Park Entrances

29Aug19

I subscribe to an e-mail service that sends me tips for visiting our national parks.

Almost every e-mail provides me with a valuable tip about a park I didn’t know.

But I had never gotten a blog post idea from these e-mails. That is until a couple of months ago when “Best Park Entrances” came across my in box.

It got me thinking – what were my favorite entrances to the national parks. With some many to choose from it was tough coming up with these few to blog about.

You know you are in a national park when you see cars pulled off the side of the road and tourists are taking selfies and other photos of themselves in front of the sign touting where you are.

The next thing you typically run across is a visitor center. At Arches National Park for instance, the visitor center is the park’s entrance. Instead of the arches the park is famous for, instead you see the massive Courthouse Towers looming above the park’s entrance.

My favorite park entrance is the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park. Not only is this one of the more beautiful spots in our first national park, but also as you enter through the town of Gardiner, Montana, you drive through a rock arch laid here by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Speaking of Roosevelt, the entrances to the two units of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota are very different. The south unit is the more frequently visited of the two because it is right off of I-94. The first “entrance” to this unit is the Canyon Visitor Center that also serves as a rest area for the interstate. The true entrance to the south unit is in the town of Medora where you can walk to the visitor center from your hotel.

This visitor center is very typical for a national park. Contrast that with the north unit entrance that is nothing more than a house trailer with few parking places.

Many others though are far from the sites you associated with the park. The mountains are a good distance away when you enter Rocky Mountain National Park from the east. I drove a few miles into Joshua Tree National Park before I saw the park’s namesake vegetation.

Then there is Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. The park entrance is 15 miles away (I looked this up) from not only the visitor center, but it is several more miles before you reach the cliff dwellings you came to see in the first place.

Yosemite National Park was essentially the same thing. Compared with the rest of the park you found in the interior, the entrance was fairly ordinary. I did like another entrance we happened along at the southwestern part of the park.

Carole and I only happened across this because a landslide forced us in this direction. However if that wouldn’t have happened, we would have missed out of the roaring Merced River that ran parallel our road back to the valley for over an hour including at the Arch Rock entrance.

Roaring streams has always fascinated me. This section of the Merced River was by far the most amazing roaring stream I have ever seen. Throw in massive boulders in the river and it made the next hour and subsequent entry back into Yosemite National Park a time I won’t soon forget.

Like so many of the entrances to our national parks.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Leave a Comment