Canyonlands National Park

As you’re visiting national parks this summer, don’t miss out on these spectacular outlooks, mountain summits, and lake vistas. We’ve got the intel on how to reach them all.

Looking to save a few bucks when visiting our national parks? Here are upcoming free days, and seven other programs for freebies or discounts. You could make some memories.

Mountain-bike world-famous slickrock at our 62 Parks Traveler's 14th stop on her journey to visit every U.S. national park in a year

'Standing Man' chronicles cyclist Payson McElveen's attempt to set a new fastest known time on a loop of White Rim in Utah's Canyonlands.

How to explore the western rivers and wilderness on the route of legendary explorer John Wesley Powell

Get a jump on the crowds. Explore our favorite hidden corners, empty spaces, and wild places in ten iconic National Parks

It's been a national park for 50 years. One more step will ensure that it's safe forever.

Play outside with kids your own age

Forget the drunk, stumbling, bleached-blonde, muscled hordes of Panama City. Take a trip to one of the country’s top spots for adventure and come back refreshed.

Last year, four friends of mine and I biked the Allegheny Passage to see the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC. This late winter or early spring, we want to top that by heading out west and backpacking for four to five days in a national park. What is a good location that will have favorable conditions? -Andrew Pittsburgh, PA

BEST: SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER, WHEN THE SAND IS COOL FIRST ENCOUNTER: Sun Spots I can’t tell you if we saw the sun set on the North Rim and rise on the South Rim or if the order was reversed. It doesn’t matter. What I remember is that I was seven…

Durango, Colorado

Play hard by day at these nine classic national parks, then ditch the franks 'n' beans by night and live large outside the boundaries

There’s something sublime about a dip in a natural swimming hole, be it a lazy oxbow in a cool river, a hillside nook fed by a subterranean hot-spring, or a limestone bowl bored out by a 40-foot waterfall. “The swimming hole is the perfect outdoor experience,” says Pancho Doll, author…

Thanks to one of the worst droughts in a century, the Southwest’s most thrilling boating of late has been a motorized trip to Cathedral in the Desert, the reemerging sandstone amphitheater in Utah’s man-made Lake Powell. Well, times change, and so does the weather. Suddenly, the big news…

An 812-mile effort to revive the spirit, if not the tactics, of the West's most notorious monkey-wrencher

Combine your next visit to a national park with a bonus raid on a great state park or national forest—and get twice the escape

32 YEARS AGO this summer, my pal, the crime novelist Jim Crumley, his overeducated farmer friend from Arkansas, Harold McDuffy, and yours truly hiked six miles to Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park. For someone who had spent most of his life in the desert country of southeastern Oregon, this…

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