A Quiet Park | Best of National Parks

Exploring National Parks has to be at the top of our evergrowing list of things we love about nomadic living (probably more crowded up there than the summit of Everest). As of 2024, there are 63 designated National Parks in the United States, and our appetite for devouring them becomes more insatiable with each park visited. I’ve lost count of how many we’ve been to, but we’ll have visited roughly half by year’s end. The two most recent, Big Bend National Park at the Texas/Mexico border and White Sands National Park in New Mexico, have stolen our hearts completely. I’d split my time living in the two if it wouldn’t get me arrested. (I’m a tough broad, but federal prison is not on my bucket list, thank you very much.) Visiting Big Bend NP and White Sands NP back-to-back was one of the most centering, invigorating ways to start the new year. Just perfect.

National Parks offer modern-day explorers a profound connection to nature in a modern world that hides its wild and untamed too well. So many people! So few animals! So many rules! So much noise! So much light pollution! (So many exclamation marks!) What struck me in particular about both Big Bend NP and White Sands NP is the deep sense of remoteness and solitude offered within, so much so that places like Yellowstone and Zion feel like a bustling city by comparison. (I’d live in those parks, too, to be fair.) If you haven’t experienced it before, not only is it unmooring in the way newly-discovered-assumed-it-wasn’t-real things can be, but you can hear complete (standard volume) conversations being had from miles away. Try envisioning that next time you’re yelling at your dinner partners across a little 4-top restaurant table, unable to hear above the collective roar of everyone there. For real—there are places that exist that are so quiet, we had to shame our cat and shush her paws (which was as successful as you’d expect.)

We’ve all heard the idiom “the silence was deafening” many times, I’m sure. In these two parks, it felt almost literal. I don’t think many Americans, maybe humans in general(?), can comprehend that kind of silence because it rarely exists. We’ve been fortunate to experience it in the remote hills of Tuscany, the pitch blackness of Carlsbad Caverns’ Kings Palace, and now in these two parks. Each time, the experience leaves us as gobsmacked as the first. I likened it to hearing the fibers of the universe move against one another. There’s so much sound in the absence of noise. 

We’re already booked and planning to start 2026 the same way. If you promise to be quiet, you should join us! And in the meantime, let’s all hope A Quiet Place’s fate never befalls us, cause we all dying. Millie the Cat left no doubts.

Hope to see you out there!—CL