking tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed houses in the neighborhood. To balance the immersion in Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, we visited the Brookfield Zoo. We managed to stay dry during a thunderstorm that flooded the tunnel leading to the zoo. Fortunately, we found another (unflooded) entrance, and had the zoo to ourselves — most visitors had left because of the thunderstorm. The highlight was a collection of life-sized animals made from hundreds of thousands of Legos.

The next day, we drove an hour to the Indiana Sand Dunes National Park. Most of the signage still referred to it as a national lakeshore. Unlike most national parks, this park did not consist of a large, contiguous area of land. Instead, it was made up of several parcels stretching along the shore of Lake Michigan. In between these parcels were steel mills and other factories. The sand dunes rose to a height of 150 feet, and dropped sharply into the Lake. From the top of the dunes, we had unobstructed views of the lake. But if we looked to the left or the right, we saw steel mills. This odd assemblage of parcels was the result of a political deal struck in the 1960s. The state of Indiana wanted to build a port near Gary, which environments opposed. The compromise struck allowed the port to proceed in exchange for the land between existing steel mills and industrial plants being converted into a national lakeshore. We enjoyed walking among the dunes and watching the waves lap the shore, but did not have the same sense of remoteness from civilization typical of a national park.

The next day, back in Chicago, we visited the Shedd Aquarium, which Jeremy loved, and rode rented bicycles over the Navy Pier and Millennium Park. We then took an architectural cruise along the Chicago River.

Both Leesa and Jeremy accompanied me to the final two national parks in my U.S. park quest: Great Basin and North Cascades. I had encountered difficulty in scheduling visits to both of these parks. During the summer of 2018, Leesa had a work trip that ended in Seattle, and I planned to join her at the trip’s conclusion to visit North Cascades. However, shortly before I left, a malignant tumor was discovered in my father’s parotid gland, and it needed to be removed before the surgeon left on his vacation. So, I didn’t fly out to Seattle. The surgery proved successful and my father quickly recovered. Similarly, we needed to cancel a planned trip to Great Basin in spring of 2019 because I had to attend a World Intellectual Property Organization seminar in Singapore. Because I was running out of time to complete the quest before my 60th birthday in November 2019, we ultimately decided to visit both Great Basin and North Cascades after a wedding in Los Angeles at the end of August 2019, even though more than 1,000 miles separate the parks.

The morning after the wedding, we flew to Las Vegas, then drove almost five hours north to a ranch with a guest house near Great Basin. The ranch stretched along a narrow canyon that reached into the park. One of the most remote national parks in the lower 48, Great Basin lies in Nevada just across the border from Utah, equidistant from Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. The following day, we joined a ranger tour of Lehman Cave, the geological feature that had originally prompted the establishment of the park. I enjoyed the cave, but it paled in comparison to Carlsbad Caverns and Wind Cave. We then drove up the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive, climbing to almost 9,500 feet. We hiked the Bristlecone Pine Trail, gaining over another 500 feet of elevation. We reached a grove of twisted, knotted bristlecone pines, some an estimated 3,000 years old. I remembered seeing a film about bristlecone pines at Horace Mann Elementary School. I felt excitement at seeing these ancient trees in their arid natural habitat, at the foot of a rugged slope far from civilization. The bristlecone pines made less of an impression on Leesa and Jeremy. On the way down, we stopped at an alpine lake the afforded views of the 13,000 foot Wheeler Peak. That night, we looked up at the star-filled night sky. Because of its cloudless skies and distance from the light pollution of populated areas, Great Basin is one of the best places for star gazing in the United States. We could identify the Milky Way and the Big Dipper, which exhausted our knowledge of the constellations.

On the drive back to Las Vegas, we stopped at Cathedral Gorge State Park, where we climbed through an intricate network of twisting slot canyons carved from clay. At a lower elevation than the national park, the temperature in the gorge climbed close to 100 degrees. By the time we reached Las Vegas, the temperature had risen even higher, to almost 110 degrees. We spent the night in Las Vegas. Leesa, who had stayed in Las Vegas on a work project for almost a week earlier in the year, kept reminding us how much she disliked Las Vegas.

The next morning, we flew to Seattle. We then drove north to Deception Pass State Park in the San Juan Islands. We took a long walk along a rocky beach, flanked on one side by tall evergreens and the other by a straight with a strong current. A paddle boarder who knew how to navigate the currents made large loops in the straight at what looked like an impossibly fast speed.

The next day, we drove east into the last national park: North Cascades. Leesa took a picture of me jumping for joy next the entry sign. As a hyper-technical matter, however, we never actually set foot in the Park. The North Cascades Highway, which bisects the park, lies within the Ross Lake National Recreation Area. The highway follows the Skagit River, on which several dams were constructed in the 1920s to generate hydroelectric power. This industrial use is incompatible with a national park. Thus, when Congress formed North Cascades National Park in 1968, it placed the highway, the river, the dams, and the reservoirs into the Ross Lake National Recreation Area, which cuts through the middle of the National Park. North Cascades National Park, Ross Lake National Recreation Area, and the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area to the south together form the North Cascades National Park Service Complex. No roads reach into the Park itself. And any trails into the Park involve a serious vertical climb. Throughout the entire day, though, we looked at peaks within the Park. In particular, at Diablo Overlook, jagged mountains in the Park surrounded us. Because we visited the Park Complex, and saw peaks within the Park for several hours, I determined that this trip counted as a visit to the Park, and that I had completed my U.S. National Park Quest. (It is my quest, so I get to determine what counts as a visit.) After a short hike to Lake Ann on the eastern side of the Park Complex, we drove to Lake Chelan.

The next morning, we sailed a boat the length of Lake Chelan to Stehekin, 50 miles north. With a maximum depth of almost 1500 feet, Lake Chelan is the third deepest lake in the United States. In Stehekin, we rented bicycles and rode up a broad valley to Rainbow Falls. Further north, we could see the snow-covered peaks within North Cascades National Park.

