In the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, just about an hour shy of the Ohio state line, sit a couple of National Park System units that might not be on your radar. I wouldn’t call them obscure, but being from the West Coast I had not heard of either until my NPS passport led me there a few months ago. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin’s wilderness house at Friendship Hill National Historic Site and Fort Necessity National Battlefield, a small palisade built by then Lt. Colonel George Washington at the very beginning of the French and Indian War, introduced me to history that I was only vaguely familiar with.

After decades of roaming the West, I took the plunge last summer: I bought a camper. There have been countless times when I’ve arrived at my camp to be faced with putting up my tent in the pouring rain, howling wind, or extreme cold. More than a few times I ended up sleeping in the back of a car not nearly meant for that. Once in Arches National Park, around New Years, we had set up the tent, eaten dinner, read for an hour and it was still only 7 p.m. That meant we would be in our sleeping bags at least for the next 12 hours in the biting cold. You can only sleep so long, after all.

Anyone who has studied a national park long enough realizes there is no way to fully appreciate what they have offer in 24 hours. Changing light and changing seasons can make the most familiar features new again. In our recent June visit, my wife, Kellie, and I attempted to absorb, in a 24-hour visit, the less-visited vertical landscape of the North Rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in western Colorado.

Sometimes, you just have to take advantage of the less hectic side of the national parks. Contributor Danny Bernstein did that recently when she left her car behind and took to walking the 11-mile loop around Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.