We're four days into 2024, the calendar is empty, or mostly empty, of planned forays into the National Park System. It's the perfect time to prepare for your adventures with some books that delve into various corners of the park system.

While the list that follows is just a sampler, it's a great one if you are wondering where to go or are getting serious about adding to your private national park home library. Along with books that guide you to trails or specific parks, the collection below offers some "big idea" literary works around individual parks, the park system, and individuals who played significant roles in the parks or National Park Service.

Click on the titles for more details.

The Dayhiker's Guide To The National Parks

You can never have enough guides to the national parks. Each author seems to catch different elements worth your attention.

Michael Oswald, who previously wrote Your Guide to the National Parks (now in a third edition) and National Park Maps, An Atlas of the United States National Parks, returns to the parks with The Dayhiker's Guide To The National Parks.

Oswald's latest endeavor tackles 280 trails in the 63 "national parks" within the National Park System. As he points out on the back cover of the guide, "There are more than 10,000 miles of trails in the U.S. National Parks. Choosing the best ones can be a challenge."

George Melendez Wright: The Fight For Wildlife And Wilderness In National Parks

In the beginning, national parks were mostly about scenery — not entirely because some early parks like Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake featured unusual marvels of the natural world. But the focus was on scenic beauty and providing opportunities for visitors to enjoy it. From those earliest days wildlife, particularly big critters like bears and elk, were one of the attractions in some parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite where they were on “display” at, for instance, the Yellowstone garbage dumps. Wildlife protection was an afterthought if a thought at all in the establishment and management of national parks.

George Melendez Wright changed this, at least for a while.

Jerry Emory has in this book brought the remarkable story of George Melendez Wright out of the shadows of national park history. It is a story of brilliance, vision, tragedy, and missed opportunity.

Guardians of the Valley: John Muir And The Friendship That Saved Yosemite

A library of books has been written about John Muir, many of which mention Robert Underwood Johnson, but not many adequately describe his long collaboration with Muir. In this book, Dean King remedies that oversight.

Muir’s life story and his contributions to the preservation of what is now Yosemite National Park have often been chronicled and King presents the highlights of that story. What King adds to the Muir story is who Robert Underwood Johnson was and what his role and contributions were in helping Muir in his many battles for protection of Yosemite.

National Park Maps

As nice as those folding park maps you get when driving into a national park are, trying to collect them all and organize them for your road trips can be a challenge, to say the least. Sure, you could punch holes in them and cram them into a three-ring binder, but an easier approach to exploring the parks on road trips is National Park Maps ($20), an atlas of the 63 "national parks."

Compiled by Michael Joseph Oswald, author of Your Guide To The National Parks, this nearly 200-page full color atlas goes beyond simply reprinting park maps. Oswald opens with snapshot profiles of the 63 parks and includes regional maps of the United States so you can gain some perspective of where parks are in relation to major cities and even other parks.

From Swamp To Wetland: The Creation Of Everglades National Park

Everglades National Park is unique in America’s National Park System in many ways, not least because it is a wetland and did not, when it was proposed in the late 1920s, feature the typical scenic attractions of most units of the system.

Wet, flat, hot, buggy, home to snakes and alligators, and difficult to access, it could not be as tourist friendly as many parks, and recreational opportunities would be limited — about the only way to experience it deeply would be by boat. In From Swamp to Wetland, a most descriptive title, environmental historian Chris Wilhelm explains how the uniqueness of the Glades made it an unusual candidate for national park status because it was considered a swamp, and swamps were wasteland that needed conversion to usefulness for the human population.  They should be drained for agriculture or leased for minerals, oil exploration, or real estate development. The wetness had to go.

That a large portion of the Everglades achieved national park status and became “useful” in many important ways is the story Wilhelm tells in this excellent book.

This Contested Land: The Storied Past And Uncertain Future Of America’s National Monuments

McKenzie Long is a rock climber, graphic designer, and writer who, inspired by the “contest” over the Bears Ears National Monument where she loved to climb in the Indian Creek basin, decided to visit a select group of national monuments to gain a deeper understanding of why and how they are contested.” Her travels take her from Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument to Hawaii, just beyond which is the vast Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

Long can turn a pithy phrase, as in her observation that “National monuments are like the scrappy younger siblings of national parks.” “Younger” because the monuments she visits are all recently designated as opposed to the many proclaimed over the years by presidents from Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 to George W. Bush in 2006. “Siblings” because the rationales for them are generally like those of national parks though the process of designating them is different. Many national parks of today started out as national monuments.

Range Of Light Trailblazer

Back in 2021 year we described a campaign to see the Sierra National Forest given to the National Park Service and redesignated the Range of Light National Monument. It would be bookended by Yosemite National Park on the north, and Kings Canyon National Park on the south.

Such a change in agency management would create a nearly 3-million-acre kingdom of parklands when you realize that Kings Canyon butts up to Sequoia National Park to the south. 

