National Parks Are America’s Best Answer to Urban Blight

Despite a few flaws, our national parks remain incomparable--unencumbered by such staples of urban blight as billboards and mini-malls. With rare exception, they are the best that America has to offer.

National parks belong to all of us. Even with various restrictions and restraints, they essentially are places to be free. The use of automobiles is gradually being curbed; so is helicopter touring.

It is impossible to describe all of our national parks in this space, so here are 10 favorites I have visited in the last few years:

Virgin Islands National Park. Thousands of miles from California, this park occupies about three-fifths of the island of St. John, the smallest of the U.S. Virgins group, offering one of the few areas left in the West Indies with beaches, tropical forest and coral reefs relatively undefiled.

Winter is the most popular season and also the most crowded and expensive, making summer more feasible. The place to stay is Maho Bay, a complex of tent-cottages on slopes on private land in the park. The cottages are simple, functional and fitting to the environment; they are set in the woods overlooking the curving sand beach of Maho Bay, with access to snorkeling, swimming and hiking the park trails.

From the overlook near Mamey Point (elevation: 1,147 feet), islands of the American and British Virgins spread over the brilliant blue and green sea.

Blue Ridge Parkway. Here is the longest scenic drive in the world, providing quiet, leisurely travel, free of commercial competition, for 469 miles through the forested mountains of Virginia and North Carolina, linking two national parks, Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains.

In some sections the parkway runs along the crest of the mountains, with great vistas from overlooks of up to 6,000 feet. Miles of excellent hiking trails are available.

Two of my favorite stops are Mabry Mill in Virginia, where an operating water-powered gristmill grinds corn and buckwheat with crude iron gears and shafts, and Linville Falls, a North Carolina wilderness beauty spot presented to the park system 40 years ago by John D. Rockefeller Jr. On the parkway a network of lodges and housekeeping cabins provides some accommodations, but many, many more are in bordering resort communities with such pleasant names as Boone and Blowing Rock.

Isle Royale National Park. No roads, no cars. This largest island in Lake Superior is the kind of place to spend a week without worrying about traffic jams, or even traffic lights.

The island covers more than 500,000 acres of forested wilderness, fiord-like harbors, beaver ponds, innumerable interior lakes and outlying islets. It’s a great place for hiking, with a chain of campgrounds extending almost the full 45-mile length of the island and across its nine-mile width. Last year I hiked to Mt. Franklin on a trail bordered with wildflowers, then continued to Ojibway Lookout high above the wave-swept shores, with a superb view of the Canadian mainland 15 miles north.

It is a park inhabited by muskrat, eagle, osprey, pileated woodpecker and gulls, with a relatively short season, mid-June to just after Labor Day.

I traveled aboard Ranger III, the National Park Service motor ship that sails from Houghton, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to Rock Harbor, the center of activity, the site of Rock Harbor Lodge, a pleasant, informal facility. Next time, however, I plan to take the Wenonah, a smaller, privately owned ferry operating from Grand Portage, Minn., to Windigo, the western end of Isle Royale.

Canyonlands National Park. All of southern Utah, if I had my choice, would be a national park. We have Zion, Bryce, Arches, Capitol Reef and Canyonlands, all national parks, plus Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and several national monuments. The Needles section of Canyonlands is a fantasy of thousands of red and white sandstone pillars, spires and balanced rocks, some as high as 30-story buildings.

Age has nothing to do with one’s ability to make it in this desert country. The pleasure of sleeping out under a clear sky keeps the body and mind young. An excellent way to visit is to join Canyonlands Adventures offered by the nonprofit Canyonlands Field Institute, a variety of programs for diverse ages and interests, from one-day seminars to weeklong back-country trips, photo workshops and summer youth programs.

Pecos National Monument. This national park closest to Santa Fe, N.M., deserves its newly enlarged visitor center. Displays and dioramas recount the history of Pecos Valley from 10,000 BC through periods of primitive Americans, Spanish and Mexican settlement, the Santa Fe Trail, the Mexican and U.S. civil wars and the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad. From the visitor center a trail leads to an archeological discovery of only 20 years ago: the foundations of a huge church, circa 1620, underneath the ruins of a much smaller one of a century later. It brings to mind a somewhat comparable scene in Cuzco in the Peruvian highlands.

Yellowstone National Park. The nonprofit Yellowstone Assn. conducts a series of fascinating short summer courses on natural and cultural history bearing such titles as “The Folklore of Bears,” “Yellowstone’s Night Skies” and “Aesthetics in the Natural Environment.” The price is modest; so are accommodations at historic Buffalo Ranch in Lamar Valley in the uncrowded northeast corner of the park.

Instructors are experts. One of them, John Good, was the chief naturalist of Yellowstone National Park before retirement. Much class time is spent outdoors, and most require at least some hiking. Little time is spent in the congested centers on the main park loop.

