Field Notes
Hiking State Parks
The state parks worth the drive — trails, passes, and how each state's system works.
Danville, CA
Mount Diablo Claims a View Bigger Than Almost Anywhere on Earth
It is only 3,849 feet, but it stands alone at the edge of a flat valley with nothing between it and the Sierra crest a hundred miles east. On the rare clear winter day the claim made for it, one of the largest viewsheds in the world, becomes difficult to argue with.
Arnold, CA
Calaveras Big Trees Was a Tourist Attraction Before Yosemite Was a Park
In 1853 a man stripped the bark off a giant sequoia here to a height of about 50 feet, shipped it east, and reassembled it as a walk-in exhibit. The tree died. The outrage that followed is arguably where the American conservation movement started, and the stump is still there.
Morgan Hill, CA
Henry Coe Is the Backcountry Nobody Believes Exists an Hour From San Jose
Eighty-seven thousand acres of steep oak and grassland ridges, more than 250 miles of trail, no water for long stretches, and climbs that gain two thousand feet without a switchback. It is the largest state park in northern California and on a weekday you can walk all day without meeting anyone.
South Lake Tahoe, CA
Emerald Bay Has a Scandinavian Castle and Tahoe's Only Island
A heiress built a 38-room Scandinavian-style mansion at the head of the bay in 1929 and a stone teahouse on the island so she could take tea there by boat. Both are still standing, the bay is a National Natural Landmark, and reaching the house means walking a mile down and a mile back up.
Burney, CA
Burney Falls Runs at Full Volume in a Drought
Most waterfalls are a river falling over an edge, so they shrink when the rain stops. Burney Falls is fed from inside the cliff by an aquifer in porous volcanic rock, and it discharges around a hundred million gallons a day whether or not it has rained since April.
Crescent City, CA
The Densest Redwoods in the World Are on a Gravel Road
Jedediah Smith holds the highest concentration of old-growth coast redwood by volume anywhere, and the best of it is reached along Howland Hill Road, six miles of one-lane gravel running directly between trees eighteen feet across. There is no entrance station on it.
Orick, CA
Fern Canyon's Walls Are Fifty Feet of Solid Ferns and You Need a Permit
A creek has cut a slot through soft sediment and the vertical walls either side are covered floor to rim in seven species of fern. It is half a mile long, it was used as a location in Jurassic Park, and between mid-May and mid-September you cannot get in without a permit booked in advance.
Weott, CA
Rockefeller Forest Is the Largest Old-Growth Redwood Stand Left on Earth
Ninety-five percent of the original coast redwood forest was cut. Humboldt Redwoods protects the single largest surviving piece of it, around 10,000 acres in one continuous block on the flats of the Eel River, and you can walk into it from a parking lot.
Borrego Springs, CA
Anza-Borrego Is Bigger Than Half the National Parks and Nobody Calls It One
At 650,000 acres it is the largest state park in California and larger than most national parks in the country. It has one small town in the middle of it, a wildflower bloom that occasionally makes national news, and five hundred miles of dirt road nobody drives.
Joseph, OR
Wallowa Lake Sits Inside the Best Moraine in America
The ridges either side of Wallowa Lake are lateral moraines nearly a thousand feet high, textbook examples used in geology courses worldwide. The state park at the head of the lake is small, and it is the doorway into the Eagle Cap Wilderness, which is not.
Portland, OR
There Is a State Park Inside Portland and It Was Saved by Neighbors
Tryon Creek is 670 acres of second-growth forest and a salmon-bearing creek inside the Portland city limits. It exists because in 1970 a group of residents found out it was about to be subdivided and spent five months raising the money to stop it.
Coos Bay, OR
A Shipping Baron's Garden on a Cliff That Throws Waves Over It
Louis Simpson built a mansion and a formal botanical garden on a sandstone headland south of Coos Bay. The house is gone and the garden remains, and in a winter storm the swell hits the cliff below it hard enough to throw spray clean over the observation building.
Hammond, OR
A Shipwreck, a Japanese Shell, and Nine Miles of Trail
Fort Stevens guarded the mouth of the Columbia for eighty years and is the only military installation in the continental United States to have been fired on by a foreign power since 1812. The rusted bow of the Peter Iredale has been sitting on its beach since 1906.
Brookings, OR
Twelve Miles of the Best Coast in Oregon, With No Front Door
The Samuel H. Boardman corridor is a ribbon of state park land hugging twelve miles of Highway 101 between Brookings and Gold Beach. There is no entrance, no visitor center, and no single trailhead. There are about a dozen pullouts, and what lies below them is the finest coastline in the state.
Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA
Point Lobos Is a Reserve, Not a Park, and That Is the Whole Point
Point Lobos protects one of only two naturally occurring Monterey cypress groves left on Earth, along with an underwater reserve that was the first of its kind in America. As of 2026 every visitor needs a reservation, including people arriving on foot, and that tells you what kind of place this is.
Boulder Creek, CA
Big Basin Burned to the Ground and the Redwoods Came Back From Their Own Trunks
The CZU Lightning Complex burned through California's oldest state park in August 2020 and destroyed nearly every building in it. The old-growth redwoods did not die. Within months they were sprouting bright green needles directly out of blackened trunks, and the park has been reopening in stages ever since.
North Bend, WA
A 251-Mile Rail Trail Crosses Washington and Almost Nobody Finishes It
The Milwaukee Road went bankrupt and abandoned its transcontinental line in 1980. Washington bought the corridor, and the result is a state park shaped like a railway: 251 miles from the Cascades to the Idaho border, including a 2.3-mile tunnel under Snoqualmie Pass you walk through in the dark.
