National Park Week and the Before They're Gone Blog Tour
April 23, 2012
A longtime backpacker, climber, and skier, Michael Lanza knows our national parks like the back of his hand. As a father, he hopes to share these special places with his two young children. But he has seen firsthand the changes wrought by the warming climate and understands what lies ahead: a vastly changed landscape. So he and his wife take his nine-year-old son, Nate, and seven-year-old daughter, Alex, on an ambitious journey to see as many climate-threatened wild places as they can fit into a year: backpacking in the Grand Canyon, Glacier, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and along the wild Olympic coast; sea kayaking in Alaska's Glacier Bay; hiking to Yosemite's waterfalls; rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park; cross-country skiing in Yellowstone; and canoeing in the Everglades.
Who better to help us celebrate National Park Week than this ambitious dad? The Before They're Gone Blog Tour begins today with an interview at Nature Moms Blog. Follow Lanza's travels throughout the week to The Mother of All Trips, Tales of a Mountain Family, Adventure Tykes and Family Wilds. We'll wrap things up on our blog with a round up at the end of the week.
Our closest National Park is of a more urban variety than the ones visited by Michael Lanza and his family. To look for a National Park near you, visit the National Parks website.
Before you get out and explore, you can get some ideas from these great Before They're Gone videos.