Synopses & Reviews
Award-winning photographer David Muench captures the popular and iconic national parks that millions of Americans love and cherish as well as the lesser-known places and wilderness areas where few travelers venture. Ruth Rudner's moving essays coupled with Muench's visual celebration of these great lands brings to life the landscapes and features of parks. These amazing photographs include Great Smoky Mountains NP, the Grand Canyon NP, Yellowstone NP, and Yosemite NP to the more remote parks like Channel Islands NP off the coast of California and Kenai Fjords NP in Alaska plus hundreds of other unique images of the 54 national parks that David Muench has photographed.
Review
“Muenchs international reputation derives from an unflinching embrace of natures nuances. He engages the primal landscape across all the human fronts: as thinker, dreamer, seeker, lover, lifelong friend.” —James Lawrence
Review
"If David Muench's photographs of the US parks and monuments fail to take your breath away, you may want to check your pulse. If they fail to inspire you to visit Canyonlands, Acadia, Big Bend, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you have something to answer for."
—Amazon.com
Review
""David Muenchs National Parks (Graphic Arts Books, May 2013) captures in images the iconic national parks that millions of Americans cherish. From the Great Smokies—the most visited of our national parks—to Gates of the Arctic—perhaps one of the most remote and therefore one of the least visited—Muenchs colorful and creative images display the character of each park. Nature writer and author Ruth Rudner contributed thoughtful essays throughout the book, and for those chapters that have no essay, there are descriptive captions to add to your sense of place. Its easy to find your favorite park as the book is broken up into a park per chapter. Notes on the images, found in the back of the book, identify the subject and provide camera information (and sometimes a little extra). Muench hopes that this book will spark Americans appreciation of these national parks even as they lose federal funding. David Muench is an award-winning landscape and nature photographer who identifies closely with the American West. In 1997, the Muench Family received NANPAs Lifetime Achievement in Nature Photography Award.""
—Niki Barri, North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA)
“Muenchs international reputation derives from an unflinching embrace of natures nuances. He engages the primal landscape across all the human fronts: as thinker, dreamer, seeker, lover, lifelong friend.” —James Lawrence
Synopsis
Award-winning photographer David Muench captures the well-visited park icons that millions of Americans love and cherish as well as the lesser-known and seldom seen wilderness areas of the park?the untouched gems where few traveler's venture. Ruth Rudner's moving essay coupled with Muench's visual celebration of these great lands, brings to life everything from the Great Smokies to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, to Bryce Canyon and hundreds of other unique images.
Synopsis
Photographer David Muench captures well-visited park icons and seldom seen wilderness areas of the parks. Ruth Rudner's moving essay brings to life everything from the Great Smokies to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone to Bryce Canyon and hundreds of other unique images.
Synopsis
At Tremont, in the park’s northwestern section, we walked a wide path along the Middle Prong of the Little River. When David went his own direction to photograph, I scrambled down to the stream, where, two steps out from the bank on submerged rock, I found a comfortable shaded boulder to sit on. It was late in the day. For all the crowds in the Smokies, we had the path and the river to ourselves. From my boulder I could see only the stream, the forested far bank, boulders in the stream, sun on the far side, shadow on my side. Upstream, I watched sun dance on water, a ribbon of white rapid-spume dance on water. Riffles molded themselves around boulders, dancing. The colors of light and of green danced. Rippled reflections of the far bank danced. The ripples themselves danced—circling, merging, parting, merging, running swiftly, folding back, dancing, dancing in the sun, the shadow.
The air was filled with butterflies and birdsong, and the sound of water flowing.
There is a sign at the beginning of the path along the Middle Prong. In the Smokies they call this kind of path (there are many of them) a “Quiet Walkway.” The sign presents a wildness easily accessible. It invites without pressure, without challenge. Even if no one in the park seems to know who wrote the words, it states a truth about wilderness:
The trail has no particular destination. A short walk on this easy trail offers close-up views, subtle aromas, and the serene quiet of protected woodland. You will be walking in one of the last great wild land areas in the east, but you won’t need a backpack or hiking boots. Take your time. Have a seat on a rock or a log bench. The trail has no particular destination, so walk as far as you like and then return.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited of our national parks, protects about half the remaining old-growth forest in the eastern United States. Among the most biodiverse parks in the country, it has been named a United Nations International Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site. The Cherokee, whose land this was, called it Place of Blue Smoke, for the deep blue haze hovering over dark, forested peaks and passes and the troughs between mountains. The wettest place in the United States besides the Pacific Northwest, average annual rainfall can be over ninety inches at altitudes above 6000 feet. It is this huge amount of moisture that produces the haze, the illusion of smoke. I am certain most of that moisture fell while I was backpacking there one May. The good thing about that is there were also fewer people in the backcountry than later in the season.
The Smokies include the third-highest peak in the east, 6642-foot Clingmans Dome. Even though the Appalachian Trail traverses this peak, the highest point on the trail, this is one place, with its broad paved path and elaborate viewing tower, even I can’t translate into wilderness. (The Appalachian Trail actually passes about fifty yards below the peak so that hikers can avoid the busyness at the lookout.) But fifteen other peaks higher than 6000 feet offer a chance for wilderness, as do many of the more than 650 miles of trails lacing the park. Of these, sixty-eight are part of the 2146-mile Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. The Appalachian Trail,
a National Scenic Trail and a unit of the National Park System, is one of the original two components of the National Trails System. The other is the Pacific Crest Trail.
