1 thru 3 of 63
So if you don’t know our story, we met each other on the road, and got to know each other on the road. A passion for traveling and exploring was the first thing we shared.
And now that we share everything else, traveling and exploring are still two of the things we love best.
Soon after we started traveling full time, we made a plan to visit all 63 of America’s national parks. At that point we had only been to four together; right now we’re at 11.
We got off to a good start though. Our first three together were Petrified Forest, Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. Stick around and we’ll tell you a story from each one.
1. Petrified Forest National Park – August 2023
The first national park we saw together was only about five weeks after we started dating. We met on the road while Adam was managing a concert tour, and after it was over we drove across the country together from Massachusetts to L.A. We took Interstate 40 for most of the trip, and since the entrance to Petrified Forest is minutes from the road, we stopped to see it for a few minutes.
Petrified Forest is one of America’s most unique places. You really should see it at least once if you ever make it out to Arizona. It’s a desert landscape scattered with huge tree trunks that have turned completely to stone.
More accurately, crystal. They’re fossils of ancient trees, formed 200 million years ago when Arizona looked completely different from what it is now.
When trees would fall in those ancient forests, sometimes they would be washed down into rivers that would cover them in silt and sediment, where the process of decay would slow down to a crawl. Over hundreds of years, as the cells in the wood broke down, the organic material would be replaced by minerals and volcanic ash.
Skipping to the end: over millions of years, geological activity pushed the petrified trees back up to the surface, and now there’s a whole landscape of these massive fossils of fallen trees, exactly life-sized and made mostly of solid quartz. In all kinds of brilliant colors and patterns. Incredibly detailed, you can mostly still see the grooves and cracks of the original bark.
So we stopped to take a look around, late one afternoon as the park was about to close. We mostly had the place to ourselves. The sun was low in the sky and the light was perfect for taking pictures. We wandered around for 20 or 30 minutes, staying mostly close to the visitor center where many of the most impressive trees are.
When we got back to the parking lot, we happened to look up and notice another couple coming back from a hike, standing on a path right at the top of a hill, silhouetted by the sun. It was so striking that Michelle raised her phone and took a couple pictures of them.
The pictures were so good that we decided to go back up the hill and show them to the couple. They were thrilled and grateful to get them, and we know the feeling: when you’re traveling as a couple, you rarely get a picture of the two of you that’s not a selfie. But Michelle caught a special moment for them that will now last forever.
We got to know them a bit and talked to them about their travel plans, and what they did for a living back home. We connected with them once via email, and then never again. But as long as they keep those pictures, there’s still that connection from us to them.
Every time you give someone a gift, a piece of you stays with them. Maybe even long after you’ve forgotten all about it.
2. Death Valley National Park – March 2024
Our second national park was Death Valley, near the end of winter 2024. We stayed in Vegas first and then continued on to Death Valley, mostly to get a glimpse of Lake Manly, which forms only once every few decades. If you’ve heard of Death Valley you probably know that it’s the hottest place on Earth, and one of the driest. Most of the time you see no water at all, let alone an entire lake. But sometimes when there’s an especially wet winter, a large and shallow lake forms in Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in the continental U.S. It’s mostly kind of a big puddle, maybe a couple miles long but never more than a few feet deep. A few weeks before we got there, a lot of people were getting out there with kayaks and canoes, but by the time we saw it, it was already too shallow. Still a crazy sight though, to see a lake in the middle of this desert that routinely gets up above 120 degrees in the summer.
The hottest place on Earth
We also took the short hike through Golden Canyon, and found out that scenes from the first Star Wars movie had been filmed there. Episode IV, the first one that was made, not the first episode in the saga. It’s a fun and easy hike, walking on mostly flat sand between two rock walls about 30 feet apart. It looks like it was probably once a riverbed that carried water down into Lake Manly, when it used to be there all year round. Afterwards we went online and found pictures of George Lucas and C-3PO standing there on the trail where we had walked, which made at least one of us nerd out for a minute.