Bellingham, WA
Larrabee Came First, and Chuckanut Is Still the Reason
Washington accepted its first state park on October 23, 1915, a strip of shoreline and forest south of Bellingham. What made it worth having was the mountain behind it, where sandstone cliffs run out above the only place in the state where the Cascades meet salt water.
Ilwaco, WA
Where the Columbia Meets the Pacific and Ships Went Down
The bar at the mouth of the Columbia has wrecked around two thousand vessels and killed hundreds of people, which is why it is called the Graveyard of the Pacific. Two lighthouses, a Civil War fort, and the end of Lewis and Clark's westward journey all sit on the headland above it.
Eastsound, WA
The Second-Highest Point on Any Island in the Lower 48
Mount Constitution rises 2,407 feet straight out of the sea on Orcas Island, with a stone observation tower on top modeled on a Caucasian watchtower and a view that takes in the whole San Juan archipelago, two countries, and three volcanoes.
Skamania, WA
One Man Built This Trail Because the State Said No
Beacon Rock is an 848-foot volcanic plug on the Columbia. Henry Biddle bought it in 1915 to stop it being quarried, then spent three years and ten thousand dollars of his own money building a trail up it: 4,500 feet of catwalk, fifty-two switchbacks, and twenty-two bridges bolted to a cliff.
LaCrosse, WA
Palouse Falls Is the Last One Still Running
The Missoula Floods carved dozens of enormous cataracts across eastern Washington and then the water stopped and every one of them went dry. Palouse Falls is the exception: a 198-foot drop into a basalt amphitheater, still fed by a river, in a canyon far too big for it.
Coulee City, WA
Dry Falls Was Once Ten Times Every River on Earth Combined
A horseshoe cliff three and a half miles wide and four hundred feet high stands in the eastern Washington desert with nothing falling over it. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacial lake the size of Lake Ontario burst its ice dam repeatedly and sent water through here at a volume that beggars comparison.
Burns, TN
A Ten-Mile Overnight Loop Forty Minutes From Nashville
Montgomery Bell has three trail shelters spaced around a 10.4-mile loop, free to reserve, in second-growth forest that was stripped bare two centuries ago to feed an iron industry. It is the easiest introduction to backpacking anywhere near Nashville.
Rocky Top, TN
Norris Dam Was the TVA's First, and the Park Is What Was Left Over
The Tennessee Valley Authority built its first dam here between 1933 and 1936, flooded a valley, moved thousands of people, and built a planned town for the workers. The state park occupies the land that was bought and never drowned, and its trails run through the seams of that history.
Jamestown, TN
Tennessee's Darkest Sky Sits Above a Park the CCC Built
Pickett CCC Memorial was the first certified International Dark Sky Park in the southeastern United States. It is also full of sandstone arches, rock shelters, and Depression-era stonework, and its trails connect straight into Big South Fork for more than fifty miles of walking.
Sparta, TN
Virgin Falls Comes Out of a Cave and Vanishes Into the Ground
An underground stream emerges from a cave mouth, drops 110 feet down a cliff, and disappears into a second cave at the bottom of the sink. It never reaches a river on the surface. Getting there is nine miles round trip through Scott's Gulf, and it is the hardest day hike on the Cumberland Plateau.
Rock Island, TN
Rock Island's Waterfall Comes Out of the Side of a Cliff
Twin Falls is eighty feet tall, twice that wide, and it did not exist before 1917. It pours straight out of a limestone cliff face because a hydroelectric dam upstream raised a reservoir over a karst aquifer, and the water found its own way through the rock.
Sparta, TN
Four Waterfalls in Three Quarters of a Mile at Burgess Falls
The Falling Water River drops more than 250 feet in the last stretch before it reaches Center Hill Lake, and it does it in four stages. A three-quarter-mile trail takes you past every one of them, finishing at a 130-foot plunge into a limestone amphitheater.
Terrebonne, OR
American Sport Climbing Was Invented Here, and You Can Just Walk Up It
Smith Rock's welded tuff walls are where bolted sport climbing arrived in the United States in the 1980s and changed the sport permanently. You do not need a rope to see any of it, Misery Ridge climbs 900 feet to a viewpoint level with the top of Monkey Face.
Sublimity, OR
The Trail of Ten Falls Lets You Walk Behind Four of Them
Oregon's largest state park holds ten waterfalls on a single loop, and the trail passes behind the curtain of four. It works because the canyon is cut through layered basalt, and the soft rock under the hard cap has weathered out into amphitheaters big enough to walk through.
Spencer, TN
Fall Creek Falls Is Tennessee's Biggest Park and the Waterfall Is the Least of It
Everyone drives to the overlook, photographs a 256-foot waterfall, and leaves. Behind it sits nearly 30,000 acres of Cumberland Plateau cut by gorges, with five more waterfalls, a suspension bridge over a cascade, and a trail system almost nobody uses.
Oak Harbor, WA
Deception Pass Is Washington's Busiest Park and Still Has Empty Trails
Three and a half million people a year come to photograph a 1935 bridge over a tidal race and walk two beaches. The park has more than thirty miles of trail across two islands, and the ones more than fifteen minutes from the bridge are frequently deserted.
Cookeville, TN
Cummins Falls Charges for a Permit in a State That Charges for Nothing
Tennessee charges no entrance fee at any of its 57 state parks. Cummins Falls is the exception that proves why: a 75-foot waterfall at the bottom of a gorge that floods in minutes, where a child died in 2019, and where getting to the base now costs seven dollars and a reservation made months ahead.
Caryville, TN
Tennessee's Only Linear State Park Is Still Being Built
The Justin P. Wilson Cumberland Trail will eventually run over 300 miles down the eastern edge of the Cumberland Plateau. Roughly 200 are open. It is a state park shaped like a line, assembled section by section for decades, and the finished parts are some of the best hiking in the South.