on the way

CNN.com has a story about the 100th anniversary of Mesa Verde’s designation as a national park.

Bandelier National Monument
Chaco Culture National Historic Park
Mesa Verde National Park
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
Grand Canyon National Park
Zion National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park
Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Park
Yosemite National Park
Redwood National and State Parks
Lewis and Clark National and State Historic Parks
Olympic National Park
Glacier National Park
Yellowstone National Park
Grand Teton National Park
Badlands National Park

(I can’t really count Mount Rushmore since I didn’t go in, but just took a photo from the road. *grin*)

So… fifteen national parks and a tribal park. Oh, and that’s not counting Shenandoah NP and Great Smoky Mountains NP, which I visited on the way from Pennsylvania to Alabama. Wheee!

Added more Grand Teton photos and a few from Badlands. There’s also more pics in the Miscellaneous section, including some of the World’s Only Corn Palace. Or, as the locals call it, The World’s Largest Bird Feeder. (All those murals are made out of corn. Really.)

In other news, it looks as though my camera card may have eaten the Yellowstone photos. All of them. If this is the case I am going to cry like a little girl, because they were the best photos all trip and of some of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, like a buffalo sitting next to a hot spring, the moon rising over Yellowstone lake, a wolf silhouetted on a hilltop against the sky… seriously. I am going to cry. In fact, I am crying right now. I am going to hand the card off to someone geekier than me in the hopes that they can extract at least SOME of the photos, so we’ll see.

ETA: And the second half of the Glacier photos. DAMMIT.

However, the rest of the Grand Teton photos are pretty cool too. This was one of the most amazing things I saw all trip — that’s not a lens issue or Photoshop trickery, that’s an actual double rainbow. Weird.

PS. Giant presidents!

I still have photos to upload and more posts to write, but I’ve been busy with schoolwork, etc. In the meantime, here’s a map of all the states I visited on this trip:

and here’s one of all the states I’ve visited in my life:

40/50, auntie!

create your own visited states map

I’m back.

*thud*

L. SULLIVAN ROSS

this one’s for you.

Glacier was stunning — hella rainy the first day, but the weather cleared up after that. Still too windy to take a boat tour though Oh well…. got to see lots of cool stuff anyway.

Finally managed to get my Olympic National Park photos online.

I am having some difficulty getting my photos online at the Kinko’s in Spokane, but rest assured they will make it online eventually. Onward to Glacier…

Redwood was beautiful — I wish I’d had more time to spend there. It’s actually a collection of several state parks linked by national park land, so you never really know where you are. I camped on the beach of the Pacific Ocean which was really nifty. Also cool: in Crescent City, which is the gateway town to the north, there is a lighthouse that you can only get to at low tide (in that photo, the tide is coming back in… see the little land bridge? It disappeared about two minutes after I took that photo — which was about a minute after I walked over it from the lighthouse!)

Oh, and hanging out a couple of hundred feet from the campground? Ahem. An elk. (Several, actually.)