Winter long has been regarded as the slow season for national park visits, and that's a good thing if you prefer to have the parks to yourself. With most travelers confined by school schedules to the summer months, and many convinced winter is a bad time to be outdoors, you can savor the best of the parks from coast to coast in winter. Here are some snapshots of wintry fun in the parks that bear that out.
Enjoying winter in the national parks doesn't mean traveling west to the Rockies or High Sierra. There are more than enough wintry adventures in the east at parks such as Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, and as Randy Johnson explains in the following article, even along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Reading about the Civil War is one thing, walking across the battlefields is something entirely different. As you follow the rise and fall of the landscape, see the forests, the cannons, the earthworks, it's not hard to imagine the terrible fighting that took place 150 years ago.
Another dozen black-footed ferrets now call Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota home, the result of plague preventing their release elsewhere in the West.
Winter can be a blissful time to visit the national parks. You can head south, and enjoy the warm weather and simply pitch your tent, or you can head to the snow belt and explore the parks on skis or snowshoes. But where should you stay? We asked our lodging experts, David and Kay Scott, for their recommendations.
From his cabin, Willis Landram had a front-row perch to one of the bloodiest days of the Civil War. Today, a trail leads you across the landscape now recalled as the "Bloody Angle" at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.