In Tennessee, Great Smokey Mountains National Park harbors a one-way road in bucolic Cades Cove. Its 11-mile paved loop is loaded with scenery, historical sites, and wildlife. But we’d heard about the cove’s famed car jams due to around two million annual visitors: lines of vehicles inching slowly along the road and parking lot congestion that prevented stopping at sites. Clearly, the car approach did not appeal to my sister or me!

With a pleasing whoosh, the water from the acequia was released through a sluice gate at Mission San Juan Capistrano in San Antonio and trickled through a hand-dug irrigation ditch towards a demonstration field teeming with corn, peppers and squash.

Cross-border travel between Glacier National Park in Montana and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada, is set to resume in the Goat Haunt area of Glacier later this month.

There are must-do hikes in many parks and Delicate Arch Trail in Arches National Park is one of them. This 3-mile (4.8 km) roundtrip hike up and over slickrock to a sandstone arch so famous it’s on the Utah state license plate is extremely popular and with good reason. It’s a trail contributing photographer Rebecca Latson has hiked and it’s one you can hike, too.