The following day, on the way back to Seattle, we stopped at the Rocky Reach Dam on the Columbia River. We continued past vast orchards of apples. When we reached Seattle, we had dinner with Susie Coskey, who had introduced us in Jerusalem in 1979. From her patio, we could see the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound. It was a fitting way to end my U.S. National Park Quest.

Israel

Over the past decade, we have visited Israel several times for both work (e.g., a workshop on digital preservation at the National Library in Jerusalem) and pleasure (the wedding of our friends’ daughter). On one trip, we rented bicycles at the old train station in Jerusalem (now called the First Station), and rode on the bike path built on the rail line through Train Track Park in the German Colony and Bakaa to beyond the Malha Station. As we pedaled, I was struck by how far Israel had come since my childhood. The public spaces of the First Station and Train Track Park were as sophisticated as those anywhere in the developed world, while maintaining a unique Israeli flavor — particularly with the mixed demography of haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews), Arabs from East Jerusalem, and secular Israelis. The bike path terminated in a small wetlands full of tall reeds. I later learned that these wetlands lay within Nahal Refaim National Park. On another trip to Israel, Leesa and I visited Apollonia, crusader ruins on the Mediterranean coast just north of Herzlia. As I mentioned above, the brochure we received with our tickets listed the Israeli national parks, and I realized I had already seen most of them. We decided that we would visit the rest of the parks the next time we travelled to Israel.

In the fall of 2018, Leesa and I discussed how to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary, upcoming in March 2019. Leesa suggested that we go to Israel, where we had first met, and that I conclude my Israeli national park quest. It took five years and fourteen trips for me to visit 20 U.S. National Parks to complete that quest. By contrast, in only five days during a single trip, Leesa and I visited thirteen national parks in Israel. While that sounds exhausting, the parks were small enough and close enough together that our pace was not frenetic and we were able to enjoy the varied landscape of the Negev, the Sharon, and the Galilee covered with wildflowers. Because we visited these parks in March, we often had the parks to ourselves.

We started in Emek Tzurim in East Jerusalem. Located on the western slope of Mount Scopus and the upper reaches of the Kidron Valley, the park offers dramatic views of the Temple Mount. It also houses the Temple Mount Sifting Project, where archeologists sift through rubble removed haphazardly from the Temple Mount.

The next day we drove to Tel Lakhish, archaeological excavations of a First Temple period town conquered by the Assyrians in the 6th century BC. Much of the siege ramp constructed by the Assyrians remains, as do some of the ramparts and the foundation of a palace. Wildflowers and thick grasses covered the windswept tel. In the distance, we could see the Judean Hills.

We then headed to Mamshit, a Nabatean town just outside of modern-day Dimona. Over the years, I had visited the Nabatean ruins in Avdat many times, but had never been to Mamshit or Shivta, which we visited the following day, even though the ruins are just as impressive as Advat, if not more so. I assume this is because of Avdat’s location near the main road between Eilat and Beer Sheva. In stark contrast to the verdant Tel Lahkish, Mamshit sat on a dusty brown hillside. The dry riverbed on the far side of the town had the remains of dams built by the Nabateans to trap water from the winter rains. We also saw several cisterns. Still, I had difficulty imagining how the Nabateans had survived for centuries in this harsh desert location; and why they chose to live there.

On the drive north to Arad, we passed by numerous surprisingly large Bedouin villages. Cultivated green fields surrounded Tel Arad. To the north stood the imposing Hebron Mountains. On top of the tel, we saw the remains of an altar and a “holy of holies” chamber; Arad had functioned as a center of worship before the construction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. Seeing these vestiges of ancient Jewish worship made me feel unexpectedly connected to that place.

We stayed that night at a small hotel in the old, “historic” part of Beer Sheva. In a scene reminiscent of a Fellini movie, a teenage chasid wearing a black suit and a black hat rode around this area on a bicycle with a yellow flag proclaiming Meshiach (Messiah). The next morning we headed southwest towards Shivta, another Nabatean town. We saw the ruins of several large houses and three Byzantine churches. As with Mamshit, I had trouble understanding why I had never been there before. True, it was not on the way to anywhere but the Egyptian border, but this fascinating and well-preserved archaeological site was only 45 minutes from Beer Sheva.

We proceeded to Nitzana, almost on the border with Egypt. The Nabateans originally established Nitzana, but it is not nearly as well-preserved as Shivta or Mamshit. The most visible ruins on the site are those of a Turkish hospital built at the beginning of the 20th century. We could see bullet holes in walls of the hospital, perhaps remnants of fighting that occurring in this area in the 1948 War of Independence.

We then drove north to Eshkol National Park, just east of the Gaza Strip. The park consists of several ponds fed by springs. We found the desolate park with small patches of grass and widely spaced palm trees depressing, and left quickly. Back in Beer Sheva, we visited the ANZAC Memorial Center. This brand-new state-of-the-art museum focuses on the role ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) units played in the Battle of Beer Sheva in 1917 during General Allenby’s conquest of Palestine. I had never paid much attention to Allenby’s campaign; I had always assumed that the British defeated the Turks with little effort. This museum showed the importance of the Battle of Beer Sheva within the larger, hard-fought, two-year struggle.

The following day we visited three national parks that consist of beaches on the Mediterranean Sea. None were as nice as Virgin Islands National Park, which we had visited a month earlier! At Hof Palmachim, we walked on a path lined with wildflowers that led to a small headland with Roman and Crusader ruins. We had difficulty locating Hof Hasharon — Google Maps doesn’t always work as well in Israel as in the United States. When we found it, we had to hike carefully down a gully through red clay cliffs to the rocky beach. According to the guidebooks, soft-shelled turtles live in Nahal Alexander, but we didn’t see any. Once again, Google Maps may have led us astray. The park’s main attraction, Turtle Bridge, crosses the river a kilometer upstream from where we entered the park. We had a nice walk along the Beit Yannai beach, which also falls within the park. We climbed some boulders to a monument honoring the illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine during the British Mandate.

