A Day In The Park

You can see a long way from the roof Guadalupe Mountains National Park, as it also happens to be the roof of the entire state of Texas, and that's saying something.

Somebody asks you to name the national park with the most impressive sand dunes, and you quickly answer, "Death Valley National Park!" And, of course, you'd be wrong.

Standing atop Grand Teton, it's easy to see the handiwork of Horace Albright and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. To the southeast is Timbered Island, down below is Jenny Lake, and a bit to the northeast is Jackson Lake. Not in view are the "shabby developments littering the roadway from Menors Ferry to Moran and along Jenny Lake’s south and east shores" that Mr. Rockefeller and Albright, then Yellowstone National Park's superintendent, saw in 1924.

When John Muir traveled in 1879 to the landscape now embraced by Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska, his great desire to see its bay and surrounding glaciers was confounded by overcast skies and rain with some snow mixed in. But when the weather took a change for the better, he was astounded by the view.