Naturally by Amy ScheerPark ranger/professor offers tips for enjoying America’s national parks AP
A well-planned vacation in a national park can bring you and your family a sense of peace, says Dr. Ann Lundberg, an NWC professor who works as a park ranger most summers.
Tips from
Ranger Lundberg Where’s the best vantage point to enjoy the Grand Canyon? Discover that and more by reading Ranger Lundberg’s tips on well-known national park destinations.
A woman walks into a ranger station. “These natural bridges,” she says, looking around at information about Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah. “They man- made?” Park ranger Ann Lundberg has heard it all. She’s fielded eccentric questions, met the self-proclaimed twin brother of Jesus, and awakened to the sounds of 70 buffalo surrounding her tent. And at the start of every summer, when her duties as a Northwestern English professor taper off, she’s ready for more. Having begun her academic career in pursuit of a geology degree, Lundberg was sidetracked by John Van Dyke’s The Desert, a poetic recounting of his three-year journey through deserts in the American Southwest at the turn of the 19th century. She knew while reading it that her two interests—literature and the natural world—could meet at the crossroads and keep on traveling together. Lundberg spent summers as a child building sand castles along the base of the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. She went on to work as a seasonal ranger at national park sites in Utah, North Dakota and Wisconsin. Ask her about the National Park Service (NPS), a system of nearly 400 sites across the nation, and she’s got plenty good to say. Why visit a national park? Why not beat the heat at Mall of America? “For peace of mind,” says Lundberg. “If you visit parks in the right way—really see them, take time to actually stay in the park, to walk, to sit still—it can really bring you a sense of peace. They’re reflective places. They’re peaceful.” What’s the right way? The ranger knows best. “Don’t overplan; plan to do things well rather than to do everything. See something, and see it well.” Beyond a few favorite parks, Lundberg is hesitant to name a “best of” list of any sort. “It’s close to impossible to choose,” she says. If pressed, she’ll tell you to see the Grand Canyon before you die—Yellowstone, too, and one “ruin” park, preferably Hovenweep in Utah. And though she can’t help favoring the wildflowers that bloom at Cedar Breaks, Utah, in late June/early July, or the 5,000-year-old bristlecone pine trees at Great Basin National Park, Nevada, she still insists that each traveler find her own way through the hundreds of unique opportunities the National Park System has to offer. “You make your own experience wherever you go,” says the ranger. Naturally. The Ranger’s Preferred PathsThough her journal is stamped with many a park’s name (visitors can secure small park “passport books” for this purpose, but she prefers some extra room for notes), Lundberg has a soft spot for sites where she’s worked and for roads less traveled, to borrow from poet Robert Frost—as any good English professor park ranger should.  ISTOCKPHOTO
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Wisconsin  AP
Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota  AP
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Colorado  ISTOCKPHOTO
Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah
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