I’ve started a journey to visit, and try to genuinely partake in the dream of, all 154 National Forests and 62 National Parks in the United States. This is a long and loose goal, one designed, a little counterintuitively, to promote quality over quantity. Read on to discover why I’m doing this and how I came to choose this particular trail.

I’ve been visiting public lands for many, many years. I’ve camped, hiked, climbed, biked, canoed, kayaked, snowboarded, skied, run, and much more in some of America’s greatest protected places. I’ve been to about half of the National Parks and dozens of National Forests along with various other State and Federal lands. I have visited and enjoyed wildernesses across the country from Maine to Alaska, California to Florida, and much in between.

A few months ago I was looking at a map of the National Parks and kicking around the idea of visiting all of the sites that I haven’t been to yet. I wanted something to unify the experience and give it shape. After working through some various ideas I hit on highpointing. This is the practice of finding the highest point in some mostly arbitrary region and visiting it. I like this idea because I like climbing and this would likely involve a bit of that.

I immediately started planning trips and gathering info on each location I would need to reach. I put together lines on the map that would take me to the most number of highpoints in the most efficient manner, considering the daylight hours I would need to be hustling and the evenings and nights when I would drive from place to place.

Without my noticing, the goal become more of a focus than the Parks. I realized this one day when I was thinking of how to get through Yellowstone as quickly as possible. I stopped dead and thought, ‘why on earth would you want to hurry through Yellowstone?!?’

I grew a bit discouraged and while discussing it with my wife she said something about the joy of making lists versus checking them off. This made so much sense that I went back to the drawing board. I would come up with a mostly impossible goal. Something that would take a decade or more to complete, if ever, thus removing any pressure to hurry.

I decided that I would visit every National Forest and Park in the country and try to do something that represented the spirit of it. Or at least the wilderness spirit, I mean, Old Faithful is fine, but I’m not much for sitting on benches waiting to say ohh and ahh. Just a personal preference kind of thing.

Sometimes this would be mean highpointing, like in the Pisgah National Forest where the tallest peak, Balsam Cone, sits in the heart of the land, physically overshadowed by it’s neighbor Mt. Mitchell, but much more a part of it’s surroundings. Other places a highpoint doesn’t make sense, such as Croatan where most of the land is swamp and much of it is below sea level. Seeking out the biggest hill would completely miss the point of this coastal lowland forest.

I also decided that I will start fresh. I won’t check any places off just because I’ve been there before. I’ll visit each one anew, with fresh eyes and a fresh spirit, to see what it holds for me now.

In these pages I’ll explain my reasons for choosing each activity, and attempt to provide some sense of what the place has meant to me. I’ll also include the details necessary to follow in my footsteps if you wish.

If you have suggestions, comments or questions, please contact me, I’d love to talk about it! If you want to learn more about my general thought process in choosing a place, feel free to read the following notes.

Types of Activities

As exciting as the prospect of doing something fun in 216 different places is, it’s also a bit daunting. Every place has it’s own vast store of unique interests. In order to reduce some of the burden of choice I’ve defined three, very mutable, strategies.

Highpointing

This is simply choosing the highest point in the Park or Forest and climbing it. Since the goal is to experience the land, not simply check it off a list, I’ll pretty much always couple this with a trek, or another event that’s logical with the highpoint.

However, highpoints can be a bit of a circus and don’t always make a good representative of a place. Consider Smoky Mountains National Park where the high point has a road, parking lot, and concrete monstrosity on top. That hardly demonstrates the captivating wildernesses that make up the bulk of the Park.

Other times the highpoint could be completely unreasonable, such as Mt. Fairweather that kills or turns back more climbers that it lets reach the summit. Or, also in Alaska, Denali, which can take months to summit and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

In other instances, such as the Pisgah National Forest, there are long, fairly isolated approaches that make a great wilderness experience. Another great highpoint experience is the diamond on Long’s Peak in RMNP which can be crowded but is one of the most iconic climbs in the Park and takes you the summit in style.

Rightpointing

I needed a way to refer to any specific activity that’s not highpointing and starting calling them rightpoints. This could be anything that I choose, from a trail that I hike, to a mountain climb, or canoeing a river.

For example, Congaree National Park is all about the cypress swamps, so canoeing Cedar Creek is the representative experience. Yellowstone has a pretty decent highpoint, but it’s also home to the most remote spot in the continental US and that seems like a much more interesting goal.

There will probably be some duds in this category, but I’ll try to choose wisely.

Wildspotting

I know, not a very catchy name, but a fun concept, at least to me. There are some places that I’ve thoroughly explored already. Others have so many things I’d like to do that I can’t possibly choose one. And sometimes I just want to do something completely surprising and take on any challenges that crop up along the way. To accomplish this I’ve built a tool that chooses a random spot in the selected public land and returns the Lat/Lon. I’ll hit the tool, grab the wildspot, and go!

I’m not trying to do something philosophical here, just wanting a different way to approach a place. If I look at the spot on a map and it’s right by a road, or in a Visitor Center I’ll just choose another. The point is to get out and hopefully discover something I wouldn’t have otherwise.