Road Trip Challenge: The National Park-to-Park Touring Route
Know those old cast metal bells with the words "El Camino Real" that line the 101? While they are rumored to follow the original "Royal Road" the Spanish missionaries used to travel from mission to mission back in the late 1700s, it's really nothing more than a driving route from the 1910s meant to boost tourism.
This wasn't a rare idea. As this wonderful piece in The Coloradan points out, there was another driving route established in 1920 as a way to promote tourism to the western National Parks. It's motto was "See America First," and it went like this:
Beginning in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP), reachable through Boulder and Lyons, the highway wound through the park to Fort Collins and went northwest to Yellowstone National Park, passing through Glacier National Park in Montana. Then it crossed to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, down the coast to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and on to Lassen Volcanic National Park, Yosemite National Park, General Grant National Park and Sequoia National Park in California. Heading south then east, it went through Los Angeles to Grand Canyon National Park, with a side trip to Zion National Park, over to Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado and finally back to Denver.
The route took drivers to 12 different national parks, four of which are in California. It can also be round-tripped from Los Angeles. So, just for fun, I decided to map it. Here are the results:
Kind of looks like a heart, doesn't it?
In all, the trip would take you 5113.36 miles, need 93 hours and 50 minutes of driving time to complete, and cost a whole lot of entrance fees, unless you got yourself an annual pass right off the bat. All of which is to say, better get started soon.