National parks superfans are on a quest to see all 413 sites
The National Park Service, which turns 100 years old Thursday, oversees 413 parks, monuments, battlefields, lakeshores and other “units.”
Scott Stieglitz is determined to visit every one of them.
At age 40, the South Elgin man said he’s already more than halfway there.
“Some people may call it an obsession,” said Stieglitz, a software developer who keeps a spreadsheet tally of his travels and has a passport booklet full of ink stamps documenting the dates of his visits. “I’m kind of nerdy when it comes to this stuff.”
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Stieglitz was introduced to the national parks passport program in his 20s during a trip to Yosemite with his now-wife, Stacey.
“We both bought a passport, and it was off to the races,” he said.
Stieglitz has plenty of company in his bid to bag all of the NPS sites. He’s one of nearly 2,000 members of the National Park Travelers Club (www.parkstamps.org), a collection of folks best described as superfans of the national park system. The club, which just wrapped up its annual meeting at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, awards members with bronze, silver, gold and platinum status, based on the number of NPS sites they’ve visited. It operates on the honor system.
“As of today, we have 43 known people that have visited every unit of the U.S. national park system — 10 of those finished this year,” said club secretary Craig Bailey of Limon, Colo., noting that the NPS centennial has been an incentive for people to reach their goal in 2016. “One man is planning on finishing (Thursday) in Washington, D.C.
“There are possibly others out there, but we don’t think many,” added Bailey, whose personal tally is 274 and counting. “Most that are really trying to visit every unit of the national park system find our club.”
The elite group of platinum members includes a couple of Illinois natives, Bruce and Letty Johnson. They raised their children — one of whom is 1988 U.S. Olympic swimmer Susan M. Johnson — in Naperville. The 75-year-old grandparents now call Gibraltar, Mich., home.
“Both of us have visited the parks all our lives and just loved them,” Letty Johnson said. “They’re the best thing about this country.”
The Johnsons’ passion for the parks kicked into high gear after they retired in 2001.
“In 2008, we became what they call platinum,” Johnson said. “We’d been to 391, and that was all of them at that point. They keep adding more, so we’re still keeping up.”
Their to-do list got longer as recently as Wednesday, when President Barack Obama created a new national monument, Katahdin Woods and Waters, in Maine.
With 413 units spread across every state — as well as American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands — it’s no small feat to drop in on every one. Accessing some of the more remote sites can be a logistical headache, not to mention a pricey endeavor.
Most people have to hire bush pilots to get to Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve in southwest Alaska’s Aleutian mountains, and they often have to hang around the outskirts for days, waiting for a break in the weather.
“Probably 100 people a year make it in,” Johnson said. “We got lucky.”
Arguably the hardest site to visit lies just outside of Phoenix: Hohokam Pima National Monument, honoring the archaeological site of an ancient Hohokam village called Snaketown. It’s owned by the Gila River Indian Reservation, which doesn’t allow public access to the site.
The Johnsons got in by way of a serendipitous dinner at a Tucson restaurant in 2008, when they were chatting with the chef about their dream of visiting every NPS site.
“We told him about the one that’s not open to the public, and he said, ‘I might be able to help you with that,'” Johnson recalled. “He knew the daughter of a tribal elder. We met with him, passed muster and got in. It was a moving experience.”
While the Johnsons grew up going to many of the country’s 59 national parks, that wasn’t the case for Stieglitz.
“I tell people I was national park-deprived as a child; the only national park units I went to as a kid were in Washington, D.C.,” said the father of two. His children, Sophie, 5, and Sammy, 3, already have dozens of stamps in their respective national parks passports.
The blue, spiral-bound “Passport to Your National Parks” booklets have been around since 1986. They’re sold at national park bookstores and are available online for $9.95 at www.eparks.com.
“All of our vacations are pretty much planned on where the NPS sites are,” Stieglitz said. That included his honeymoon in Hawaii, where they visited all the units the Aloha State had to offer — at the time.
“They’ve since added one, so we’ll have to go back,” he said.
Stieglitz said he’d been to 245 NPS sites as of Wednesday. He hopes to surpass 250 by the end of the summer.
“The big one on the bucket list that I still haven’t been to is Yellowstone, the granddaddy of them all,” he said about what many consider the world’s first national park.
“I don’t know when I’m going to finish this quest,” he said, “but I’m still young enough where I think it will happen.”
lrackl@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @lorirackl
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