The Great Outdoors

This past weekend, I took a trip to Bryce Canyon with a few of my friends. It was a nice trip out of town - good food, good company, good hiking. It had been a really long time since I had gone to a national park. I used to be very outdoorsy; I was a Girl Scout for 11 years. But since adulthood and all the responsibilities that go along with it, I haven't had much of a chance to experience the great outdoors.

I googled and found out that there are 59 US national parks. I've only been to 9 of them (I've also been to 4 Canadian national parks), and embarrassingly, I've never been to Yosemite despite having lived most of my life in California.

I think I'm going to make it a point to travel to a few more of them. When I was driving through the forest, there were signs reminding me that these are "your public lands". So, I'm going to explore my land!

I'm fortunate to live in the southwest, where there are tons of nearby parks. On my short list to visit are:

• Arches
• Carlsbad Caverns
• Grand Canyon
• Joshua Tree
• Saguaro
• Petrified Forest
• Yosemite

My slightly longer list includes Haleakala, Hawaii Volcanoes, and Denali, but they're not exactly road trip parks and will have to wait until I'm not broke.

The ones I've already seen are:

US

• Bryce Canyon
• Crater Lake
• Death Valley
• Glacier (this is the US half of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, located on the Montana/Alberta border)
• Mount Rainier
• Olympic
• Redwood
• Yellowstone
• Zion

Canada

• Banff
• Glacier (this park is located in British Columbia and is unrelated to Waterton-Glacier)
• Jasper
• Waterton Lakes (this is the Canada half of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park)

I think overall, my favorite US park is Crater Lake, but Yellowstone and Bryce Canyon come in at a close second. Glacier was nice, but it snowed when I visited (in July!), and I don't like snow.

My favorite Canadian park is Banff, though I liked Jasper as well. Banff has the distinguishing feature of animals that walk through town like they own the place, and also the advantage of not having snow on the ground in July. (The other three were snowy and cold even in the summer. That's Canada, eh?)