Posts tagged #nature

A 286-foot plunge waterfall in the Oregon Cascades near Willamette Pass — one of the tallest in the state, with a viewing deck, rim trail, and winter snowshoeing season.

Grand Teton National Park in northwestern Wyoming rises abruptly from the valley floor without foothills — the jagged Teton peaks just appear, reflected in glacial lakes, with wildlife grazing in the meadows below.

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.

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.