Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

As a birder and naturalist, I have a love/hate relationship with roads and parking lots in national parks. On the one hand, it’s not difficult to agree with Ed Abbey that all pavement is the opposite of progress. Roads kill things outright and bring more tourists, a certain percentage of which will be destructive in their own way. Then I stop and think about the best birding spots I’ve found in the parks – and a majority of them of were either in a parking lot or within sight of some kind of pavement.

"Find Another Park." That twist on the National Park Service's "Find Your Park" campaign leading into the agency's centennial year was voiced this year in some parks as record visitation strained staff and impacted resources and left Park Service managers wondering how high visitation might go next year, according to a sampling of parks by the Traveler.

Taiga is a word of just two syllables, and yet it connotes remoteness. Its synonym – boreal – is slightly more familiar, though it too conjures the distant, the mysterious. But if you travel to the Great Lakes, to the national lakeshores that line the southern shores of those inland oceans known as Superior and Michigan, you can find yourself deep in the coniferous forests, the taiga or boreal forests, more familiar to the Canadian landscapes to the north.

Propose a visit to a national lakeshore, and most folks will think you're talking about a warm-weather visit. But as the following video shows, winter can be a wonderful time to visit Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore to climb some waterfalls.