The National Parks

  • Chasing Light in Glacier National Park

    Bymichael

    What I want to do differently on the return is leave the car. The road showed me what Glacier looks like from 6,646 feet at Logan Pass. The hikes from that pass — the Hidden Lake Overlook trail, the Highline Trail along the Garden Wall — show you what it feels like from inside it. There is a difference between driving through extraordinary light and hiking into it, and the next visit is about the hiking version. That and an RV camp close enough to the park that the early morning starts are practical rather than heroic.

  • The Light at Mesa Verde National Park

    Bymichael

    When planning a visit to America’s national parks, most destinations can be appreciated without significant background knowledge. You arrive at the Grand Canyon and the scale does the work. You arrive at Yellowstone and the thermal features explain themselves. Mesa Verde is different. Mesa Verde requires context before you arrive, or the cliff dwellings risk becoming something you photograph without fully understanding — impressive stone structures tucked into canyon walls, beautiful and ancient and somehow incomplete without the human story behind them.

  • Storm Light in Theodore Roosevelt National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination long before we ever visit them. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is not one of those. It tends to arrive as a surprise — a park most people haven’t thought much about, sitting in the North Dakota badlands along the Little Missouri River, named for the president who spent formative years in this exact landscape and credited it with saving his life after the deaths of his wife and mother on the same day in 1884.

  • Finding Light in Yellowstone National Park

    Bymichael

    Yellowstone is America’s first national park — established in 1872, before the concept of a national park fully existed in law or in public imagination. It is also, by almost any measure, the most geologically extraordinary place on the continent. The supervolcano beneath it drives a hydrothermal system unlike anything else on earth, producing geysers, hot springs, mud pots, and fumaroles across 10,000 individual thermal features. For photographers, it is simultaneously one of the most rewarding and most logistically challenging parks in the system — extraordinary subjects everywhere, and crowds that require either timing or strategy to navigate.

  • The Light at Joshua Tree National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination long before we ever visit them. Joshua Tree is one of those — the surreal silhouettes of the trees against a fading sky, the stacked boulder formations that look arranged rather than geological, the sense of a landscape that operates by rules different from anywhere else. I had seen those images for years before I finally drove through the park.

  • Inside Congaree National Park

    Bymichael

    Congaree National Park protects the largest intact expanse of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the United States — 26,000 acres of floodplain forest in central South Carolina where the Congaree and Wateree Rivers deposit rich sediment that has allowed trees to grow to extraordinary size for centuries. The park contains the highest temperate deciduous forest canopy in North America, with loblolly pines, bald cypress, water tupelo, cherrybark oak, and sweetgum reaching heights that dwarf the surrounding managed timberlands.

  • The Light at New River Gorge National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination long before we ever visit them. New River Gorge is not one of those landscapes — not yet, not for most people. It became a national park only in December 2020, elevated from national river status in the same legislation that created the first new national park in the system in years. Most Americans still don’t know it exists.

  • Chasing Light in Hot Springs National Park

    Bymichael

    Hot Springs is the smallest national park in the system and the oldest protected federal land in America — designated a federal reservation in 1832, decades before Yellowstone established the national park concept in 1872. It sits not in a remote wilderness but in the middle of a small Arkansas city, also called Hot Springs, where the historic bathhouses of Bathhouse Row line Central Avenue in a grand procession of early 20th-century architecture. The park is the city and the city is the park, intertwined in a way that exists nowhere else in the national park system.

  • Finding Light in Grand Canyon National Park

    Bymichael

    Some landscapes become part of our imagination long before we ever visit them. The Grand Canyon is perhaps the most extreme version of that in the American experience — a place so photographed, so described, so deeply embedded in the national visual vocabulary that arriving at the South Rim for the first time carries the strange weight of recognizing something you have never actually seen.

  • Storm Light in Rocky Mountain National Park

    Bymichael

    I have been to Rocky Mountain National Park before. I remember the scale of it — Trail Ridge Road climbing above the treeline into a tundra landscape that feels more like Alaska than Colorado, the elk in the meadows at Moraine Park in the golden hour, the way the mountains reflect in Bear Lake on a still morning before the day hikers arrive. I remember being moved by all of it. What I don’t remember doing is slowing down enough to find the specific light that makes this particular landscape different from every other mountain park I have visited.