*** UPDATE Check out my 4 published guidebooks to the U.S.A. available for sale on Amazon ***

Welcome to Raven About The Parks, an informational guide to the National Parks, National Forests, National Monuments, and other public lands of the United States of America (U.S.A.)!

Scott Sink started Raven About The Parks in 2018 to share his love of America’s public lands.  Thus far, he has visited 401 of the 430+ units in the National Park Service (NPS) system across all 50 states and three territories.  In 2022, he expanded this travel blog to include the 155 National Forests and the other sites managed by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).  You can learn more about his quest during the pandemic to visit all the National Forests in the newspaper articles he wrote that are shared on this website.  Don’t know the difference between the NPS and USFS?  Check out this blog post explaining how they are unique.

Scott writes Raven About The Parks to inspire others to travel to these amazing public lands that are owned by every American and open to everyone on Earth.  Beyond the handful of NPS sites that see more than one-million visitors annually there are hundreds of forests, monuments, and historic sites where it is easy to have a unique and personal experience connecting with the land.  He hopes that by spending time in the wild places of the United States and learning more about the history of this country that voters (and future voters) will make more informed decisions about how their representatives protect these treasures in the future.

Basically, the goal of Raven About The Parks is to answer the question: Why would I want to go there?  While the 63 NPS units named National Park are detailed in a variety of publications (including Scott’s own guidebook) and websites, there is little information or photographs covering the hundreds of smaller sites located across the U.S.A.  With more than 430 designated NPS units and more than 200 areas managed by the USFS, there is public land closer to you than you might realize.

I believe traveling is a great way to expand cultural horizons, study history in an interactive way, and get in touch with the natural world.  A secondary goal of this blog is to provide a single venue from which to offer Scott’s artwork for sale under the Shop tab. 

Scott has been blogging since 2013, documenting the adventures of Wondon the Traveling Bunny and raving about the parks.  That same year he began photographing Echo the Raven with the NPS “unigrid” pamphlets at each site he visited.  He chose ravens because they are the one wildlife species that shows up across many National Parks regardless of the ecosystem.  He has seen these intelligent scavengers at Denali in Alaska, Death Valley in California, Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and everywhere in between.  He hase long considered ravens (and related Corvids) to be unofficial park ambassadors.

He kicked off this blog by writing about his favorite NPS site in all 50 states.  Click the Follow button above to receive updates by email.

For more photography, please follow Raven About The Parks on Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.

…In the meantime, check out some real ravens in parks from Arizona to Maine to Alaska.