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.
Cuyahoga Valley is 33,000 acres of forested river valley between Cleveland and Akron — a landscape shaped by the Cuyahoga River, glacial geology, 19th-century canal history, and the kind of dense hardwood forest that the Midwest produces when it has been left largely alone for long enough. It is a park that rewards the visitor who slows down and looks carefully at a landscape that does not announce its beauty dramatically but reveals it in layers. I did not slow down. The return trip is about finding out what those layers are.
Acadia is the only national park in the northeastern United States, and it occupies a landscape unlike anything else in the park system — granite peaks rising directly from the Atlantic Ocean, pink granite shoreline meeting cold surf, spruce and fir forest covering the hillsides in a dense dark green that the western parks cannot match. The light here is an Atlantic light. Coastal, variable, frequently dramatic, capable of turning a gray morning into something extraordinary with almost no warning. For photographers trained on the warm reds of the desert Southwest or the granite gold of the Sierra Nevada, Acadia is a recalibration.