We stayed that night in a bed & breakfast in Zichron Yaakov. When I had worked on the L.A. Ulpan 40 years before, we had visited Zichron from our nearby base at the Shfeya Youth Village. To put it mildly, Zichron has changed over the 40 years. The sleepy main street consisting of the historic homes of the settlement’s founders had been converted into a bustling promenade with boutiques and gourmet restaurants.

The following day, we drove north to the Crusader fort at Yechiam. From the massive fortifications perched high on a hill surrounded by deep valleys, we could see the coast from Rosh Hanikra down to the Carmel. We climbed among the ruins as David and I had at Belvoir and Nimrod’s Castle in my childhood. Given how close Yechiam is to Kiryat Chaim, where Chaya and Levi lived, and which we visited so often when I lived in Israel with my parents, I was surprised that I had never been there before.

From Yechiam, we followed tortuous roads through the central Galilee to Sdeh Amudim, north of Tzomat Golani. At first we thought that Google Maps had failed us yet again, but then from the road we saw a column standing in a field surrounded by barbed wire. The column matched the picture I had seen on the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority website. A synagogue had stood there in the 3rd and 4th century. Evidently the Parks Authority had not gotten around to developing this site for tourists.

The final national park, Yodfat, more than made up for the disappointment of Sdeh Amudim. I had studied about Yodfat in Giveret Tziton’s class in the sixth grade. During the Great Revolt, the Romans had besieged Yodfat in 67 AD. After a 47-day siege, the Romans captured the town. According to Josephus Flavius, the Romans then executed the 40,000 residents. Although Josephus may have exaggerated the carnage, archeologists have found evidence of a massacre. Few ruins remain of the town, but the remote site is beautiful. The landscape probably has not changed in the two thousand years since the Roman conquest. From the hilltop, we could see few signs of development other than the road leading to the park.

On April 10, 2019, a few weeks after I completed my Israeli National Park quest, my mother passed away. In the months before her death, Alzheimer’s had diminished her cognitive ability so significantly that she had no awareness of my undertaking. However, I believe that she would have been proud of the achievement had she not lost her ability to understand. She would have admired my discipline in traveling to even the most remote corners of the land of Israel to gain a deeper familiarity with her birthplace. She would have wanted me to show her the all pictures I took at each park, and would have asked detailed questions about them — as my father did upon our return. She would have thought we were out of our minds to see thirteen parks in five days, but she would have appreciated the careful planning that allowed us to do so.

Concluding Thoughts

My mother would have had one overarching question after my completion of these parallel quests: what is the significance of my having completed these journeys? On one level, the quests reflect aspects of my personality. I am impatient and do not enjoy staying in one place too long. I am curious and do not want to miss anything. I am goal oriented and believe in completeness. When I wrote my senior thesis on the role youth movements played in the development of institutions in Israel, I examined all the movements, instead of focusing on just one; and I wrote a detailed introductory chapter setting forth the entire history of the Yishuv. As a result, the thesis was twice as long as it should have been. Likewise, my now three books on the legal history the software interoperability debate document every skirmish and battle in this thirty-year war, including incidents probably not worth remembering. As with the park quests, I did not set out to write a history of the interoperability debate. Rather, I wrote individual articles about cases and legislative proposals, and then at some point it made sense to gather them together into a book. Additional articles formed the core of the second book, and then the third.

But on a deeper level, the parallel quests manifest the two aspects of my identity, as an American and a Jew. Writer and historian Wallace Stegner called the U.S. national parks “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best….” Visiting all the parks in the lower 48 thus expressed my American identity. The U.S. National Park quest took me places I otherwise would never have gone, and revealed elements of American history I otherwise would never have learned.

By the same token, visiting all the Israeli National Parks expressed my Jewish identity. Because of the years I lived in Israel in my youth, my Jewish identity is inextricably linked to Israel. But since my junior year in Israel, I have lived only in the United States. Maintaining more than a superficial connection to Israel has been difficult. Over the years, I have provided copyright advice to various Israeli entities, and we have visited friends and family there, but ultimately these have proven insufficient. In contrast, the Israel Park quest has provided me, at least recently, a tangible way of expressing my Jewish identity. The parks provide a concrete means of understanding over 3,000 years of construction and conquest. They show the continuous connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, but the connection of other people as well. Of course, one doesn’t need to compulsively visit every single national park in Israel to appreciate this complex history. Nonetheless, visiting each park imposed on me a discipline of seeing remote places that I otherwise would have overlooked, and provided me with an even greater sense of familiarity with the Land of Israel.

Now that I have completed my quest, many friends have asked for a list of my favorite U.S. Parks. I respond that I can’t identify a handful that I like best, given their enormous variety and overall excellence. Instead, I categorize the parks into three tiers: the top tier, parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, that everyone should visit at least once in their life; the middle tier, parks such as Acadia and Shenandoah and Guadalupe Mountain, that are worth visiting if one enjoys nature and parks; and the bottom tier, parks such as Cuyahoga Valley and Indiana Sand Dunes, that can easily be missed. Very few parks reside in the bottom tier. As with much in life, enjoyment often turns on expectations. If one has high expectations, one is often disappointed; it one has no expectations, one can be pleasantly surprised. I had no expectations concerning Dry Tortugas and Channel Islands, and they both overwhelmed me.

