Category Archives: Update

Special message for Local Authors Day at Laramie County Library

Thank you to everyone who we met at the Laramie County Library’s Local Authors Day on Saturday.  This was our first public event showcasing our travel guidebook A Park To Yourself: Finding Adventure in America’s National Parks (click here for the Amazon.com link).

We are currently writing a travel guide for America’s 155 National Forests that we plan to release in 2022.  Please subscribe to this travel blog for updates on that book and new posts on National Park Service sites.

We will also be writing a few newspaper articles for the Cheyenne Tribune-Eagle in November and December about visiting the final three National Forests on our list in California and Puerto Rico.

Thanks for your interest in our work.  We hope you are inspired to travel someplace new!

Scott and Tiff

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Update to Our Guidebook: A Park to Yourself

Since White Sands National Monument was upgraded to the 62nd National Park on December 20, 2019, we decided to update our guidebook to the parks.  If you already bought your copy on Amazon, please find the new page 308 posted below.  White Sands is one of our favorite of the many National Park Service units in New Mexico.  You can read more about the park on this blog

White Sands

New Mexico

148,558 acres

Established 2019

603,008 visitors in 2018

Dunes composed of gypsum make a great destination for snow sledding year round, especially when the sand is wet.  Gypsum readily dissolves in water, but here it forms dunes because no river drains the Tularosa Basin.  Follow markers on the five-mile roundtrip Alkali Flat Trail that goes up and down dunes and provides views of the San Andres Mountains.  Most of the wildlife here is nocturnal, but during the day you may spot bleached earless lizards that evolved to camouflage in the gypsum.  The white dunes take on the colors of the sunset if you attend the ranger-guided Sunset Stroll or backpack camp.  There is no campground and only ten backcountry campsites, and their availability is dependent upon whether the military is conducting missile tests overnight, so call ahead or check the schedule online.  Oliver Lee Memorial State Park offers a full service campground in a beautiful setting south of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

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Wishing You All Happy Travels in 2020

2019 was the first complete year of our National Parks travel blog and it was a big year for us.  We wrote 112 blog posts and finished drawing our 50th logo for a National Park (see them all here).  In November, we published our first hard copy guidebook to visiting the 61 National Parks (which is available on Amazon). Then on December 20, White Sands was named the 62nd National Park so we will soon be working on a 2nd Edition (see our new logo on Cafe Press).

In 2019, we also worked toward our goal of visiting at least 400 of the current 419 units in the National Park Service (NPS) system.  In April, we took off two weeks to see all five NPS sites in the U.S. Virgin Islands (Virgin Islands NP, VI Coral Reef NM, Salt River Bay NHP, Buck Island NM, and Christiansted NHS).  We crossed off 29 NPS units from our list on a September blitz through Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.  In December, we made it to our final NPS sites in both Florida and Georgia.

We have now visited 364 of 419 NPS units, but most of the remaining sites are far flung, so it will take many separate trips to see the rest.  We hope to return to Washington, D.C. soon to see the leftover NPS sites there and in the surrounding states.  We are very grateful for the opportunity to travel and see some of the most wonderful parts of America. 

We wish you all happy and safe travels in 2020.

Thank you for reading our travel blog. 

Tiff at Christiansted NHS on the island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands
This design we created to celebrate the new White Sands National Park is available on a variety of products at Cafe Press and Amazon.