National Parks and Recreation

We’re almost halfway there! 31 of 63 parks. We’ve been very lucky that we’ve been able to knock out national parks on two Frozen Four trips in a row. So thank you to whoever decided it was a good idea to host a hockey tournament in the desert. We had a blast!

It’s even better when BU isn’t in it so I can relax and actually enjoy myself. I even extended my trip by half a week and decided to fly out to San Francisco to hang out with some friends beforehand.

This was my first time in San Francisco (only second time in California) and I absolutely fell in love. It’s an expensive city, but everything is so beautiful and the public transit is great!

I had a day to myself when I first arrived so I spent it wandering around to all the classic tourist destinations. Then the rest of our friends descended on the city and we drove up into the redwoods.

Muir Woods is 100% one of those places that cannot be captured on film. It was just so peaceful to walk around, surrounded by these gigantic trees.

The below picture is the closest I came to capturing the serenity of the forest.

But then it was time to fly to Vegas and get ready for some desert hockey. And for me to set foot in my 49th state. So close!!! (And rumor has it our next national park might be in my 50th state!)

As soon as we found out the Frozen Four would be in Vegas, I knew I wanted to try to squeeze in a day trip to Death Valley. What I didn’t expect was for so many people to want to join us. We ended up packing up a van with eight humans, gallons of water, and tons of snacks as we took off into the mountains and then back down the other side.

Death Valley National Park straddles the Nevada/California border with most of the park residing in California, but it was a quick two hour (beautiful!) drive from Vegas. We began our time in Death Valley, by climbing up one side of the valley to Dante’s Peak, situated at 5,500 feet above sea level.

And I immediately knew this was going to be a top 10 national park for me.

I think this was the perfect spot to begin our trip to Death Valley because you could literally see the entire park from here. And it was very cool to see the salt flats as far as the eye could see. It was hard for my brain to not just automatically assume it was snow.

It was also SO windy. All of our hats blew off the second we opened the doors to the van. It was like a scene out of a sitcom. And this would persist throughout our entire time in the park (and Vegas too). I still have a blood blister on my hand from chasing James’ hat down a rocky hill.

Next stop was Zabriskie Point! It felt so random to just come around a corner and see these badlands rise up out of the landscape. Like we were in an entirely new park. You can see the the Badlands Loop trail in the background of these photos. We had plans to do the entire 3 mile loop, but had gotten a slow start to the morning so we decided to cut it down into a shorter, half-mile hike.

Which led to us hiking down this pretty sketchy path. In my defense, I did yell “IT’S SANDY! TAKE SMALL STEPS!” as I went down ahead of them.

But this photo my friend took of them struggling hard made me laugh. I was already around and up the next hill by this point and had no idea this was happening. Oops.

Raise your hands if you have proper hydration!

Spirits were still high. Sunburns were minimal. Hydration was being upheld.

And it was time to finally head to the visitor center and cool off in the A/C for a little bit!

You probably recognize the above photo from the nightly news anytime there’s a massive heat wave out west. Furnace Creek has the record for the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on Earth’s surface with a reading of 134 degrees back in 1913. The AVERAGE high in July at Furnace Creek is 117 degrees. No thanks. Luckily it didn’t feel too oppressive while we were there, dry heat and all. Though, it did get up to 99 degrees as we were driving through the basin floor.

The visitor’s center sits at sea level. So it was time to continue our descent down into Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. Fun fact: the highest point in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney, is just 88 miles away. Eighty-eight miles and nearly 15,000 feet up.

The red arrow above is pointing to a white rectangle demarking the sea level line. I thought that was so cool to visualize like that. The salt was also pretty slushy in parts. They got a lot more rainfall than usual in Death Valley in early spring (still not a lot) so we saw a few standing pools of water and their were a lot of wildflowers around.

This entire area was so surreal. It was hot as hell, but it looked like we were walking in a winter wonderland. Super trippy.

And yes…we did lick it. It was, indeed, salt.

We didn’t have to wander very far before it felt like we were the only people out there. It was hard to get a grasp of how big this area was, but it was several miles across.

It was time to begin our drive out on the main park road, but not before making a few stops along the way.

Did I mention we had to rent a Sprinter van for this? Apparently all of Enterprise’s mini vans were recalled the day before our trip so they upgraded us to this. It was easy to navigate, but the gas mileage was not cute. But hey, basically everyone got their own row to themselves and their own unobstructed views out the window so it worked out.

We made a quick detour to the Devil’s Golf Course. I love how basically every national park has this random pit stop with the most unique rock formations. Erosion is pretty neat, huh?

We then made the loop through Artists Drive, which was one of my favorite parts of the park.

I mean…it had a fun, winding mountain drive, rocks to climb on, and lots of purple. What more could I possibly want?

The different colors are a result of different volcanic deposits of iron oxides and chlorites.

Just look how happy I was!

But alas, it was time to head to our last stop of the park: the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes.

We could see dust from the sand dunes from the top of Dante’s Peak, shown in the picture below on the far right.

And just like the rest of the park, it really seemed like we just came around a corner and voila: completely new and totally different landscape.

The crazy winds within the park and the surrounding mountains create the perfect conditions for sand dunes to form.

And boy, was it windy! Which meant we ended up being the only people crazy enough to hike out to the highest dunes. So it felt like we had the place to ourselves.

It was a pretty brutal tail wind as we hiked out so we knew that each step we took out was going to be a miserable step back with the wind blowing sand directly in our faces. But we couldn’t stop, we were having too much fun. And everytime we would crest what was surely the biggest dune, we would see an even bigger one just ahead that we had to climb.

The setting sun allowed for some fun shadows!

And the sand really only hurt when you were at the very top of a dune where the wind was whipping over.

Just look at the clouds! The whole thing felt like we were on another planet. Like we were standing in front of a green screen.

Even now I’m blown away (pun intended) looking back on photos and seeing how much we truly had this entire landscape to ourselves. I didn’t really appreciate it in the moment because of the whole can’t-look-up-without-getting-sand-in-all-my-orifices thing.

It wouldn’t be a national park blogpost without me lecturing you about how you should always just go do the hike! Even if you don’t have the legs or the time to do the whole thing, just get out of the car and walk around. You never know what you might see around the next dune. (Okay, yes. It will be just another, taller dune. But still.)

And then sadly it was time to head back to the bright lights of Vegas. I’m forever grateful for this annual tradition. And beyond blessed to have so many wonderful friends to do these trips with. (And not just because it means I have more people taking photos of everything in the national park.)

How many people can say they have 20+ friends who will travel around the country with them to watch this stupid sport? Even when their team isn’t even playing. It’s the best. I can’t wait to see where the next season takes us and who we’ll run into in these random corners of this big, beautiful country.

So goodbye for now! Hopefully next time I post it will be from my 50th state… Stay tuned!