Friends also ask what my next quest will be. I briefly thought about visiting all the national parks in Canada, but many are as inaccessible as the national parks in Alaska. I also considered visiting all the U.S. national battlefields. I’ve already visited 10 of the 25 national battlefields, and the 12 of the remaining 15 are in the South, so I could easily visit them in a couple of roadtrips. My traveling companions, however, have no interest in visiting the battlefields. Perhaps the 15 national parks in the United Kingdom….

In the meantime, I’d like to revisit the national parks in California that I haven’t seen since childhood. As noted above, Leesa and I went to Joshua Tree in February 2020, which we thoroughly enjoyed. We had planned to spend several days in Sequoia and Kings Canyon this summer, until the pandemic caused the cancellation of the wedding taking us to California. Perhaps next summer. And at some point in the future, when we have a large blocks of time, we might try to tackle the remaining national parks in Alaska and American Samoa. And we’ll visit any new national parks designated in either the United States and Israel.

January 2021 Addendum

In the omnibus spending bill passed at the end of 2020, Congress designation New River Gorge in West Virginia as a National Park. Fortunately, I visited New River Gorge with Leesa and Jeremy two months-and-a-half months earlier in October 2020. We were looking for a place we could reach within a one-day drive from D.C. for a short vacation during the covid-19 pandemic, and I had read that West Virginia’s Senators had been seeking National Park designation for the New River Gorge. We figured it made sense to make a preemptive visit there. Because we travelled during the middle of the week, we avoided crowds and could easily maintain a social distance.

On the drive out, we went on the Bunker Tour at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The Bunker had been constructed during the Cold War to house Congress in the event of a nuclear attack. We had visited the Churchill War Rooms in London, so we anticipated a similar cramped space. We were shocked by the Bunker’s expansive rooms with high ceilings. Unlike the War Rooms, which consisted of retrofitted basements in existing buildings in Whitehall, the Bunker was part of an entirely new building constructed specifically for the purpose of sheltering members of Congress and their staff. Concealed in plain sight, the Bunker was the underground exhibition hall of an annex to the hotel.

After we found our Airbnb cabin near Fayetteville, we walked along the Canyon Rim Boardwalk, which afforded us great views of the gorge as well as the New River Gorge Bridge. When completed in 1977, it was the world’s longest single span arch bridge. The roadway is almost 900 feet above the river, making it the third highest in the United States. By chance, our trip coincided with peak fall foliage. The colors weren’t as vivid as in New England, but still very nice, especially during the pandemic.

The following day we drove to Pipestem State Park, through which flowed the Bluestone River, one the tributaries of the New River. Unfortunately, the aerial tram down to the bottom of the Bluestone Gorge wasn’t operating. We took a strenuous hike along the rim of the gorge, but contrary to the map and the trail description, the trail didn’t afford clear views of the gorge. However, the deck of the lodge provided us with a panorama.

We proceeded to Sandstone Falls at the bottom of the New River Gorge. We walked along the Sandstone Falls Boardwalk and the Island Loop trail, enjoying the views of the river and the canyon walls. We then drove to Grandview, with its overlook of a horseshoe bend in the New River Gorge. We were chagrined that for 35 years we had lived only a five-hour drive from such natural splendor, but had never been there before. We hiked along the Grandview Rim Trail, which had numerous viewpoints overlooking the gorge. We drove down to Thurmond, a railway town on the banks of the New River. While we walked around few remaining buildings from the early 20th century, a long train thundered by on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.

The next day, we visited Hawksnest State Park, where we hiked down to the Lovers’ Leap Overlook. We then hiked along the Endless Wall Trail to Diamond Point, from which we could seek the New River 1000 feet below as well as a longer wall of cliffs. We drove down to the remains of Nuttallburg, a coal mining town at the bottom of the gorge. The enormous coal tipple and the coal conveyor climbing the canyon wall are still in good condition. While Leesa joined a work call, Jeremy and I went on the New River Gorge Bridge Walk, where we walked the length of the bridge on a catwalk suspended below the roadway and 900 feet above the river. For safety, we wore harnesses and were attached to a guidewire.

On the way back to DC, we stopped to explore the downtown campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown. We then walked along the Cheat Lake trail, an old railway line that had been converted into a hiker-biker trail.

The trip was a great escape from the confinement of the pandemic, and it ultimately added another National Park to the tally!

August 2021 Addendum

One night in July 2020, at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, I had trouble falling asleep. I started to think about where we should go once we were vaccinated and it was safe to travel again. I wondered how feasible it would be to visit the remote national parks in Alaska and American Samoa that I had bypassed by structuring my national park quest as targeting the national parks in the Lower-48. On the Internet, I quickly identified several travel agencies in Alaska that specialized in arranging visits to all of the state’s national parks. I also determined that there were regular flights to American Samoa from Hawaii. The following morning, I mentioned to Leesa my interest in visiting the six remote parks once we were vaccinated, and she readily agreed.

Because Hawaii at the time required visitors to quarantine, we decided to concentrate first on the five remaining parks in Alaska. I emailed several of the Alaskan travel agencies, and within days we had an itinerary for the summer of 2021. Due to the inaccessibility of the parks, the itinerary involved numerous flights on small aircraft (including float planes). The agency we selected agreed to allow us to roll over our deposit to the summer of 2022 if we decided by the end of April 2021 that it was not yet safe to travel.

The chaotic rollout of the vaccine in December 2020 and January 2021 made us doubt whether we would be fully vaccinated by the end of April 2021. Because we did not want to delay our trip to the summer of 2022, we were eager to get vaccinated as soon as possible. At the same time, we didn’t want to cut ahead of anyone who needed the vaccine more than we did. Leesa learned from a friend that if one volunteered to assist in Maryland’s effort to vaccinate its residents, one could receive the vaccine. We felt this did not constitute skipping to the head of the line; we would earn the vaccine through our labor. We took the online certification course to become members of the Maryland Responds Medical Reserve Corps and registered to volunteer at Montgomery County Covid vaccination centers.

