19Parks

In October of 2021, two months into my first year of graduate school in North Carolina, I made a decision. I was finally, finally, going to road trip to the west coast. It was the type of trip I’d been wanting to do for years, and for the first time I was in a position to be able to actually make it happen.

I’ve always enjoyed hiking and being outside – I adore being on the coast and have been an on-and-off rock climber for a few years now. Moving to North Carolina was like taking that spark and pouring gasoline on it. The proximity of the Smoky Mountains, not to mention the beautiful areas around central NC, got me out nearly every weekend exploring.

A few weeks into my newfound love for serious hiking, I started pinning maps onto my walls, picking up national park guides at my local bookstore, and tentatively looking at dates for the next summer. I’d traded up from my old Corolla to a little hatchback over the summer, and everything seemed to align.

My route began as a map of the US with a sticker marking every single national park in the Lower Forty-Eight. I knew I wanted to get to the west coast – my goal was not just to visit national parks, but to see as much of the country as I could. I’d visited every state east of the Mississippi, but my travels west of that had consisted of a 48-hour marathon trip to Texas for a football game in 2018 and a work trip out to Kalispell, MT for The Event at Rebecca Farm in 2019. That trip to Montana was incredible, and it gave me a small taste of what the rest of the country had to offer.

I started eliminating parks based on region – anything east of the Mississippi was out because I knew I’d have other opportunities to get there. Then it was figuring out a general route and hitting as many parks along that route as possible. One by one, they fell. The Texas and New Mexico parks came off because they were too far south to fit into a cohesive route. Utah’s Mighty Five were the first definite stops – aside from the absolutely non-negotiable Yosemite, which felt somewhat like a geological Mecca on this pilgrimage I was making. The Grand Canyon was a sure thing, and then I headed west to California. 

Los Angeles was an obvious stop, and then back to the parks: Kings Canyon, Sequoia, up to Yosemite for the longest stay in one park of the entire trip, and then back over to the coast for the incredible scenery of Big Sur and a stop in San Francisco. The next section was fuzzy for months – the itinerary at one point included Lake Tahoe and Lassen Volcanic Park, at another point included just Lake Tahoe, and eventually included neither and skipped straight up the coast to Redwood Park before heading to Oregon and Washington. The route started to take on a general loop beginning and ending in Colorado – Yellowstone and Grand Teton were a sure thing and I desperately wanted to include Rocky Mountain. The first iteration also included Badlands and Wind Cave. They stayed for a long time, until my dates solidified.

The schedule I’d planned out had one major flaw – there was not enough time to get to the parks in Washington. Olympic and North Cascades were two of my top parks that I wanted to see, but I couldn’t find a way to fit them in without compromising the rest of the schedule and rushing too much. But then, my summer schedule became clearer. The June 1 deadline faded, and I jumped at the chance to extend the dates. I did what I’d so desperately wanted to do all along – I added Olympic, Mount Rainier, and North Cascades. I was thrilled. With that change, Badlands and Wind Cave got knocked off the trip. Even with a two-week extension, the dates still felt restrictive to get everywhere I wanted to, and those two felt just a little too far out of the way to keep. The extra plans in northern California faded for good around this time too, and I added another day to Yosemite. My initial dates were locked in, but a look at the calendar had made me realize I was a day off from being in Yosemite for the lunar eclipse. I bumped Sequoia and Kings Canyon to after Yosemite, applied for a backcountry permit, and made plans to watch the lunar eclipse from the top of El Capitan.

The itinerary was finally coming together, and as I moved into February, and then March, I continued booking all the campsites I still needed, getting gear, outfitting my car, and making sure to hike as much as I could possibly find time for. I was not about to go on an epic adventure like this and be limited by my fitness level. I managed to get on a trail probably four times a week as the weather turned nicer.

I finished classes on April 27, spent the day of April 28 making last minute adjustments, checking my packing lists and my car set-up, double-checking my trip binder with itineraries, reservations, maps, and emergency contact info, and left at 8 PM on the 28th, headed for Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Montrose, Colorado.