Nature's Canvas

I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting to see when I entered Joshua Tree National Park, but it was way beyond my expectations! With elevations from 536 to 5,814 feet there are two distinct desert ecosystems contained in its 794,000 acres. The western half of the park is in the higher cooler Mojave Desert, […]

Forging ahead on my National Park hunt, I made the choice to stop at the Grand Canyon. The National Park Service has created collectable tokens for National Parks, National Monuments, National Historic Sites, etc. I started collecting them last September with my first one being from the Dry Tortugas National Park. I was so close […]

When you think of a petrified forest, do you think of a painted badlands? I didn’t, but that is what I found at the Petrified Forest National Park. Unexpected, but beautiful! Those of you who know me well, know how I feel about trees and how they feed my soul. That said, there was no […]

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is right across the border into New Mexico from Guadalupe Mountains National Park. In fact, and this I did not know, Carlsbad Caverns National Park is in the Guadalupe Mountains range, and there are more than 300 caves within the Captain Reef fossil reef of the park. I had been to […]

The last two National Parks I visited in Texas were Big Bend National Park, located in southwest Texas along the Rio Grande River, and Guadalupe Mountains National Park, located in western Texas on the border of New Mexico. I’ll start with the 801,163-acre Big Bend National Park. The name is appropriate because of the big […]