The National Parks

  • The Light at Kings Canyon National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination through the photographs we find at the end of a long search. Kings Canyon National Park arrived at the end of this one — the last of 63 national parks in a project that began at the Everglades 25 miles from home, traveled to the sand dunes above the Arctic Circle, descended into the longest cave on earth, climbed to 10,000 feet above Maui, and arrives here in a canyon deeper than the Grand Canyon on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in California.

  • Storm Light in Mammoth Cave National Park

    Bymichael

    Every photographer eventually builds a list of subjects that require a specific piece of equipment rather than a specific piece of landscape. Mammoth Cave National Park is the second cave in this series that belongs on that list — the Sony with its high ISO performance and its image stabilization is the enabling technology for photography inside the longest cave system on earth, where the light is artificial, the tripod is not permitted on most tours, and the passages extend for 420 surveyed miles beneath the Kentucky karst plateau.

  • Finding Light in Kobuk Valley National Park

    Bymichael

    When planning a visit to America’s national parks, some destinations require a second look at the map to confirm what the photograph is showing. Kobuk Valley National Park contains active sand dunes above the Arctic Circle. Not near the Arctic Circle, not at its edge — 35 miles north of it, in the boreal forest and tundra of northwestern Alaska, where the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes rise to 100 feet above the Kobuk River valley floor with the Brooks Range as backdrop and the caribou migration passing through them twice a year.

  • Inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park

    Bymichael

    Every photographer eventually builds a list of places they cannot believe exist at the scale described. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is at the top of that list. It covers 13.2 million acres of southeastern Alaska — larger than the entire country of Switzerland, larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite and the entire Swiss Alps combined. It contains nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the United States. It holds the largest collection of glaciers outside the polar ice caps. The Bagley Icefield alone, one of several major ice systems within the park, covers more area than the state of Rhode Island.

  • Chasing Light in Haleakala National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes exist in two completely separate registers and the transition between them is part of the experience. Haleakala National Park on Maui begins at sea level in the tropical warmth that defines the Hawaiian imagination — the ukulele and the plumeria and the particular quality of Pacific island air that is warm and salt-tinged and deeply specific to this archipelago. And then the road climbs. Past the pineapple fields and the upcountry ranches, through the cloud layer at 7,000 feet, above the clouds into the alpine zone at 9,000 feet, and finally to the summit of Haleakala at 10,023 feet — a dormant shield volcano whose summit crater is 2.5 miles wide and 2,100 feet deep and looks, on a clear morning above the cloud layer, like the surface of another planet.

  • Storm Light in Lake Clark National Park

    Bymichael

    When planning a visit to America’s national parks, the Alaska parks occupy a category that the lower 48 cannot replicate. They are larger, more remote, more demanding, and more rewarding in a proportion that remains consistent across all of them. Lake Clark National Park and Preserve sits at the far end of that spectrum — not because it is the most famous Alaska park or the most visited, but because it contains more of what Alaska offers in a single park boundary than any other unit in the system.

  • Finding Light in Pinnacles National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination through the surprise of their existence. Pinnacles National Park sits about 80 miles south of San Jose in the Gabilan Mountains of central California, and most people who have driven Highway 101 through the Salinas Valley have passed within 30 miles of it without knowing it was there. It became a national park in 2013, elevated from national monument status, and it remains one of the least visited parks in California despite being within day trip distance of the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

  • First Light at Voyageurs National Park

    Bymichael

    Every photographer eventually builds a list of parks they have confused with each other. Voyageurs National Park and Isle Royale National Park share enough surface characteristics that the confusion is understandable and common. Both sit at the top of the Midwest. Both require a boat to access the interior. Both have the mosquitoes that the northern lake wilderness produces in June and July. Both sit under dark skies that produce the aurora photography that brings serious photographers to the upper Midwest specifically.

  • The Light at White Sands National Park

    Bymichael

    When planning a visit to America’s national parks, some destinations require no prior knowledge to understand immediately upon arrival. White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico is one of those places. The moment the Dunes Drive enters the gypsum dune field and the landscape goes from the tan desert scrub of the Tularosa Basin to pure white in every direction, the park explains itself. There is nothing else that looks like this.

  • Chasing Light in Great Sand Dunes National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination through sheer improbability. Great Sand Dunes National Park contains the tallest sand dunes in North America — rising to 750 feet — standing directly at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The dunes are not a transitional landscape between the mountains and the desert. They are pressed against the mountain wall, the sand meeting the snow-capped peaks at their base in a juxtaposition that the eye keeps trying to rationalize and cannot.