Roaming Sparrow

Congaree National Park protects the largest intact stand of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest left in the United States — a flooded forest of champion trees so tall it holds one of the highest forest canopies in the eastern US. For two weeks each May, the park hosts something that happens in only a handful of places on Earth: synchronous fireflies, blinking in unison acro...

The Olympic Peninsula Loop runs 330 miles of US-101 in a near-complete circle around Olympic National Park, packing three entirely different ecosystems into a single drive — glaciated alpine peaks at Hurricane Ridge, one of the only temperate rainforests in the continental United States at the Hoh, and a wild Pacific coastline of sea stacks and tide pools at Ruby Beach. Olymp...

The Natchez Trace Parkway runs 444 miles from Nashville, Tennessee to Natchez, Mississippi, following a route that humans have walked for more than 10,000 years. No commercial trucks. No billboards. No stoplights. A 50 mph speed limit the entire way. It’s the eighth most-visited unit in the National Park System, and most of the people driving it don’t realize they’re on natio...

Eureka Springs, Arkansas is a 19th-century mountain spa town built into the side of an Ozark hillside so steep that no two downtown streets meet at the same elevation. The entire downtown sits on the National Register of Historic Places. Victorian houses cling to switchback streets. The 1886 Crescent Hotel is marketed, with a straight face, as “America’s most haunted hotel.” ...

Galena, Illinois sits three hours west of Chicago in a corner of the state that looks nothing like the rest of it. No flat corn rows. No grid. Instead, rolling hills carved by the Driftless Area — a pocket of the Upper Midwest that the last glaciers somehow missed — and a 19th-century town where 85% of the buildings sit on the National Register of Historic Places.

The ...