My first session occurred at a Korean senior residential facility the morning after an ice storm in late February 2021. I slipped on the ice in the parking lot on my way into the facility. I extended my right arm to break my fall. I slowly stood up and carefully made my way into the facility. My arm was a bit sore, but I had no trouble completing my shift. At the end of the session, the nurse in charge offered the vaccine to the volunteers who had not yet been vaccinated. Typically, one had to volunteer three times before receiving the vaccine, but I obviously didn’t say no. Because I received my first shot at the end of February, I was now eligible to receive my second shot at the end of March, meaning I would be fully vaccinated well before the deadline at the end of April. We felt confident that Leesa would receive her vaccines in time as well.

The next morning, I realized that I couldn’t raise my right arm above shoulder level. Leesa previously had rotator cuff surgery on both of her shoulders, so we feared that I may have torn my rotator cuff. A visit to an orthopedist and an MRI confirmed that I had indeed torn my rotator cuff and needed surgery to repair it. In other words, I had volunteered with Maryland Responds in order to get vaccinated promptly so that we could go to Alaska in July 2021, but in the course of volunteering I injured myself in a manner that could jeopardize the trip. I did not know whether my shoulder would recover sufficiently to enable me to carry my luggage and get in and out of the small airplanes. After the operation in late March, I religiously performed all the exercises prescribed by my physical therapist, notwithstanding my aversion to exercise, in order to ensure that the injury did not interfere with the trip. At the same time, I felt exasperated that my anxiety over getting the vaccine in time — and subsequent volunteering and rotator cuff tear — turned out to have no basis, as the vaccine was readily available by the end of March.

By the end of April, we decided to go forward with the trip that summer. We both were fully vaccinated, the rotator cuff surgery was successful, and my recovery was on track. Although we eagerly anticipated this adventure, it continued to induce more anxiety than any previous national park trip. First, even though we had received our vaccinations, covid cast a long shadow over the trip. We had to wear masks in the airport terminals and on the long flights to Alaska, and the week before we left, the CDC reported increased incidents of the delta variant breaking through the vaccine. Indeed, shortly after we arrived in Alaska, we learned that one of our nephews had contracted covid notwithstanding being vaccinated.

Second, a nationwide shortage of rental cars made us wonder whether the car our travel agent had reserved would in fact be waiting for us in Anchorage when we went to pick it up.

Third, United Airlines, like other major carriers, kept changing the times of our flights to reduce the length of our layover before our connecting flight to Anchorage (there are no non-stop flights from Washington to Anchorage). This required us to change our itinerary twice to ensure that we’d make our connection to Anchorage.

Fourth, Alaska has temperamental weather that could interfere with the flights of small planes. We knew that we might not succeed in reaching all five parks.

Finally, less than two months before our scheduled July 25 departure, Leesa’s 89 year-old mother Shirl Fields collapsed and was hospitalized. Leesa flew down to Florida to see her mother for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. A suspicious mass was detected in Shirl’s abdomen, and it was soon diagnosed as an aggressive lymphoma. Shirl’s oncologist gave her less than six months to live. We put the Alaska trip on hold. Leesa flew down again to Florida on June 28. Shirl had deteriorated so seriously in the four weeks since Leesa’s previous visit that it was clear the end was near. Shirl passed away on July 4, just two and a half weeks after receiving the diagnosis. I joined Leesa and other family members for the funeral in Florida on July 12. Two days later, we held a shiva service for Shirl back in Maryland.

We discussed whether we should go ahead with the trip. Leesa strongly believed that a trip to the national parks in Alaska was exactly what she needed to start processing her mother’s sudden demise. Although Shirl had a chronic kidney condition and other health issues, the lymphoma appeared unrelated to those and Shirl’s rapid passing took everyone by surprise.

In short, it was a miracle that we went on the trip at all, let alone that we succeeded in reaching all five national parks we planned on visiting.

We arrived in Anchorage on July 25. We spent the afternoon walking around the Lake Hood Seaplane Base, where we saw a steady stream of floatplanes taking off and landing. The following morning, we visited Katami National Park in the southern Alaska Peninsula. We flew to King Salmon on a 10-seat aircraft with Leesa sitting in the co-pilot’s seat. In King Salmon, we transferred from the airport to a floatplane on the nearby Naknek River that flew us to Naknek Lake. As the floatplane cruised to the shore after landing, we saw several brown bears lumbering along water’s edge. Any concerns we may have had about not seeing bears disappeared.

We had timed our visit to Katami (and to Alaska) to coincide with the salmon run, when the brown bears fish the returning salmon out of the Brooks River. Unfortunately, many other tourists similarly timed their visit. Floatplanes lined the shore, and throughout the afternoon, a constant flow of floatplanes arrived and disgorged passengers intent on viewing the bears. Even though the total number of visitors for the day probably numbered only in the hundreds, we funneled into a small area so it seemed crowded.

At the Brooks Camp Visitors Center, a ranger gave us an orientation talk on how we should respond if we encountered a bear. We then started our hike to Brooks Falls. From a long boardwalk across the mouth of the Brooks River, we could see several bears on the river bank. After winding through a wooded area, the path led us to an exhibit area where a ranger put our names on a waitlist. The ranger then directed us to Ripples observation platform where we could wait our turn for the Brooks observation platform. The Ripples platform overlooked the Brooks River about 100 yards downstream from Brooks Falls. Right in front of us, five bears prowled the river searching for salmon. We could see another twenty bears at the falls themselves. More than fifty visitors stood with us on the Ripples platform waiting for a ranger to call our names out as at a busy restaurant. Fortunately, the 90-minute wait passed quickly because of the bear activity directly before us. When a bear detected an unsuspecting sockeye salmon swim by, the bear would pounce on it. Sometimes the salmon succeeded in evading the bear, but often the bear would catch the salmon in its jaws. The bear would then take the wriggling salmon either to a rock in the river or to the river bank, and shred the salmon open with its claws. Within moments, the bear would devour the salmon. The bear would discard the skin and bones, which seagulls would swoop in to eat. On occasion, one bear would try to snatch a salmon from another bear, which would lead to an altercation. We also saw a mother share a salmon she caught with her cubs. Some of this activity occurred directly in front of the platform, no more than 10 yards away. With our binoculars, we could see similar activity at the falls upstream. The bears seemed completely indifferent to our presence; nothing could distract them from the salmon.

