What do you envision when you enter a national park? What do you expect to experience? Why do we visit these places?

I know I head into the National Park System to be amazed by the scenery and wildlife, to enjoy the recreational opportunities that abound there, to relax, to be rejuvenated. 

For Evan Turk, an artist who was introduced to national parks by his father, going into the parks is like going home. 

In a new book out this summer -- You Are Home: An Ode to the National Parks – Turk blends his beautiful paintings of settings from across the National Park System with short passages connecting all living creatures to these landscapes.

To the chipmunk in her burrow, sleeping beneath the leaves to keep warm; to the resilient bison in the steaming oases of an endless winter, you are home.

To the constellations of blinking fireflies in the warm summer nights, you are home.

Beneath the soaring doorways of stone, and peaks that pierce the ceiling of clouds, within the corridors of ancient, breathing trunks of trees, and the teeming reefs of the ocean floor, you are home.

It’s not hard to see Turk is connecting us with Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, Arches, Halelakā, Sequoia, and Biscayne national parks.

Throughout his colorful book, the artist draws connections to 23 national parks, connections that tell us “we’re home.”

And why not? It’s fitting. Many of us want to make the parks, or a specific park in particular, our home. To wrap us in the setting, the wildness, the solitude that can be found there, to be comforted within it.

Turk concludes his book with a message about the incredible landscapes that are within the National Park System, and the power and ambition and inspiration that flows from them. And he makes clear that the parks are for all of us, no matter our race, gender, or ethnicity.

You’ll have to excuse him for getting on his soapbox, for he believes in the collective good all cultures and races bring to the United States.

National parks, he writes, “protect the idea of a United States that can grow to become better than its beginnings; to become inclusive of all the nation’s history and diversity,” he writes. “They protect spaces where the most valuable seeds of this country’s future can be sown for its next generations. They preserve the limitless potential of the countless astronomers, geologists, poets, artists, athletes, and people of all kinds who come to feel the power of the places we all call home, and that is worth preserving.”

There was a time not too long ago when the relevancy of the national parks was questioned. Today, however, they are perhaps more relevant than ever before. They can ground us, if you let them.