Welcome to National Parked

With the Alaska trip of 2008 over and done with, a sampling of the better images from the visit have been posted to the Alaska section of the Photo Gallery. The beauty of these areas is impossible to understand until you see it for yourself, and capturing this beauty in a photo is a difficult task. The wildly erratic weather of the area also presented many challenges. Most notably, despite four days spent in Denali National Park, Denali (Mount McKinley) itself never made an appearance through the clouds. Nevertheless, the large numbers of rare (outside of Alaska) wildlife sightings made the time well spent. This trip was really just a quick sampler of the easier to reach parts of the Alaskan parks, and instilled a deep need to return for a much longer, more in-depth visit to both the three parks visited and the five yet to be seen.

We are back from the last of our May park visits. The first covered the middle part of the month, with a week spent in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and four days in Shenandoah National Park, with a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway in between. The end of the month included five days in Maine's Acadia National Park. We have a tremendous amount of photos and data to go through from these visits, but new sections will be appearing for Shenandoah and Acadia in the near future. June will see the most exciting destinations of the summer, as we head to Alaska and Denali, Glacier Bay, and Kenai Fjords National Parks. The drive trip of the summer will occupy most of July and August. More information will be posted about that in the coming weeks.

Yosemite National Park announced yesterday that the famed Tunnel View Overlook area would be rehabilitated as part of the National Park Service's Centennial Initiative. Anyone who knows this park knows Tunnel View. It is widely regarded as the best view in the park, which makes it one of the best views in the world. Timeframes were not given in the press release, but hopefully the updates will be performed in the off-season, or will not require closure of the area, as depriving anyone of the Tunnel View vista would be a great tragedy.

Roads within Yellowstone National Park will begin re-opening for the summer tomorrow. Only the sections of road between the North Entrance and the Northeast Entrance remain open year-round. Tomorrow, roads will open as far as the Old Faithful and Canyon areas, through the North, Northeast, and West Entrances. The East Entrance is scheduled to open on May 2, and the South Entrance (which allows access to Grand Teton National Park) will open May 9. The road section between Tower and Canyon, the final part, will open by Memorial Day weekend. Visit our Yellowstone Scenic Drives Page for more on planning your route.

Arizona Highway 67, the sole access route to the North Rim developed area of Grand Canyon National Park, will be opened by the state on the morning of May 15. To coincide with this, NPS facilities and concessioner services will also begin their season on this date. Whereas the South Rim of the park is open year-round, heavy snow closes the North Rim for much of the year, usually remaining open only mid May through mid October.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park has been temporarily closed in its entirety due to elevated levels of toxic sulphur dioxide gas. This will remain in effect until the levels return to a safe level. Due to the nature of the problem, it is quite likely that this closure will be repeated in the future. Those planning to visit the area should contact the park directly. This information is available at the bottom of the Overview Page linked above.

Rocky Mountain National Park has announced that the Timber Creek Campground will be closed until early July. This is to allow crews to remove "hazard trees", numerous dead trees killed by the pine beetle epidemic sweeping the region. As this is the only campground on the park's west side, this closure is quite significant for anyone planning a visit before early July. Campsites in the park can be hard to find, so they will be even more so until this campground opens. Visit our Rocky Mountain National Park Camping Page for more info on the other campgrounds, and how to reserve a site when possible.

The monumental annual task of plowing the roads of Glacier National Park has begun. The current plan is for the Going-to-the-Sun Road to open completely on June 13. The alpine section between the Jackson Glacier Overlook and Avalanche will remain closed until at least this time, regardless of the weather, for the continuing rehabilitation of the road surface. Other park roads, such as those leading into the Many Glacier and Two Medicine regions, should open sooner, although Many Glacier Road will remain closed until at least April 19 for the protection of wildlife. Current plowing progress can be viewed on this NPS page.

At 2:58AM local time this morning, an explosive eruption occurred at the Halema`uma`u crater at the summit of the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The resulting debris covered a 75 acre area, including Crater Rim Drive, the Crater Rim Trail, and the parking lot. This is the first explosive event here since 1924, and has prompted some closures in the park, extending many closures made last month. Portions of both the Crater Rim Drive and Crater Rim Trail are closed indefinitely. The large majority of the park and its facilities remain open.

The National Park Service has updated the visitation statistics for all parks to include the year 2007 totals. As such, we have updated each park's Overview Page to show the 2007 number. We have also added a link next to this new number which leads to a new page, a chart showing the visitation for every year in which the NPS reported a number. There are occasional irregularities and missing totals; these are left as the NPS reported them. Of particular note in 2007 were Katmai National Park and Yellowstone National Park, both of which had record visitation years.

After over a year of work and travel, the opening date has come and we are now officially open. A large amount of work remains to be done, of course, both with continuing to add sections for parks we have already visited, as well as the travel to the parks we haven't yet visited, but a wealth of information is already available. Feel free to start a discussion in the forums or add your own photos to the gallery, and welcome.

This will be our final site update before the official opening of the site in two days on New Year's Day. We have initially completed the sections for Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and Death Valley National Park, Joshua Tree National Park, and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks in California. Many other parks are mostly online and the entire site is browsable.

After spending December 9-15 in south Florida, we have initially completed the park listings for Biscayne National Park, Dry Tortugas National Park, and Everglades National Park. The section for Biscayne is a bit lacking due to the tour boats not operating at the time, but otherwise, everything is at least useful. Also, unrelated to this trip, the section for Olympic National Park is initially complete. With only 12 days left to go until our official opening, many of the park's listings are coming together nicely in pieces. Feel free to look around, post on the forums, or share your own photos in the gallery.