Finally, the ranger called out our name and we headed to the Brooks Falls platform. Directly before us, half a dozen bears perched on the edge of the ten-foot-high falls, waiting for the salmon to jump. We saw one salmon jump right into a bear’s mouth. Other bears congregated just below the falls, where the salmon gathered before attempting to jump. Some of the bears stood on their hind legs to get a better view of the salmon. Other bears would hunt by walking with their heads submerged. High in a tree across the river, a bald eagle watched over the bears feasting on the salmon. We felt as if we had been dropped into a National Geographic documentary. In addition to my visiting my 58th national park, I witnessed one of the world’s most iconic wildlife behaviors.

After lunch back at Brooks Camp, we spent more time on the long boardwalk over the mouth of the Brooks River, watching a handful of bears fish (unsuccessfully, as far as we could tell) for salmon. As we waited on the lakeshore to board our floatplane, three bears came down to the beach. One started to move in our direction. We were told to crouch on the pontoons under the floatplane to allow the bear to stroll past us, no more than 20 feet away. We then boarded the floatplane back to King Salmon, where we caught the ten-seater to Anchorage.

The next morning, soon after we arrived at Rust’s Flying Service’s dock on Lake Hood, we learned that Rust’s had canceled the flight to Lake Clark National Park due to fog in the landing area in Chinitna Bay. On our travel agent’s advice we had added an extra day in Anchorage to accommodate cancellations due to weather, but Rust’s did not have a flight to Chinitna Bay — or anywhere else in Lake Clark — the next day. We contacted the travel agency, which said they didn’t know of any other companies that flew to Lake Clark. In addition to annoyance at the unhelpfulness of the travel agency, I had the sinking feeling that we would not reach Lake Clark on this trip. I wondered whether I could justify the expense of another trip to Alaska just complete my national park quest. I also felt frustrated with myself that I had not been satisfied with my original objective of the national parks in the Lower 48, which did not pose the logistical challenges of the remote Alaska parks.

Rust’s suggested we contact two other companies, which Leesa did once we returned to our hotel. One of the companies said they could fly us to a different part of Lake Clark the following day, assuming that they could finish a repair on one of their planes in time. They advised us to call back at 6pm to learn the status of the aircraft. This didn’t sound too promising. I found it hard to believe that with all the floatplanes on Lake Hood right outside our hotel window, no one could fly us to Lake Clark. I Googled “flying to Lake Clark,” and the first response was a company called Lake Clark Air that had regular flights to Port Alsworth, a town on Lake Clark surrounded by the park. I called Lake Clark Air and they had availability for a flight down at 9am the next morning and back at 5pm that evening. After debating our alternatives, we decided to proceeded with Lake Clark Air.

In the meantime, we had a free day in Anchorage. We visited Earthquake Park, built on the site on a neighborhood destroyed by a landslide caused by the 1964 earthquake. We then walked along the Coastal Trail above Cook Inlet. The trail passed right under the runway for the international airport. In the distance I saw a riderless horse, and remarked on it to Leesa. She responded (scoffingly) that it wasn’t a horse, it was a cow moose. The moose started to move in our direction. We then saw a baby moose trailing the cow. They nonchalantly walked right past us. We picked up our rental car at the airport and drove down Turnagain Sound to Girdwood. The mountains of the Kenai Peninsula plunging into the Sound reminded us of the fjords in Norway or the lakes in the Alps. In Girdwood, we took the tram to the top of Mt. Alyeska, which afforded us wonderful views of the Chugach Mountains.

The following morning, we drove the Merrill Field, Anchorage’s original airport now used by small planes. Unlike Katmai Air and Rust’s, which primarily (if not exclusively) serve tourists, Lake Clark Air provides Alaskans with transportation to villages on the Alaskan Peninsula that can’t be reached by road. As the ten-seat plane flew through Lake Clark Pass, between jagged snow-covered peaks, I realized that no one knew we were on that flight. It wasn’t on our travel agent’s itinerary, and we hadn’t told any family members. Moreover, our children did not know the name of our trust and estates lawyer, or how to access our assets in the event we didn’t survive a crash. After we landed, I mentioned this to Leesa, and she said that she had had exactly the same train of thought.

Trees surrounded the gravel landing strip at Port Alsworth, which ended on the shore of Lake Clark. Above the trees we could see the mountains in the park. We walked to the park’s visitor center, which stood on the shoulder of the parallel landing strip. (Port Alsworth has two landing strips because they each are privately owned by the competing air taxi services that serve Port Alsworth.) At the visitor center, we met the park’s historian, who had worked for the National Park Service for nearly half a century. He told us about the history of Port Alsworth and the park, and answered Leesa’s questions about life in such an isolated location — he lived there year-round. He then led on a short cut through a black spruce forest to the head of the trail to Tanalin Falls.

On the trail, we came across a group from Samaritan House, a religious organization that hosts veterans with PTSD and their spouses for week-long retreats in Port Alsworth. We encountered only one other couple on the two-mile trail to the falls, underscoring the remoteness of the park. (Only 20,000 people a year visit Lake Clark, which is larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.) We have seen grander waterfalls, but enjoyed having them to ourselves. We continued on another half mile to Lake Kontrashibuna. Technically, the falls lie within the Lake Clark National Preserve, where hunting is allowed, while the lake lies within Lake Clark National Park itself.

