November 12, 2020

Another National Park Guide

By roadsrus

I mentioned earlier this week that the state of Georgia has no National Parks, but it’s adjacent to Tennessee, the state that has one of the 10 most popular National Parks. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is #1 if number of visitors is taken into consideration. It had 12.5 million of them in 2019, more than twice as many as #2, Grand Canyon National Park. This does not mean that Georgia is a less active participant in sponsoring National Park Service properties. It has 1 Biosphere Reserve, 15 National Park Service Managed Sites, 1 National Forest, and 8 Wildlife Refuges. Ruth and I have visited 2 of the 15 NPS Managed Sites in Georgia, Ocmulgee Mounds near Macon and Chickamauga, which is 15 miles south of Chattanooga, TN in Georgia. It’s the National Park Service’s oldest and largest National Military Park. I wrote about it in November, 2017 under a title containing the word Chickamauga. We saw Ocmulgee 2 years later.

Ocmulgee, a prehistory American Indian site, is similar to Cahokia Mounds in Illinois. Other managed sites in Georgia include 2 National Monuments, Fort Pulaski and Fort Frederica. Such monuments sometimes become national parks. Other well-known managed sites in this state include the National Historical Park celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta. It includes his birth home, and he is buried there. Another National Historic Site is in Plains, GA and honors the only US President so far who hailed from Georgia, Jimmy Carter.

When I wrote about Pennsylvania earlier this week, I focused on its portion of the Appalachian Trail. This National Scenic Trail that has been around since 1937 when it was completed begins in Georgia on Springer Mountain This state has 76 miles of it as it winds north through 7 counties.

The National Park Service manages a lot of wildlife refuges. The 8 in Georgia include the famous Okefenokee Swamp, which is also on the World Heritage Tentative List. Near Georgia’s border with Florida, the huge Okefenokee is the source of 2 rivers, one of which flows into the Atlantic Ocean. The state of California has the most wildlife refuges with 39. The #2 state was a surprise to me. North Dakota has 33. Alaska has 16 and Florida has 29. Kentucky and Vermont have one each.

Hank

About roadsrus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roadsrus
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2020 at 10:54 pm and posted in Georgia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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