Pictures of National Parks

Taking pictures in our National Parks.

Over the years we have found that National Parks are the very best places to take scenic pictures. We have visited almost every National Park in America over the last twenty years. Here are our favorite and how we take pictures in them.

Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming is probably my favorite National Park. This is probably becasue I grew up in Wyoming and had most likely visited the Tetons twenty times before I was twenty years old. Jenny Lake and Jackson Lake and Hedric Pond have been some of my favorite places in this park.

Glacier National Park is another favorite. I don't think any other national park has quite the same number of majestic mountains, lakes and rivers. This is another national park that I visited when very young. Hands down the best trail in Glacier is the Grinnell Glacier Trail.

Another National Park that I saw a lot of when I was a kid was Yosemite. I found the views of Half Dome and El Capitan and Glacier point just as magnificent at 60 as I did at 10.

Since we lived in Colorado for much of our photographic careers, Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park, Colorado got a lot of our time. Bear Lake, and Moraine Park and Sprague Lake and the trail up to the high lakes above Bear Lake are some of our favorite places there.

Grand Canyon National Park is a place of many great pictures. When our three boys were young we spent a week or so every summer backpacking on the inner canyon trails along the Colorado River. The best pictures here are not down in the canyon though, but from the great overlooks on the south rim.

I visited Rainier National Park as a young boy but found when I revisited it several years ago that I had forgotten a lot of the trails and views. When I revisited it several years ago I found that the trails and views from both the Sunrise area and the Paradise areas where some of the most stunning I have ever seen. For me, Rainier is a member of my top three parks group along with Teton and Glacier.

When my son and his family moved to Maine four years ago, I visited Acadia National Park for the first time. This is a nice park but very crowded and not anywhere as overwhelmingly beautiful as the best of the Western parks. I did love the top of Cadillac Mountain though. It is especially awesome in the fall when the colors are changing. Like everything else in Acadia, there are too many cars and people here though.

Zion and Bryce are great National Parks. I think Zion is the better of the two as it has a much greater variety of beautiful stuff to look at. It also has a magnificent back country full of rivers and canyons and forests and huge stone cliffs. In Bryce, once I had seen the hoodoos from the main view points I got a little bored. This is probably totally unjust though. I'm sure Bryce has a lot I just haven't seen yet.

The whole southern Utah area around Escalante and Capital Reef and Grand Staircase has always had a great appeal for me. It is still relatively wild and undeveloped and exciting. Of course Ed Abbey said the whole area was over run with tourists and cows thirty years ago, but he was a real purist. I'm not quite as picky as he was. This area still has a feeling of real adventure to me. There are still lots of places where I could get good and lost and maybe even not make it out alive. And a lot of it hasn't even been squashed into National Parks yet but still exists as BLM Study Areas. I have a lot of pictures to take here yet. I'm planning a month long trip here in May of 2010. I'll see how it goes. I still need a lot of pictures from this area.