North Cascades National Park. This region near the Canadian border in Washington has been called the “American Alps.” The scenery is overpowering. The giant faults and massive overthrusts, combined with heavy precipitation, produce a network of hanging glaciers and icefalls, ice aprons and icecaps, hanging valleys and waterfalls.

The North Cascades is rough, tall country, with some of the finest mountaineering opportunities anywhere, great for backpacking and for day hikes. My idea of doing the park is to organize a party in two groups.

One starts from the west side at Marblemount on the Skagit River, driving 22 miles to the Cascade Pass trail head for the hike through flowering meadows to the pass, the scenic climax of the range.

The other group starts from Chelan on the east side, traveling by ferry up beautiful Lake Chelan, flanked by forested slopes and wilderness peaks to Stehekin, the gateway to wilderness. Stehekin provides a choice of camping and bed-and-board accommodations, and a National Park Service shuttle bus running 23 miles to the last stop at Cottonwood Camp, the east side trail head to Cascade Pass.

One of the great spectacles en route, Horseshoe Basin, is focused on a huge rock wall with more than a dozen waterfalls plunging over the top. Eventually the two parties will meet. The higher portions of the North Cascades, I should note, are strictly summer country, with considerable snow across the trails until mid-June or even early July.

Alaska National Parks. For many people, Alaska is the vacation of a lifetime, and the national parks are what make it so. They’re expansive, filled with dramatic landscapes. If there is one mistake to avoid it is trying to cover too much ground too fast. So here are three great parks to enjoy.

Glacier Bay National Park is popular with large cruise ships that spend part of a day heading up-bay, then out again. On the mini-cruise liner Glacier Bay Explorer, however, passengers can spend two or three days deep in the bay, with overnights at the base of active glaciers. The bay is about 50 miles long and 2 to 10 miles wide, its waters flecked with icebergs and dotted with islands and rocks teeming with birds--from eagles to cormorants, puffins and gulls. It’s a certainty to see hundreds of seals, and very likely sea lions, porpoises and whales on their summer in northern waters.

Lake Clark National Park, where the mighty Alaska Range meets the Aleutian Range, is a composition of wilderness peaks, glacial valleys, sparkling lakes, waterfalls and streams, plus towering semi-active volcanoes.

Although roadless, this national park lies only 150 miles from Anchorage and is readily accessible by plane. The flight gives an inspiring overview. Koksetna Camp on the shore of Lake Clark offers rustic, comfortable cabins and family-style meals to match the wilderness setting. Other small lodges appeal largely to fishermen, but Chuck Hornberger of Koksetna features wildlife and bird watching by boat on the Chulitna River.

Denali National Park is the showpiece of Alaska, embracing Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain on this continent (20,320 feet), plus glaciers, forests, tundra and blue lakes. Many visitors spend one night as part of an Alaska package tour, but this hardly does the park justice.

I highly recommend Camp Denali, a wilderness vacation retreat with comfortable log or frame cabins and activities that interpret plant, bird and animal life. Or pitch your own tent at one of the six campgrounds along the 90-mile park road.

From almost any ridge-top a search with binoculars is likely to reveal a wildlife spectacle: of grizzlies on nearby hillsides, caribou feeding on the lowlands, a lone wolf on a hunting trail. At Denali, as in any national park, it isn’t a matter of how much distance one covers; follow the slower pace to expand dimensions of time. Visiting fewer parks, staying longer at each one, heightens appreciation and enjoyment.

For more information:

Virgin Islands National Park, Box 806, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands 00801.

Blue Ridge Parkway, 700 Northwestern Bank Building, Asheville, N.C. 28801.

Isle Royale National Park, 87 N. Ripley St., Houghton, Mich. 49931.

National Park Concessions Inc., Isle Royale National Park, Mich. 49940 (before June 1, c/o Mammoth Cave, Ky. 42259).

Canyonlands National Park, 446 S. Main St., Moab, Utah 84532; Canyonlands Field Institute, Box 68, Moab, Utah 84532.

Pecos National Monument, Drawer 11, Pecos, N.M. 87522.

Yellowstone Assn., Box 117, Yellowstone National Park, Wyo. 82190.

North Cascades National Park, 800 State St., Sedro Woolley, Wash. 98284.

Glacier Bay National Park, Bartlett Cove, Gustavus, Alaska 99826.

Exploration Cruise Line, 1500 Metropolitan Park Building, Seattle 98101, (800) 426-0600.

Lake Clark National Park, Box 61, Anchorage, Alaska 99513.

Koksetna Camp, Box 69, Iliamna, Alaska 99606.

Denali National Park, Box 9, McKinley Park Station, Alaska 99755.

Camp Denali, Box 67, Denali National Park, Alaska 99755 (until late May, HCR 75, Box 106, Cornish, N.H. 03745).