Standing atop Grand Teton, it's easy to see the handiwork of Horace Albright and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. To the southeast is Timbered Island, down below is Jenny Lake, and a bit to the northeast is Jackson Lake. Not in view are the "shabby developments littering the roadway from Menors Ferry to Moran and along Jenny Lake’s south and east shores" that Mr. Rockefeller and Albright, then Yellowstone National Park's superintendent, saw in 1924.

When John Muir traveled in 1879 to the landscape now embraced by Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska, his great desire to see its bay and surrounding glaciers was confounded by overcast skies and rain with some snow mixed in. But when the weather took a change for the better, he was astounded by the view.

I stumbled across a video the other day that further convinced me that I need to move Gates of the Arctic National Park higher on my to-do list. In it, two septuagenarians set off on a three-week canoe trip down the Noatak River, a river the park staff tells us "drains the largest mountain-ringed river basin in America that is still virtually unaffected by human activities."

Freeman Tilden brushed on the military history of a small clutch of coral cayes when he mentioned Fort Jefferson National Monument in The National Parks, but the brief entry did little justice to the place known today as Dry Tortugas National Park.