Here’re the remainder my comments on experiences about the first through 42nd of the list of activities and experiences to find in NPS units.

01. Back in 1969, watching the sunrise in Arcadia NP was on my list of things to do on my last trip to Maine before I went west to start my PhD program at the University of Washington (AKA, UDUB). It was truly spectacular and is equal in my experience to watching the sunrise over the Pacific from the Marine Parade in Napier, New Zealand.

04. Camping with the bison was especially an experience for us, because that’s where we slept the night my third day driving from DC to UDUB to start graduate school. Badlands was still a National Monument at the time and we found a wide place on the highway that we thought was a nominal rest area and wound up with a huge parade of wildlife through the area where we were parked. Very KEWL!

07. Did you see CBS Sunday Morning today? They had a fairly lengthy story about Hot Springs NP, including that only one of the bathhouses is still providing baths. But, another former bathhouse has been converted to a brewery and sells its product right there on the spot. Warning for people who prefer their beer in cans, this is a craft brewery and they don’t do cans!

09. The ice cave in Apostle Islands NL is truly a shivering experience. As a precaution, I wore long pants (blue jeans) and a sweatshirt . That was not sufficient. Were I to go there again, you can bet I’ll be wearing multiple layers and the outer one will be a parka covering up my Mountain Hardware fleece jacket and my sweatshirt. Under the jeans will be my LL Bean thermals!

12. The kelp forest in the Channel Islands NP is at least equaled by the kelp forest offshore of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula which is hard to dive on because the water is so rough. Scuba divers are not often seen there!

14. I first became aware of Mount Rainier’s wildflowers when I was about 9 yo and we went on a family trip for the day to Mount Rainier NP. And, except for the wildflowers in the southern California deserts (Joshua Tree NP, Mojave P, and Death Valley NP), Mount Rainier is tops in my mind. Its great advantage over the southern California deserts is that its flowers are there seasonally every year, not so much in SoCal where we’re dependent on fall and early winter storms to deliver water to the deserts. Fortunately, often enough we have an El Niño as we do this year!

15. Crater Lake NP is the bluest lake you’ll ever see. The only way for water drops to get out of the lake is to evaporate. If you come to Crater Lake NP and the sky is not blue as you approach the road up to the Lake, I suggest taking a side trip to the Oregon Caves NM&P where inclement weather won’t wreck your visit. Whenever I go north on I-5 through Medford and Grants Pass, if the weather’s good, I take a lateral arabesque. Next time I do this it will be trip number 17 to the Lake.

16. I did find a Giant Green Anemone in a tidal pool with a bunch of its brothers and sisters north of Kalaloch on the Olympic NP coast in Washington when I was about 10. We also found three glass floats that had broken loose from a fisherman’s net in the North Pacific.

18. Near Joshua Tree NP, a very popular dark orange T-shirt is available. On the front, it says, “Go climb a rock!” in big white letters. And, several times, I’ve seen people climbing the rocks there and ALL of them are wearing one of those T-shirts. It’s definitely a fun sport and one of the first times I went to Joshua Tree, I climbed to the top of one of the smaller rocks, under supervision!

19. When I got to go through the Grand Canyon on a float trip, the very most impressive thing was the class 5 rapids which I’d never experienced before. And, then we did it again. Altogether over 7 days we did a bunch of rapids so that I was largely soaked through for three days of the trip. However, I did capture a Phantom Ranch kerchief!

21. Seeing a moose for the first time was spectacular, especially because it was a female with a baby. Later that day, we saw a male moose complete with a serious set of antlers.

25. Snorkeling in Biscayne NP, even before it was designated a park, was spectacular, not just for the wrecks which were exceptionally cool, but for the fish we’d never seen before up in Puget Sound.

27. You can also catch several different species of salmon, including Kings, in Puget Sound off San Juan Island NHP, as well as in a lot of other places. Being able to catch spectacular fish in Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca was one of the highlights of growing up in the Puget Sound area.

28. Hearing the big whoosh coming as gazillions of bats head for the exits of the caves at Carlsbad Caverns NP was one of the highlights of our touring that day. We were warned by the rangers and went outside ourselves to be able to take pictures of the bats heading out to catch their dinner of various kinds of bugs outside the Caverns. Totally awesome!

29. Ziplining in Great Smoky Mountains NP is an experience not to be missed and we almost did! But, we were the very last people in line when they were about to close for the evening since the 4th of July parade was about to happen in Gatlinburg.

31 and 33. Anyplace named Inspiration Point deserves a visit. The one in Grand Teton NP is well worth it and, in my view, comes in a very close second to Inspiration Point in Yosemite NP.

34. Every fall from 1960 through 1965, my college buds and I went up to Shenandoah NP to check out the fall foliage. And, it gets the prize for being handy. During the latter part of the 1960s, I flew to Maine a number of times and had a chance to see the New England foliage from the air. It was good, but not as good as Shenandoah!

35. Slogging through the Everglades NP was impressive for two reasons: the golden silk spiders all along the roads and the fact that the Park had hydroponic tomato fields within its boundaries (it turned out they were grandfathered in because they had been there long before the Everglades were designated a NP in the mid-1930s). I hadn’t gotten upclose and personal with any alligators at the point I first discovered the tomato fields, but I did that a few years later (see item 72).

36. You’ll never know what quiet is until you’re standing in a rainforest such as Upper Hoh in Olympic NP and the things you’ll hear will amaze you. As I mentioned in item 67 I saw what a real temperate climate rainforest was like and also heard it at the same time.

37. Altogether, on my first visit to Glacer NP, I took over 200 photographs and they are as varied as the scenery. It was astounding to me that I was able to visit places my Mom had visited with her Mom and three sisters back in the 1930s after all the sisters had graduated high school. When I showed her the photographs, she was amazed they were all in color because when they’d visited Glacier, they had only a B/W camera. So, prints of some of the color pictures replaced those very old B/W pictures.

38. I earned my first Junior Ranger Badge at the Santa Monica Mountains NRA by answering the questions the rangers posed when they opened the Anthony Beilenson VC about 4 years ago. I earned my most recent one when the SaMo rangers participated in the recent NPS exhibit in Pasadena, CA, as part of the Tournament of Roses for 2015-16 and it’s stuck onto one of the support bars of my walker!

41. Not a chance that I will NEVER eat “watermelon snow” or any other colored or flavored snow.

Enjoy!

virginia