When we arrived back in Port Alsworth, we had three hours until our flight to Anchorage. We found a bench at a lodge on the shore of Lake Clark next to the airstrip, and just sat there looking at the water, the mountains on the far side of the lake, and the floatplanes and fixed wheel aircraft coming and coming. Leesa took a nap on the grass sloping down to the lake, and then had a long chat with a member of the family that owns the lodge, Lake Clark Air, and the airstrip. We then strolled to the Lake Clark Air hanger, and watched with fascination the dependence of the community on air taxi services. Cut off from the road network and navigable rivers, Port Alsworth residents import all supplies by air. When a small propellor plane would land, a two-man ground crew unloaded food, drinks, packages, and building supplies from storage compartments throughout the plane.

We flew a six-seat aircraft back to Anchorage, but one seat had been removed to accommodate two coolers full of smoked salmon belonging to one of the other passengers. An Alaskan Native, she worked as an assistant to Deb Holland, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, splitting her time between Anchorage and Washington. Family members had smoked the salmon in her native village further south in the Alaska Peninsula. This plane was the least airworthy of any that we flew on this trip; I could see a small gap between the door and the fuselage. Fortunately, we had a smooth flight back to Anchorage.

That evening, we had dinner at the home of my high school classmate Creed Mamikunian. Creed had moved to Anchorage after medical school and had built a successful ENT practice. His home high in the hills on the east side of Anchorage has a spectacular view of the city, the Cook Inlet, and the Turnagain Arm. Creed is one of 17 children; he and his wife have six children; and another of the couples joining us for dinner had 10 children. We felt like amateur parents with only two children.

The next day we drove east to the Copper River, then south to an airstrip outside of Chitina. The airstrip looked like an abandoned parking lot. We were the only people there; no ground crew, no other passengers; no sign of any activity. We wondered whether we were in the right place. After fifteen minutes, we heard the welcome whine of a small plane. Moments later it landed. The plane taxied to where we stood near a handful of parked cars. A passenger disembarked and the pilot walked over to us and said, “You’re with me.” We took off and flew towards the town of McCarthy in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. On the way, the pilot pointed out Dall sheep grazing on the steep slopes below us. We descended over the Kennicott Glacier towards the airstrip. On the left, the town of Kennicott clung to the mountainside.

Once we landed, a van from the Kennicott Lodge drove us the five miles up the glacier valley to Kennicott. After checking into the lodge, we walked around the former copper mining town. The park service had informative exhibits in the restored buildings concerning the mining operations, the construction of the railroad to transport the copper to Cordova on the Pacific Ocean, and the challenges of the long, cold Alaska winters. As we walked among the buildings, we could see the glacier stretching down from the mountains before us. We had dinner that night on the lodge’s porch overlooking the glacier.

The following morning, we hiked on the Root Glacier, which flows into the Kennicott Glacier. Our guide Inga was a glaciologist from the University of Maine who had just finished her Master’s and was starting a PhD program in the fall. Although we had seen many glaciers in previous journeys, Inga provided us with a much deeper understanding of their complex behavior. The husband of the other couple in our group was blind. Amazingly, he had no difficulty negotiating the uneven two-mile trail to the glacier, including stairs and switchbacks. We put crampons on our boots when we reached the glacier itself. Once we started walking on the ice, I questioned the wisdom of this activity. After all, I was still recovering from a shoulder injury cause by slipping on ice. Of course, I hadn’t been wearing crampons in the parking lot of the Korean senior residential facility. We had lunch on the glacier, including hot chocolate made with boiled glacier ice.

That afternoon, Inga took us on a tour of the mill that towers over Kennicott. Machinery within this fourteen-story wooden structure separated the limestone from the copper embedded within it. Inga provided clear explanations of the complex series of steps used in the early 20th century to increase the purity of the copper. That evening, we once again had dinner overlooking the glacier.

The following morning, we flew back to Chitina. We then drove north, often in eye-sight of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Early in my career, I had represented the State of Alaska in litigation relating to TAPS, so I enjoyed finally seeing the pipeline. At one point in the drive, we think we saw Denali in the distance. We arrived in Fairbanks that evening.

The next morning, we were scheduled to fly to Bettles, a small town above the Arctic Circle. We had seen flood warnings for the Koyukuk River, on which Bettles sits, the previous few days, but the rain was forecast to subside during the course of Sunday, August 1, the day we were to fly out. That morning, we arrived at the Bettles terminal at the Fairbanks airport along with another couple, Linda and Frank from Nashville Tennessee, who also were “chasing” national parks. Over the next three days, the four of us bonded over the somewhat absurd situations in which we found ourselves. The plane took off only a few minutes behind schedule. Our pilot, who flew 747s for a cargo company prior to retirement, pointed out the Yukon River and other landmarks.

When we reached Bettles, we felt we had landed in an independent film full of quirky characters, from the innkeeper who couldn’t stop talking to the floatplane pilot who refused to answer questions. Bettles had seen better days. Some years before, the National Park Service had relocated the Gates of the Arctic park headquarters from Bettles to Fairbanks due to the high cost of living above the Arctic Circle off the road network, dropping the year-round population from 60 to 30. Many of the parks service buildings, and a school, stood abandoned. The Bettles Lodge also had seen better days.

It had rained heavily the previous five days, and backpackers whose flights into Gates of the Arctic National Park had been cancelled were camped out in an aircraft hanger. The park has no infrastructure, and had no road access. Although the weather was clearing, the lakes and rivers still were at flood stage, which could jeopardize our flight the next day.

However, the next morning we departed as planned with Frank and Linda. Sig, the taciturn pilot in his 70s, flew the float plane towards Lake Walter in the Gates of the Arctic National Park. For over an hour we flew without seeing almost any signs of habitation. We passed a few small isolated Alaskan Native villages with a handful of buildings and a small airstrip, but otherwise we saw just wilderness — mountains, valleys, and streams bursting their banks.