In another part of the park, we actually had our picture taken by someone else. A young girl was walking with her dad and came up to us holding a Polaroid camera, and offered to give us a picture. So we picked a spot with a good backdrop and posed for her, and she pulled a tiny little piece of photo paper out of the camera and handed it to us. And we stood there in Death Valley, huddled against the wind as the film developed, and over the next two or three minutes we saw a ghostly image of the three of us appear. The kid and her dad were long gone, but there we were with a little piece of her art in our hands.
3. Grand Canyon National Park – July 2024
We visited the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in the summer of 2024, starting at the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, which was tragically destroyed in a fire almost exactly a year later. That in itself would have made this trip especially memorable, getting to see the lodge in person before it was gone.
It was a national treasure. Hopefully it’ll be rebuilt someday in the same spot. They’ve actually done it once before: the original Grand Canyon Lodge was built in 1928, and was lost in another fire only four years later. So they rebuilt it in 1937, and that one stayed until last year. If you’ve never seen it, look up some pictures. It used to sit on the very edge of the Canyon, 8000 feet above sea level at Bright Angel Point. You could basically sit on deck chairs out on the patio and look down into the Canyon. It was built out of limestone and massive Ponderosa pines, and the stones were cut intentionally to look like natural rock outcroppings. The main building was all common space, and there was a collection of more than 100 small log cabins for overnight guests. Most of those were lost in the fire as well.
In all honesty, neither of us paid enough attention to the lodge when we were there, because we were so excited to see the Canyon itself. The sense of wonder is a little overwhelming, just about everywhere you go at the Grand Canyon. Sometimes it blocks everything else out. But when you’re walking through and around signs and buildings that have been there in the same place for almost 90 years, you get the feeling that they’ll always be there. And then it’s easy to let them fade into the background. Especially because in order to see the buildings, you have to turn away from one of the greatest natural wonders on the planet. But it was a special thing for us, to visit the lodge in person so soon before it was lost forever. It’s very sad but there’s gratitude there as well.
The statue of Brighty, the real-life burro who became the title character in Marguerite Henry’s famous children’s book Brighty of the Grand Canyon. It was in the lobby of the Grand Canyon Lodge and survived the fire with some damage.
On the road into the park, we came across a herd of bison spread out across a field. Neither of us had realized there were any bison at the Grand Canyon, but there they were. There were at least a hundred in the herd, on both sides of the road, including quite a few babies. We stopped for five or six minutes with no other cars in sight, just taking pictures and video of the bison. One of the biggest males in the whole herd got up from the ground and walked across the road right in front of our car, and took a minute to stand still and pose for us.
On that day we didn’t do any hiking; we just drove along the North Rim and stopped at all the major lookout points. Which is more than enough to keep you busy for a day or an afternoon there. And more than enough to fill up your phone storage too, if you like to take video. A lot of content from that trip is still on the way, so if you’re following us on social media keep an eye out.
As for the Grand Canyon itself, it’s hard to express anything meaningful about it in a verbal description. There’s nothing that captures the experience except being there. Every single thing you look at is on a completely different scale of beauty from anything you ever see in everyday life. There’s very little to compare it to. In many places it’s more than a mile deep. You can stand on the edge and look down, and the water you’re seeing at the very bottom is a mile away. The average width across the whole Canyon is about 10 miles, but the widest point is 18 miles. And across all that open space, as far as you can see in every direction, shapes and colors and lines and shadows arranged in pictures that you just can’t see anywhere else. To call it “spectacular” would be an insulting understatement.
People sometimes criticize each other for living through their phones, and trying to get so much content that they forget to enjoy the thing they came to see. But here there’s far too much to remember later. That day was one of the most profound experiences of our lives, and we walked away from it with mostly impressionistic memory-pictures of sweeping scenes of overwhelming beauty. We cherish all our photos and videos from that day because they’re the only thing that can fill in the details that our minds have already lost — and in so doing they help bring us back to what it was actually like to be there.