For the parks traveler, this would be an incredible landscape to explore. And there's even a guidebook out there to help you navigate many of those 3 million acres and more, for this book, Range of Light Trailblazer, also touches on Death Valley National Park.

Hike The Parks: Rocky Mountain National Park

If you're planning on visiting Rocky Mountain and hope to do some hiking, this guidebook that can help you craft an itinerary for best day hikes. Hike The Parks | Best Day Hikes, Walks, and Sights: Rocky Mountain National Park from Mountaineers Books is small, roughly 7 inches by 4 inches, but it's packed with hikes broken down into four sections of the park.

The sections identified by author Brendan Leonard are the Grand Lake Entrance, Trail Ridge Road, Bear Lake Road, Devil's Gulch Road, and Colorado Highway 7, a breakdown that makes it easy to find hikes depending on the entrance you use to visit Rocky Mountain and want to hit the trail as soon after you reach the park as possible.

The Appalachian Trail: A Biography

The Appalachian Trail is a fixture of outdoor life in 21st century America and is, as author Philip D’Anieri describes it, “a very narrow national park, from Maine to Georgia.” Introducing the book, he makes clear he does not intend it to be a history but rather a biography, “an attempt to render something essential about the life of this place by looking at how it developed over time.”

He succeeds brilliantly by describing the contributions of 12 people — ten men and two women — who were key players in the creation of the Appalachian Trails (A.T.) that we know and love and take for granted today. D’Anieri’s goal is to “describe the world of ideas that built the A.T. over the 20th . . .” This was, he can’t help but noting, a “very monochromatic world.”

A Window To Heaven: The Daring First Ascent Of Denali, America’s Wildest Peak

The first attempts to climb Denali, one of the world’s great mountains, and until recently named Mount McKinley, make for unique stories in mountaineering history.

The climbers who sought to be the first to climb the major peaks of Europe and Asia in the 18th and early 19th century were often “gentlemen” seeking fame and glory and bent on advancing the often nationalistic “sport” of mountaineering.

The men at the center of this story of the first ascent of Denali were cut from very different molds than such mountaineering pioneers. They were Alaskans — Alaska Natives, Alaska pioneers, or “sourdoughs,” and a cleric with a yen for adventure.

America’s Great Mountain Trails: 100 Highcountry Hikes Of A Lifetime

Some people have really tough jobs, like photographer and writer Tim Palmer, author of award-winning books about rivers, conservation, and adventure travel. In order to produce his extensive body of work (29 books) over a 40-year career, Tim has had to hike, bike, ski, and especially paddle all over the rivers, mountains, and other wild landscapes of America. All of this, he writes, “is dedicated to conservation, and each project I undertake is designed to reach people with an inspiring message to motivate them to care about the fate of our Earth.”

Three of his books, including America’s Great Mountain Trails, have won National Outdoor Book Awards, a program for which Traveler contributor John Miles has been a judge. John knew of Tim’s conservation work, especially on American rivers, but didn’t know of the excellence of his publishing projects until they appeared in John's annual pile of NOBA books. Tim’s projects have required him to, as his job, run the rivers and travel the trails of America like no other writer/photographer. He is the envy of all of us outdoor nuts.

Of course, in order to produce a volume like America’s Great Outdoor Trails, Palmer had to hike all 100 trails, and probably others that might be candidates but didn’t make the cut. This is no mean feat, and testify to the planning, work, and expertise that allows Palmer to contribute books like this one and his 2017 Wild and Scenic Rivers: An American Legacy to his conservation and outdoor readership.

Wonders Of Sand And Stone: A History Of Utah’s National Parks And Monuments

The southern half of Utah is canyon country, a land of aridity, sparse vegetation, and unique and scenically spectacular topography and geology. It is a land rich in sites of archaeological importance and parts of it are sacred to indigenous people. It is also mostly public land, owned by the American people, part of their national legacy, and for a century it has been contested terrain.

Frederick Swanson, in Wonders of Sand and Stone, tells the story of the century-long battles between those who would preserve large parts of this spectacular landscape and those who would dedicate them to “multiple use,” principally grazing, mining, dams, and oil and gas development. The story begins early in the history of America’s national parks when Utah’s redrock country was virtually inaccessible except to a few intrepid explorers, prospectors, and reaches to the 21st century conflicts over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.

The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

Kim Heacox and his new friend and fellow National Park Service seasonal ranger, Richard Steele, launched their tandem kayak into Glacier Bay in 1979 before their work season began. They were not seasoned paddlers. “In Reid Inlet we are two men in a little boat, rookie park rangers in Alaska, model GS-4 employees who have no idea what we’re doing,” writes Heacox. “I’ve come from Death Valley. To say we are naïve would be generous. From reading our embellished NPS summer seasonal park ranger applications, you’d think we were Leatherstocking and Black Elk, brother hunters in the wilderness, sons of the earth.”

Romantic adventurers and chechakos they certainly were, but they safely paddled on a week-long trip that changed their lives.