The western escarpment of the Appalachians, the Smokies merge in the east with the Blue Ridge Mountains. Giant trees, spectacular displays of mountain laurel and rhododendron, a jumble of moss-covered ancient logs rotting into earth, glistening wood sorrel, dark violets, myriad waterfalls, the white, stark limbs of long-dead chestnut trees, their trunks swirled about, soaring skyward, all characterize the deep mystery of this place. In the omnipresent forest, something is always happening. A sudden fluttering of great wings and an owl lights in a tree beside the trail. Watching, waiting, finally lifting himself, he soars to a farther tree. A junco flitters up from the side of the path. There, where grass or moss or roots or mud hangs over to form a roof, he’s built his nest. Three white eggs lie nestled in it. A salamander, one of the twenty-seven different species of salamander in the park, slithers out of the inside of a log, then disappears beneath it. A mouse runs across the path; a rabbit munches grass in a gentle clearing; a dark bear walks quietly through dark forest; a surprised bobcat hurries across the early morning trail; a boar, which is not native and causes enough destruction that it should be eliminated from the park, roots through the understory. (Backcountry shelters along the Appalachian Trail in the park are fenced to keep boars out.)
Inside these dark forests, the park seems remote from the world, invulnerable. But this is among the most endangered of our parks. Nonnative pests and diseases are killing Fraser firs, dogwoods, butternuts and beech trees. In May 2002, park botanists also found hemlocks under attack from the hemlock wooly adelgid, a nonnative aphid-like insect that originated in Japan. Problems associated with air pollution are among the greatest in the National Park System. Regional coal-fired plants, industry, and motor vehicles create health issues and seriously compromised visibility. Nine million annual park visitors, plus traffic on US 441, the Newfound Gap Road traversing the park from Cherokee, North Carolina, to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, can bring traffic to a halt. The Cades Cove Road is often so congested it can take four hours to drive its eleven-mile loop. Polluting vehicle emissions damage historic structures and the health of visitors and wildlife. A lack of ranger staff exposes structures to vandalism. According to the National Parks Conservation Association’s State of the Parks Report on the Smokies, a proposal to build a road across the southwestern section of the park, “the largest unfragmented tract of mountain terrain in the eastern United States,” has the potential to devastate wildlife, especially bears. Other problems have to do with serious budget shortfalls and a full-time staff that is too small, but this is equally true of many other units of the National Park Service.
The presence of crowds depends on where and when you go. On that wet May, six-day, sixty-one-plus–mile backpack through the eastern section of the park (I started and ended at Cataloochee), I actually saw few other people except on a Saturday night near Mount Sterling, which is not far from the road. In more recent years, David and I have made several visits to the Smokies, specifically to hike to waterfalls. If we had chosen other times than spring, when visitors come for the flowers, or fall, when they come for the foliage, we would have seen fewer people. But even in the busiest seasons, most people walk the easily accessible trails without lingering longer than to snap a photo at a waterfall.
By staying put in a place, I have had even the most popular areas to myself, for a little while at least. Hiking to Grotto Falls in clear, still, autumn air, I often felt as if I, alone, were involved in autumn. I had the company of leaves falling in a windless afternoon, twisting slowly to the forest floor, red and gold and orange, sounding in the stillness like a light rain.
About the Author
David Muench is a landscape and nature photographer known for portraying the American western landscape for half a century. He is the primary photographer for more than fifty books and his work appears in many magazines, posters, and private collections. His 4 x 5 large-format camera is as much a part of him as his innovative eye. He has lately been experimenting with digital cameras as a result of his work photographing World Heritage Sites for UNESCO and Panasonic. For him, every photograph is a journey in perception, an exploration in seeing.
Ruth Rudner is an outdoor writer, former horse-packing guide, and erstwhile ski bum. Her work has appeared in the Leisure and Arts section of the Wall Street Journal, in Wilderness, Outside, Field and Stream, Parabola, Arizona Highways, and numerous other publications. Among her ten previously published books are Windstone, with her husband, David Muench, A Chorus of Buffalo, Partings and Other Beginnings, and Ask Now the Beasts.
Table of Contents
Preface by Ruth Rudner
Map of USA with National Parks
Introduction: An American Invention
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii
Haleakala National Park, Hawaii
Channel Islands National Park, California
Redwood National Park, California
Olympic National Park, Washington
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska
Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska
Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska
Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Alaska
North Cascades National Park, Washington
Mount Rainier National Park, Washington
Crater Lake National Park, Oregon
Lassen Volcanic National Park, California
Yosemite National Park, California
Sequoia National Park, California
Kings Canyon National Park, California
Death Valley National Park, California
Joshua Tree National Park, California
Saguaro National Park, Arizona
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
Zion National Park, Utah
Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah
Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
Canyonlands National Park, Utah
Arches National Park, Utah
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Colorado
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Colorado
Great Basin National Park, Nevada
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
Glacier National Park, Montana
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas
Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
Big Bend National Park, Texas
Badlands National Park, South Dakota
Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota
Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota
Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota
Isle Royale National Park, Michigan
Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio
Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky
Virgin Islands National Park, Virgin Islands
Dry Tortugas National Park, Florida
Biscayne National Park, Florida
Everglades National Park, Florida
Congaree National Park, South Carolina
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN/NC
Shenandoah National Park, Virginia
Acadia National Park, Maine
Photo Notes
Acknowledgments
Sources