National Parks of the American West

Main stopping points during the month's long trip.

The below pictures were taken during a summer vacation trip back in 2005 from May 30 thru June 23. 

A good friend of mine and myself took a month off from civilization and decided to explore the wilderness of the American West including the desert areas of Southern California, Arizona and parts of southern Utah, to the mountainous region of the Sierra Nevada in Central California including parts of Nevada where the Lake Tahoe area is located all the way up to Lassen Volcanic and into the Pacific Northwest where the Redwood National Park meets the Pacific ocean. 

We slept mostly on camping grounds where available otherwise we would pull off the main road and hide the car behind the bushes and slept right there, in the middle of nowhere...

Usually we woke up around 7:00am and would usually hit the sleeping bags around midnight. We would drive from one site to the other during the late afternoon and into the early evening. We would eat and prepare the tent around 10pm. Along the way (during the day) we would visit important cities including Los Angeles (where it all started and ended, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Clara, and San Diego.

Something you would appreciate in the pictures is the diversity in geography and thus in the landscape in the state of California. We would be in the 100s degrees Fahrenheit one day and the next day we would be in the 40-50s with snow on the ground. 

Enjoy the view!

cs

Joshua Tree National Park

Grand Canyon National Park

Death Valley

Utah

Sequoia National Park

Yosemite National Park

Lake Tahoe

Lassen Volcanic National Park

Redwood National Park

Big Sur