Writing — Page 17

An active stratovolcano at 14,410 feet dominating western Washington — glaciers, wildflower meadows at Paradise, and views that make the rest of the range look small.

Zion National Park in southwestern Utah is a landscape of towering sandstone canyon walls, ancient cultural history, and hikes that range from gentle riverside strolls to vertiginous ridgeline scrambles above the clouds.

Utah's largest national park is a vast plateau carved into three separate districts by the Colorado and Green rivers — a landscape of mesas, canyons, and buttes that requires real commitment to see properly.

A Bandon, Oregon headland with a Native American legend, dramatic sea stacks named Cat and Kitten Rocks, and a stairway trail down to a wild stretch of protected beach.

A 235-foot basalt sea stack on Cannon Beach, home to nesting tufted puffins in spring and summer and some of the best tide pools on the Oregon Coast.

Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest lake in the United States and one of the most pristine — a collapsed volcano filled over millennia by snowmelt, producing a shade of blue that seems almost artificially saturated.

Niagara Falls from the American side — the Horseshoe Falls and American Falls, the Maid of the Mist boat tour, and the improbable scale of moving water.

Arches National Park in southeastern Utah holds the world's highest concentration of natural stone arches — over 2,000 of them — in a landscape so otherworldly it barely feels like it belongs to this planet.

Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah holds the largest concentration of hoodoos on Earth — thousands of tall, narrow rock spires in shades of red, orange, and white that fill the amphitheater like a frozen crowd.