Sig beached the plane on the shore of a peninsula jutting into Lake Walter. We waded in our rubber boots to the shore covered by blueberry bushes and scrubby black spruce. Gates of the Arctic has no established trails, and hikers can go wherever they want. Nonetheless, we felt a little guilty as we stomped through the bushes to the ridge line from which we could see the lakeshore on the other side of the peninsula. Because of its remoteness, Gates of the Arctic is one of the quietest places in North America, and we could hear a stream coursing down the face of a mountain on the opposite side of the lake. We then walked back to the plane, where Sig had set up folding chairs for our lunch. After taking pictures with a homemade Gates of the Arctic National Park sign, we reboarded the plane.

The flight to Kobuk Valley National Park lasted a little over an hour. Much of the way we followed the swollen Kobuk River. Once we reached the park, we headed towards fields of sand dunes left by receding glaciers. In places, streams and vegetation have begun to encroach on the sand dunes. Sig then turned back to the Kobuk River. Sig said that he had never seen the river so high, but he thought he could bring us ashore safely. We touched down on the river and cruised to a sand embankment. Once the fronts of the pontoon touched the sand, Sig cut the engine, jumped out of the cockpit onto the left pontoon, and tried to jump onto the embankment holding on to a rope attached to the plane. The current began to pull the plane away from the shore so Sig climbed back into the cockpit and restarted the engine. Twice more he tried to beach the plane, without success; the current was just too strong. On the fourth attempt, Leesa saw Sig jump into the river, but it was deeper than he expected; he ended up to his neck in water. (Because I was on the opposite side of the plane, I had to rely on Leesa’s narration.) Sig managed to clamber back on the pontoon.

In my mind’s eye, I saw the rope slipping from between Sig’s fingers and the current sweeping the plane with us downstream toward the Bering Sea without a pilot. Linda stated several times that our landing in the river constituted reaching the park, and there was no need for us to get off the plane and actually stand in the park. Part of me agreed with Linda, but part of me thought that we were so close that Sig should keep on trying. Sig started the engine and once again headed to the river bank. This time, he succeeded in stepping onto shore, holding us in place with the rope. We disembarked and climbed to the top of the sandy embankment. We had made it to Kobuk Valley National Park, my 62nd.

Without doubt, Kobuk was the most difficult park for me to reach, and perhaps the most dangerous. I don’t know anything about landing floatplanes, but I suspect that Sig’s repeated attempts to beach the plane when the river was at flood stage bordered on (if not exceeded) the reckless. Earlier in the flight, Sig made it clear that if he wanted our help, he would ask for it. Since he didn’t ask for our help in beaching the plane in Kobuk, we didn’t offer. Clearly, if we had known what we were doing, we could have been useful; but it is just as likely that we could have been separated from the plane.

In any event, we made it. We giddily took our photographs with the homemade Kobuk Valley National Park sign (on the reverse side of the Gates of the Arctic sign). We saw some bear prints, which discouraged us from exploring further. We climbed back onboard the plane and flew back to Bettles without further incident.

The next morning, our flight back to Fairbanks should have left at 11am. At 10am, we learned that our plane had mechanical problems, and that we would take another plane back at 5pm. We spent a leisurely day on the front porch of the Bettles Lodge, chatting with the assorted characters passing though. We spoke to another park chasing couple from Minneapolis that had arrived the previous evening. We had a long conversation with three geologists in their twenties taking a break from several weeks in the field searching for copper for an Australian mining company. We met a helicopter pilot assigned to an archaeological team tasked with looking for Alaskan Native artifacts along the proposed route for a copper mine on land controlled by an Alaskan Native corporation. We saw a DC-6 tanker plane land with heating oil for the coming winter. To our pleasant surprise, the flight back to Fairbanks departed a few minutes ahead of schedule.

We spent the last day of our trip in Fairbanks. In the morning, we visited the Museum of the North on the campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. We learned slices of Alaskan history we had not previously encountered, such as the internment of Aleuts and the construction of the Alaskan Highway during World War II. In the afternoon, we experienced Fairbanks’ main tourist attraction, a three-hour cruise on the riverboat Discovery. Although kitschy, we still enjoyed the cruise, especially the dogsled exhibition and the visit to a recreated Alaskan Native village.

That evening, we boarded an American Airlines flight to Chicago. By then, we were unaccustomed to such a large plane! I noticed a woman sitting in the row behind us wearing a “Trump 2024” mask below her nose. Before backing the plane away from the gate, the pilot announced several times that the crew would remove anyone who did not wear his or her mask properly. Soon thereafter, the woman with the Trump mask had an altercation with the flight attendant, the pilot intervened, and the woman and her son were removed from the plane.

Before the trip to Alaska, I had no expectations; I simply wanted to get to the five parks in my obsessively goal-oriented manner. But each park’s grandeur thrust itself upon me. The bears feeding on salmon in Katmai; the solitude of Lake Clark; the glacier and the mining town in Wrangell-St. Elias; the vast wilderness of Gates of the Arctic; and the incongruous sand dunes of Kobuk Valley reminded me of the reason I sought to visit all the U.S. national parks in the first place: the quest expressed my identity as an American. Visiting these five parks forced me to explore the far corners of a part of the country I otherwise would never have seen; it revealed elements of American history I otherwise would have never learned; and it made me recall the incredible beauty, diversity, complexity and enormity of the country. Finally, particularly because of all the challenges we encountered before and during the trip, it provided us with a wonderful escape from the rest of the world and the rest of our lives.

We now must visit the final park — number 63 — in American Samoa. All flights have been canceled due to covid, but we hope to go soon, perhaps next summer, before the typhoon season.