Adventuring beyond through travel, food, and more.
Our recent trip to California included 1 stunning day in Channel Islands National Park! This park requires some planning and early reservations for your ferry, so plan ahead. We visited Santa Cruz Island after a lot of research and would suggest you do the same! Read on to see our best logistics and hiking tips for your next trip to Channel Islands National Park.
…
We had the most amazing 2 days in Lassen Volcanic National Park! This park, which is sadly overlooked in a state with Yosemite, Death Valley, Redwood, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and other beautiful spots, should be a destination on your road trip because it is so unique!
Unique meaning a mini-Yellowstone, Haleakala, or Mount Rainier. This park is home to both the world’s largest plug dome volcano (Lassen Peak) but also is home to all 4 types of volcanoes (plug dome, shield, cinder cone, and stratovolcano), which is rare in such close proximity. It is also home to a geothermal area named Bumpass Hell that feels like Yellowstone. You also have some higher elevation areas that felt like a high elevation mountain.
…
Crater Lake is the deepest and one of the most beautiful lakes in the United States. It is also both easy to visit and hard to experience. It is easy to visit because as long as the road is plowed you can get to see the lake itself often. It is hard to experience because the shore is approximately 900 feet below the rim drive and only one path leads down to the lake itself. Making matters worse is that the trail, as well as the boat rides that leave from it, are not open to visit for as long as you would expect and the boat tour was still closed in late June when we visited.
…A special post by Kelsey Nelson
Introduction
When was the last time you walked in a National Park? How did that make you feel? Was it calming? There are 4 reasons that will be introduced to prove that National Parks are helpful to humans, animals, and the environment.
Our summer trip to Voyageurs National Park was perfect – it included beautiful sunsets, stunning lakes, great hikes, and some fun history. We spent a total of 4 nights in the park, with 3 of those being on the water on our houseboat.
As mentioned in our other post here on Voyageurs National Park, we went out on Crane Lake and as a result some of these things to see are on that side of the park, but we visited Kabetogema Lake Visitor Center and Rainy Lake Visitor Center as well so we got to two of the three Visitor Centers and did activities at each of them. We have organized this post by the nearest visitor center so you can choose where you go and what to see in that area.
…
If you aren’t a die-hard National Park visitor, or are not from the Texas/New Mexico area, I expect you may be wondering what this park, Guadalupe Mountains, is. Receiving just 172,000 visitors in the last report, it gets just 1% of the number of visitors to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Most of those visitors will arrive the way we did, along Highway 180 between El Paso, TX and Carlsbad, NM.
Located just 25 miles west of Carlsbad Caverns, these parks are great to pair together into one visit. I’d suggest a day for each park as the minimum time to plan for and let Carlsbad take your priority as your ability to get an entrance ticket here is the most challenging part. We rented a home in Carlsbad, NM so we weren’t too far from either park.
…