Hike The Parks: Joshua Tree National Park

Winter is the high season at Joshua Tree National Park in California. And what better way to prepare for a Joshua Tree adventure than finding a guide to help you make the most of the park's hikes?

There are plenty of disturbing stories of hikers who headed out into Joshua Tree's high desert landscape without properly preparing or carrying maps with them, and most of those end in death. Even with a guidebook or map there's no guarantee you won't get lost, but they should lessen the odds.

Scott Turner in this title hails from Southern California and has spent more than a little time in Joshua Tree. From that field testing, he produced a more than 200-page guidebook that includes details on 38 hikes or destinations in the park, and supported his words with maps and color photographs.

The Grand Canyon: Between River And Rim

An estimated six million people visit the Grand Canyon annually. Most visitors look in from the South Rim or through the window of a helicopter, and roughly 26,000 float the Colorado River through all or part of the canyon. Very few in the recorded history of Grand Canyon exploration have walked its length (fewer than have walked on the moon, Kevin Fedarko tells photographer Pete McBride). Likely no one with the photographic skills of National Geographic photographer McBride have made this arduous journey, which covered 750 miles from Lees Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs at the canyon’s western end.

Fedarko, author of the Grand Canyon classic, The Emerald Mile, joined McBride for the entire journey, while others joined the pair for stretches of it. They could not do the trip in one continuous push after McBride, laden with camera equipment, suffered hyponatremia (low sodium levels in the blood) five days into the trip, so they reasonably broke it into segments, lightened their loads, and walked between September 2015 and November 2016, seventy-one days of negotiating incredibly rough terrain. McBride shot 30,000 photos and captured 60 hours of video that resulted in the documentary film Into the Canyon.

Gates Of The Arctic National Park: Twelve Years Of Wilderness Exploration

Retired from college teaching, still healing from combat in Vietnam, Joe Wilkins found peace and solace in some of the most remote wilderness in the United States — Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. For a dozen years he volunteered for the National Park Service, accompanying rangers on patrols into remote corners of this 8,472,566-acre preserve in northern Alaska. He took many photos and kept careful notes of the places and people he encountered in his travels there, and in this photo-memoir he shares his experience of this remote and remarkable landscape.

Wilkins’ photography is the strength of this book. Most photos have captions, but some do not, and the scene or anecdote depicted without a caption are grist for his text. Many of his photos are stunning, especially those of a backpack into the Arrigetch peaks in the Endicott Mountains of the Brooks Range. On this trip he and his companion encountered days of cold rain and mist, grizzlies, roaring streams, incredibly dramatic mountain faces, and maybe a few bugs, all qualities of many Alaska wilderness treks. Sharp fins of rock tower into the sky, dusted with snow. The Arrigetch are a popular destination for climbers, and the backpack patrol aimed to determine how climbers were impacting this part of the range.

First Impressions, A Reader’s Journey To Iconic Places Of The American Southwest

This is not a book for light reading. It is, though, one that takes a historical approach to examining the hallmarks of the Southwestern landscape. Canyon de Chelly, El Morro, Rainbow Bridge, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and the Grand Canyon are among the destinations to which we are reintroduced through the writings of the first non-natives who encountered. 

As a result, we see the Grand Canyon through the writings of Pedro de Castaneda de Najera, who recounted the travels of Spanish explorers who found themselves on the South Rim of the canyon in 1540. 

The section on Rainbow Bridge comes to us through the eyes of two competing archaeologists, Byron Cummings and William B. Douglas.

“On the morning of the last day’s travel, when we were told by the Indian guides that the bridge would be reached by noon, the excitement became intense,” wrote Douglas.  “A spirit of rivalry developed between Professor Cummings and myself as to who should first reach the bridge.”

Deep Into Yellowstone: A Year’s Immersion In Grandeur & Controversy

Rick Lamplugh writes not as a scientist, park manager, or authority on any of the issues but as an outdoorsman and concerned citizen who has been captivated by the Yellowstone country. He tells stories, delves into park history related to the issues he describes, and offers natural history insights into the Yellowstone community as he explores it. He writes for fellow citizens not familiar with the park and its issues, and his book is especially timely as public lands in America are beset with challenges and challengers.

Into The Mist: Tales Of Death And Disaster

Books such as the one David Brill has written are reminders that national park landscapes can be as deadly as they are beautiful.

And the Volume 1 notation on the cover of Into the Mist: Tales of Death and Disaster, Mishaps and Mideeds, Misfortune and Mayhem in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a sign that he's compiling more stories from this park in the heart of the Appalachians. If anyone is apprehensive of entering one of the nation's big park landscapes that rolls and tumbles, sprawls and stretches, climbs and dips, and is roamed by wild animals that might consider you as a meal, this is not the book to give them.

Within the covers of Into the Mist are tales of murder, death due to hypothermia brought on by a massive snowstorm, drownings, deadly lightning strikes and, yes, fatal bear maulings.

There you have it, a start on building a national park library that can serve as reference, inspiration, and trip planner. And there are more to come.