TRAVEL

Where to find the largest sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere

A road trip through the Nebraska Sandhills reveals wide-open spaces and natural wonders.

Novelist Jim Harrison once called the Nebraska Sandhills “without a doubt the most mysterious landscape in the United States,” and for good reason. “The vastness and waving of the hilly grasslands in the wind make you smell salt,” he wrote.

Stabilized by a fragile hide of prairie grass and encompassing roughly 20,000 square miles, the Sandhills is the largest sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere. As the last Ice Age began to wane, glacial meltwater carried sand and silt from the Rocky Mountains to central Nebraska, where the relentless winds whipped up dunes like surf cresting offshore.

(Related: Avoid crowds at the 10 least-visited U.S. national parks.)
The Nebraska Sandhills region is home to four of the top 10 least populated counties in the U.S. While the COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered tourist attractions across the country, many of those in the Sandhills—a National Natural Landmark since 1984—are ready-built for social distancing. A relaxing road trip through north-central Nebraska, traveling east to west, affords the visitor easy and responsible access to a host of overlooked attractions, from a celebrated sculpture garden hidden in plain sight to the largest handplanted forest in the Western Hemisphere. All of it set against the surreal beauty of one of the largest remaining intact grassland ecosystems in the world.


PHOTOGRAPH BY MAREK ULIASZ, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Wildfires show how climate change is transforming national parks

Across the parched West this year there’s been an obvious—and destructive—signal that national parks are struggling to cope with a shifting climate: wildfire.

Through early October, 8 million acres were torched, some by strikes of lightning, others by carelessness and arson. Many of the burned trees were already dead, killed by tiny beetles once kept in check by bitter winters that are rarely seen today. Although this year’s tally so far lags behind the 9.3 million acres burned in 2015, the wildfire trend in recent years is clear to land managers in the National Park Service (NPS) who are trying to cope with a climate that has brought their parks to “the extreme warm edge of historical conditions.”

There have been warnings. On a craggy ridgeline in northern Montana’s Glacier National Park, Grinnell Glacier is melting away, its trickling runoff filling a small lake. An estimated 150 glaciers coated this landscape in 1850; today the park holds 26. From 2015 to 2019, that glacial footprint shrank 68 percent, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. If a single national park were an icon of climate change, it would be Glacier, with its icy pools of meltwater.

Fire managers are bracing for more intense fires on drier landscapes stressed by warmer weather. Many are preparing for blazes that will close parks and alter the landscapes that generations of visitors have come to know. Among park staffers, there’s no question that climate change is to blame.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LUIS SINCO, LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES

What role do tourists play in the future of Confederate monuments?

At Stone Mountain, Georgia’s most visited attraction, visitors navigate race and responsibility in the shadow of a massive Confederate carving.

FOR TINA FEARS, Stone Mountain is a place of contradictions.

When Fears was a child at Stone Mountain Elementary School, she could walk outside and see the massive dome: Its moonlike, 800-foot-tall surface juts out from the surrounding trees. Her father took her and her sister fishing at a lake in Stone Mountain Park, in the monolith’s shadow, just past the historic covered bridge constructed by prominent Black businessman Washington W. King.

But on the other side of the mountain towers a monument to those who fought to keep Fears’s ancestors enslaved: a carving of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on horseback, hats over their hearts. Nine stories tall and three acres in surface area, the high relief sculpture is the world’s largest.

For park tourists—many of whom are people of color—Georgia’s most visited attraction can invite conflicting emotions: awe at its natural splendor, comfort from seeing the array of friendly, diverse park staff and guests—and bitterness at how white supremacists have marked it as their own. The state-owned monument has weathered years of debate about whether or how to remove the Confederate carving, but there’s no clear answer in sight. And, increasingly, tourists are wondering where they come in.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KRIS GRAVES