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Recent Adventures
We recently started a YouTube channel to capture life on the trail. We’re in the middle of our fourth season which follows the 70 days we spent living out our Toyota 4Runner in the summer of 2023. Our travels ranged from the north rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona to Olympic National Park in Washington and loads more. We’d love to hear from you here or over on You Tube!
We are Kelly and Michelle vanDellen, part-time road trippers, full-time park lovers. Awhile back, we got the idea to hike every mile of every trail in every (US) National Park. It’s a 25 year-long adventure that will take us to 28 states, 2 territories, and over 9,000 miles of trail. You can keep up with our progress and read about our favorite hikes on our park pages. You can support our adventures by purchasing prints. Got a question? Fill out the form below and we’ll answer it in our FAQ.
Quick Questions
How do you find so much time to adventure?
We live a strange life. Our goal to hike all the National Parks requires about 70 days of hiking a year (that’s 5 new miles a day). We usually average over that distance per day and we usually try to sneak in more time in nature than just those 70 days. That’s just 35 weekends a year! Obviously we can’t spend every weekend hiking, or at least, we can’t easily manage to spend weekends hiking all across the country. But 70 days is not that bad when you add weekends, vacation days, and flexible working situations. The way we make things work changes as our lives change. We enjoy long road trips in the summer where we work remotely and can be near parks further away from our home. We’ve gotten very efficient at working remotely thanks to finding effective habits and Zoom. We add a lot of travel around conferences for Michelle’s job, for instance, going early or staying late to visit parks near cities where conferences are located. During winter and on rainy weekends, you can often find us working ahead to free up time for adventuring in better weather.
Aren’t you afraid of bears?
We used to be. The first time we saw a bear, we took off running for our car. This is not what you are supposed to do. Now we have seen so many bears that we look forward to it. We have seen bears on the trail in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, and Wyoming with a total count of 109, including both black and grizzly bears. We carry bear spray when we are hiking in areas with grizzly bears, but otherwise the best precaution for bears is just being alert and remaining calm.
Where do you sleep?
We sleep everywhere—hotels, AirBnB’s, friends and family members’ houses, and tents. After spending so much time on the road, we decided we needed a better travel system and in 2020, we added a Roofnest tent to our gear collection. We purchased the Sparrow Eye because it allows us to keep our bedding in the closed tent top while we travel. The tent secures to a roof rack on our Subaru Forester or our Toyota 4runner, takes less than a minute to fully set up, and has a memory foam mattress. We spent over 300 nights in our first one and loved it so much we eventually replaced it with an identical model. We’re always scheming about new set-ups and have been spending some time dreaming about a van lately.
But why?
We get asked a lot about why we would ever want to hike every trail in every park. The most obvious is because it’s there. Other reasons include that you never know where you will find beauty and that hiking all of the miles in a park really lets you see how the natural systems work together in a region. For us, loving a park is knowing a park, and knowing a park is hiking a park. There are plenty of other ways one could really know a park but this is the one that works for us.
What’s your favorite National Park?
We love them all. OK, but not really. We definitely have favorites, including (in alphabetical order) Big Bend, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Virgin Islands, and Yellowstone. We’ve spent glorious days in each of these parks from sunrise to sundown. They have amazing landscape views and tons of good wildlife.
Where are you headed next?
We just wrapped up a 10 week summer trip where we focused on the pacific northwest. We’ve been getting in a lot more backpacking on our road trips which has made us more efficient and allowed us to see super cool things. This year, we are doing our summer in two parts. First up, we’ll do some touring on the east coast. After a family wedding in Kentucky, we’re going to focus on getting miles in big parks (Rocky, Yellowstone, and Glacier) while getting ourselves close to the finish line in Grand Teton.
Can you help me plan a National Parks trip?
Yes! We love the parks and love talking about them. We have helped countless people plan trips both big and small to National Parks, all for free just because we love the parks and want you to as well. You can always search this site for a park to find blog posts about trails in or visits to parks and our park pages should help you daydream about where to go. But if you want more, just reach out by contacting us below (or on Facebook or Instagram). We also have some tips for planning a park trip here.
Say Hello
Did you meet us on the trail? Do you like our work? Want to work together on a project? Want some help planning a trip to a National Park? Send us an email and we'll figure out some time to talk.