Finding Solitude in National Parks Helped Me Evolve as a Traveler

Bright and early on August 27, 2020, I left my hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota and drove an hour east. I was alone, it was pitch-black out and the world seemed empty. It was my birthday, during that year when birthdays were FaceTime affairs, and I wanted to spend it someplace where I felt at peace — where I could travel safely, feel nostalgic and celebrate with some socially distanced bighorn sheep. As surreal as that time was, spending my birthday by myself in Badlands National Park is one of my happiest memories. Visiting national parks alone just hits different.

I arrived in time for a chilly sunrise, reminding me of my first awe-inspiring trip to the park years prior, the sea of spires and buttes draped in marigold. I spent that birthday hiking alone, getting caught in a torrential downpour that turned the entire Mars-like terrain, comprised mostly of all-too-malleable clay and sandstone, into one big muddy Slip ‘N Slide. I talked to my mom, who I hadn’t seen in a year, with whatever scrap of cell service I could finagle. It was perfect.

After newly settling in Oklahoma City earlier that month in 2020, via two years spent traveling the country in an RV, I drove the 12 hours to one of my favorite national parks not just as a birthday treat, but because national parks have come to mean so much to me — physically, mentally, emotionally — as I’ve gotten older. As a kid, they were more of a chore, when I’d much rather be drinking Gloria Jean’s at the mall than hiking with my family. In 2016, though, a fateful trip to Badlands National Park changed everything. I had been working in Chicago as a food writer, steadily transitioning more towards travel work. A formative work trip took me to South Dakota for a week, including a life-changing visit to Badlands that utterly altered the way I viewed the world, and the way I wanted to write about it. The same is true for many, regardless of background, athletic ability or profession. There’s something so enriching and centering, removed of elitism or gate-keeping, that makes national parks the ultimate unifiers. For me, ever since that first sunrise over the Badlands Wall, they are where I’m most at peace by myself. 

In the ensuing years, I’ve visited numerous national parks, both in my RV and since. They changed my career for the better, opened my eyes and pen to a wealth of opportunity, and pushed me to challenge myself in ways that have served me not only as a writer, but as a traveler transfixed by the world. After I left Chicago in 2018, national parks offered enriching escape while I was struggling with homesickness and a detachment from the life and career I built there. They were a bucolic balm, a wellspring of inspiration and, increasingly, oases where I could hike at my own pace, bask in my own thoughts and drown out the noise — the noise of homophobia, the noise of divorce, the noise of pandemic.

Most national parks I’ve been to I’ve visited alone. For the most part, I prefer it that way. As much as I’ve loved national parks trips with my family in recent years, visiting alone means I get to experience these places more fully, going at my own pace and pushing myself to try new things. I’ve paddle boarded through mangrove forests in Biscayne, descended into Carlsbad Caverns, soaked in Hot Springs, snow-shoed in the Rocky Mountains and hugged a giant Sequoia. Some of my favorite, and most visceral, travel memories were on solo trips like these, and they helped color the way in which I traveled more mindfully.

Like the time I drove a rental car along Nevada’s Highway 50, a.k.a the “The Loneliest Road in America” to the far-flung nether reaches of Great Basin, praying I wouldn’t break down in the middle of nowhere, only to be rewarded on the other side by the majesty of the snowy South Snake Mountains, and humbled by the gnarly bristlecone pines — the oldest living things on Earth. Or the time I made it to the very tip of Key West, only to take a ferry another 70 miles out to Dry Tortugas, where I snorkeled around Fort Jefferson, no land in sight. And that time I zig-zagged down into the volcanic Haleakalā crater, at its namesake Hawaiian park, and ate Spam musubi while nēnēs squawked nearby.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and indeed, some of my most significant national parks experiences stemmed from struggle that made me feel empowered. As when, while RV-ing in Wyoming, a group of homophobic teenagers harassed me, and triggered me to spontaneously leave town for a few days. The irony of driving to North Dakota to escape homophobia is not lost on me, but even in a deep-red Dakota, Theodore Roosevelt National Park was precisely that. While there, I hiked through badlands and petrified forests, and friendly hikers treated me with kindness — an apt, much-needed reminder of national parks’ unifying force.

Visiting national parks while traveling in an RV goes hand-in-hand, but even long after I settled in Oklahoma City, they’ve remained recurring bastions that make me feel centered and soothed the second I pass through the gates. I return, time and again, to slow myself down, breath and bask. It’s a magical thing to feel connected to places that seem so otherworldly, like the summit of Texas’ Guadalupe Peak, or Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring, aglow with enough color to make Barbie look as dull as chalk. In southern Arizona, Saguaro National Park is one I’ve visited so often that I have my favorite cactus, a sky-scraping beauty on the Cactus Forest Trail that I photograph every time, watching it inch ever upward with each return visit. I spent the start of the pandemic in Tucson, and for those two months, all I had were cacti.

Life looks a lot different nowadays, but my love for national parks has grown as steadily as that resilient cactus. In recent years, since marrying my husband, I’ve fostered a newer appreciation for national parks, and for the first time, I’m able to visit them with someone willing to bask with me, and respect these spaces for the sanctuaries that they are. Our first park together was Everglades, where he bravely kayaked for the first time on a jet-black creek populated both by crocodiles and alligators. We honeymooned at Mesa Verde, and while on a classic car trip through Utah, woke up early to catch sunrise together at Bryce Canyon. I have a thing for a national park sunrise.

As reliable as the sunrise, through all of life’s ebbs and flows, national parks have been there to rejuvenate and awe. Before my first Badlands trip, I was a city kid, unimpressed by what I deemed the “flyover country” in between. All it took was one trip to shine a new light and open my eyes to the buttes, canyons, caverns and cacti waiting just out of sight. If all the solo hikers and paddlers I’ve crossed paths with on my recent travels are any indication, I might be alone on some of those trails, but I’m not alone in that appreciation.