The National Park System

This book can be either a coffee table book or a wish list - or maybe both. The book features chapters on ten lodges across the park system from Crater Lake to the Grand Canyon. Each chapter features a brief narrative about each lodge along with stunning photography. Most, but not all, of the lodges are of the "Parkitecture" style.  

Need to know a little bit about all the parks, this is the guide. With a pull-out map, each park gets between two and twelve pages of information, depending on the park's popularity, size, and variety of activities.  The book is focused on activities and the bare essentials.  There is generally very little information on lodging and dining.  Guides dedicated to specific parks have much, much more detail.

A fact about most national parks is that the vast majority of visitors hit a few highlights and rarely get more than half a mile from a parking lot. This book highlights what most people skip over or miss in their hurried visits.  For instance, for the Petrified Forest NP, there is a little known trail that leads to an expanive area of petrified trees that most people never see.

A different type of "guidebook."  Every park is covered in this book.  You will not find places to stay or trails to hike; rather, each park gets a narrative description that touches on its history and character.  Each park also gets a single word to contemplate in relation to the park. For instance Arches' word is "Connection" and Glacier's is "Consequences".  The final thought for each park is a set of questions designed for reflection.

This is a primer for those interested in the wildlife, botany, and geology of the national parks. Each park is covered with six to eight pages of information. The format is a set of quick facts about the park, a list of a few popular hikes, and then a page or two about the wildlife, plants, and geology of that park.  Most parks have much more in depth natural history guides, but this is a good introduciton to all the parks.

Many of the parks are great for stargazing, with several being "Dark Skies" parks that have minimal to no light pollution from towns and cities. The author walks through viewing the stars and other astronomic phenomen and ties it to related parks.  This could be tides in Acadia or the similarlity of red rocks in the southwest and Mars.  Great for those who are passionate about stars and parks.

After twenty pages of introduction, this book covers 17 different national park units in the southwest - from Death Valley to Big Bend. Each park unit gets a description, a narrative about the common birds of the area and a list of birds of note one might see in the park like Acorn Woodpeckers or Juniper TItmouse. 

The subtitle sets an interesting premise: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks. Thirteen essays related to different NPS units cover topics such as battlefield monuments or a letter-writing campaign regarding Canyonlands.  A unique book that is thought provoking.

A good book for aspiring watercolor painters and park lovers.  After a brief intro and review of watercolor techniques, the book goes into detailed instructions for twenty different scenes across the park system - from Arches to Acadia.  Each has a list of materials - an illustration of what the painter's beginning line drawing should look like and then step-by-step painting illustrations of how the layers of the painting should be built up to arrive at the finished painting.  

After a brief introduction/refresher on watercolors, the author provides step-by-step instructions for 24 different compositions. They are broken into sets of four across six sections: mountains, lakes, deserts, forests, wildlife, and wilderness.  Each composition gives the steps from sketch through each step of applying washes and detail.  

This book was written by an early evangelist of nature and wilderness in 1901. Best known for his advocacy for Yosemite, it should not be a surprise that about 60% of the book is about Yosemite, but it does cover other national parks and public lands as well.

Al Capone in the Everglades? Mysterious rocks creating tracks across the desert? The missing couple who tried to raft the Grand Canyon? There are lots of odd things in the national park system, and this book covers 35 different stories. 

All 63 National Park units in seven and a half years over a dozen trips. Some trips were a month long, and some were just a day. The parks provide the backdrop for healing family relationships between a grandparent and a grandchild.  Begining with a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and ending in American Samoa, this is an uplifting story. 

Over a year, the author visited all the National Park units. The book starts with Acadia and then covers parks thematically - water for Biscayne Bay and Hot Springs, and borders for Big Bend and American Samoa.  Trees, Volcanos, and Home are examples of other groupings. Part travel log and part journey of healing and self discovery, the parks help the author resolve his problems.