I’ve never been one to seek out the packaged excursion. Call me old fashioned, but I truly enjoy the process of scouring guidebooks, tracking down timetables, and navigating unknown places with a degree of independence. What I may suffer from getting lost or missing the occasional train is (usually) nothing when compared to the connections I come to feel with the rhythms of foreign life. But like so many rules, there are exceptions.
From the rocky spires of the Grand Tetons to the craggy shores of Acadia, the United States’ 59 national parks are as diverse as the nation itself. Where Death Valley holds a world record for the highest air temperature ever recorded (134 degrees), the slopes of Mt. Rainier saw an astounding 93.5 feet of snow in the winter of 1971. So what makes Olympic National Park stand out among these millions of acres of natural wonder?
If you were lucky enough to come of age in the 1980s and 1990s, The Oregon Trail was likely your first introduction to computers, to the nearly impossible task of hunting squirrels, and to the very real dangers of fording a river. It also may have been your first exposure to the Willamette Valley, that little piece of verdant paradise your wagon traveled 2,000 miles to reach. So what is it that led hundreds of thousands of settlers—and countless elementary school students—to brave dysentery, typhoid, and meager rations to reach a valley at the foot of the Cascades?
Oh, the joys of beginning a new year. Joining a gym, filing taxes, and realizing just how much you overspent on Christmas. But with the new year also comes a refreshingly blank slate—the promise of 12 new months that could be filled with life-changing opportunities, new faces and friends, and exhilarating travels near and far. As for me, I begin 2015 in a very different place—quite literally—than I was this time last year.
In mountain years, they are the picture of youth. Some ten million years ago, as the Rocky Mountains approached their 60 millionth birthday, the Earth’s crust began to stretch along the Teton fault in modern-day Wyoming. As the crust quaked and ruptured, the land east of the fault collapsed to form the valley of Jackson Hole. But west of the fault the land rose skyward, eventually forming a new range of mountains to tower over the sunken basin.
The Long Weekender 