National Park Discussion Thread

Although not theme parks, the national parks are pretty large tourist attractions. They offer educational services, recreation, and most have campgrounds. The parks draw over 300 million visitors yearly.

With the government shut down, each of these national parks are now closed. Has this affected anyone's vacation plans? Luckily, this isn't a peak time for vacations so I assume not as many are affected as if this would have happened in the summer.

Well good thing it didn't last too long.

Now that all of that is over, I visited Montezuma's Castle here in AZ for the first time I moved here 8 years ago. It's a small little park and only $5 to get in but it was pretty cool.

^ I remember going there on a family trip in 96 when we visited a bunch of national parks in Utah and Arizona. There was one day in Arizona when we hit up three different national monuments in the same day and I think this was one of them. I thought the castle was pretty cool, although I really would have liked to visit Mesa Verde National Park in CO, but it was too far out of our way. Grand Canyon was the most famous NP we visited on that trip, but it wasn't my favorite. Bryce Canyon NP in Utah was my favorite on the trip as we got to walk through the canyon and see it up close as opposed to the Grand Canyon where we just looked at it (the North Rim was better though).

^^

Yeh it was a pretty cool find. I went to Grand Canyon National Park a few years ago and it was pretty cool but not my favorite. I want to go to Yosemite and to YellowStone as well sometime soon.

Here are some of my Grand Canyon pics from a few years ago.

We hit two national parks during our recent cross country trip: Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest.

Here are some pictures:

Grand Canyon National Park has a nice campground at Trailer Village - they are paved, relatively level, and quite spacious.

Don't mind the deer wandering through the campground.

The Grand Canyon is awesome to see during sunset. It's even better to go in the winter like we did so you can go down the bus shuttle road that is normally closed to cars.

The scenery is really breathtaking.

The winter sunset colors are really beautiful.

I couldn't stop taking pictures.

There is a great Mexican restaurant in Tusayan, the town right outside the entrance. My food was good, but my wife said that was the best burrito she had ever eaten.

On to the petrified forest - my daughter got bored after about five minutes. I was really interested, though.

It's intriguing how the wood turned to stone.

Here you can see the rings of the tree.

There are some random scenes like this that are cool.

They also have a memorial to Route 66 that used to pass through here.

In fact these power poles are the only thing left standing. The road bed used to follow along beside them.

Wow. Nice pics. Thanks for posting. I've lived here in AZ for 8 years and have never gone to see the Petrified Forest. Now I may just have to plan a weekend trip.

Anyone have any other pics of other National Parks to post like YellowStone or Yosemite?