Michael:
How many National Parks Sites are we traveling to? The better question is how many are there?
388 National Parks Units. That’s what the cover of the “Official National Parks Guide” says. We have seen the same 388 in ads and park pamphlets and heard it quoted by Rangers and know-it-alls.
When we began the trip, we took out the “Official Guide” and subtracted the 30 sites in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the American Samoa. The book actually lists 31, but there is a Klondike Gold Rush NHP Unit in Seattle so at 30 it stood.
388-30=358.
Now the National Park Service, as you probably know from glancing at our website, breaks their Parks down into an indecipherable alphabet soup of classifications. NP, NPRES, NHS, NHP, WSR and NS to name a few. They stand for, of course, National Parks, National Preserves, National Historic Sites, National Historical Parks, Wild and Scenic Rivers and National Seashores respectively.
Luckily, the same “Official Guide” denotes groups of these classifications with six pictograms. We decided to travel to all but one group, the sunglasses group, defined as “set aside purely for recreational use”. At the time, we felt these were not essential for a ‘complete’ trip. This group of 44 included Nat’l Lakeshores, Seashores, Rivers and Recreation Areas.
358-44=314. That number is do-able in two years.
Early on in the trip, a surly Yankee Ranger taunted Michael, “Oh, so the Recreation Areas aren’t important enough for you to go to? Don’t they count?”
314+44=358.
Traveling to the Recreation Areas has brought its plusses and minuses. The Lakeshores, Seashores and urban NRA’s are terrific. Our trip would not have been the same without them. The NRA’s created by dams and the National Rivers, unnecessary, forgettable and out of our budget because we do not have a boat. There is nothing for us to do at most of these places.
The number wavers.
For sanity’s sake (or lack thereof), when you count the number of Parks with entries in the “Official Guide” you only come up with 377. Turns out, we shouldn’t have been counting down, we should have been counting up.
It is not just our number that wavers.
Either way, a goal is still a goal. To date, we have been to 290 of the 346 official Parks in the continental United States. Nearly 84%.
Somehow, we have managed to write 314 Site Ratings. Sure we have written about non-Park Sites like Presidential Libraries, Hall of Fames and doubled up with mega Sites like Yellowstone, but we have skipped writing a few reviews as well. Why are there 40 more reviews than places visited?
The NPS has these things called “Affiliate Sites”. They are a part of the park system but are under someone else’s jurisdiction. Most of the time, they are privately owned and you must pay to get in; sort of an outsourced National Park. (Get used to it; outsourced Parks are the way of the future). There are also National Heritage Areas and National Scenic Trails, which are kind of, sort of Parks but not really. Sometimes they get the brochure and more frequently, nowadays, they get the Parks Passport Stamp.
Check out the online list of National Park Passport Stamp locations. The list of Parks here easily tops 500 and it is growing. This list gives us nightmares.
But back to the pertinent questions. “How many Park Sites are you traveling to?” and “Are you going to get to them all?”
47 of the 56 remaining Sites are east of the Mississippi. Good news for gasoline use. Fingers crossed, we plan to hit them all within the next year. Ten in Maryland, ten in Pennsylvania and the entire District of Columbia. We will be busy.
That leaves nine.
Two are not open to public: Yucca House NM and Hohokam Pima NM, located in Colorado and Arizona, respectively.
Two are just west of the Mississippi and are definites: Ulysses S. Grant NHS, near St. Louis, and Effigy Mounds NHS in Iowa.
That leaves five.
Two are River-based Parks that we have already driven past but did not enter the water or go to a Visitor Center: the Missouri and the Niobrara NSR, both in Nebraska. We are not going back.
That leaves three official National Park Sites that we are not going to get to Lake Chelan NRA in Washington State, Rainbow Bridge NM in Utah and Gila Cliff Dwellings NM in New Mexico.
Lake Chelan and Rainbow Bridge require expensive boat rides down man-made lakes and are cost prohibitive. The road to the Gila Cliff Dwellings was washed out by a flood and we could not linger in Silver City, as much as we may have wanted to.
Currently we are bunkered up in Harrisburg waiting for spring to come and the New England parks to open. That would be Labor Day. It no longer feels like a road trip but in actuality, the hope to see all the National Park Sites within a two year span is ongoing.
It is not going to happen within two years, but it will happen within two and a half. We guarantee that.
Er, except for those three we just mentioned.