The view from the back deck of Big Meadows Lodge in Shenandoah National Park: Glynn Wilson

Secret Vistas –
By Glynn Wilson –

SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, Va. — When Americans and people from all over the world think of visiting a national park, or camping in the great outdoors in the United States, they often think of the big, famous parks out West like Yosemite in California, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, or Yellowstone on the borders of Montana, Wyoming and Utah.

For full time or part time RV travelers looking for deals, as well as car-tent campers or back country hikers, the West is the place to be, with free camping on National Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land all over the place.

But there are great national parks in the East too, and some of the most visited in the country, and you don’t have to empty out your bank account to visit and see them. If you are 62 or over, you can purchase the lifetime senior America the Beautiful pass for $80 at the entrance, and never pay an entrance fee to another national park ever. That also entitles you to half-priced senior discount camping.

So the $20 you would normally pay for a campsite at Big Meadows costs you only $10, and at Mathews Arm and Loft Mountain the $15 campsite fee is halved to $7.50 a night. That’s $52.50 a week, but technically you are limited to only 14 days in a row in one place.

If you count the Blue Ridge Parkway, 14.1 million people hit that great American drive every year, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park between North Carolina and Tennessee normally gets about 10 million visitors a year. In 2020, the COVID year, that number hit a high of 12.1 million as people were searching for something to do to get outside and take a break from social distancing and social isolation during the pandemic.

By comparison, Yellowstone was visited by 3.8 million in 2020, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado recorded 3.3 million visitors, the Grand Canyon had 2.9 million, and rangers in Shenandoah are saying it was something of a record in 2020 with 1.7 million visitors and campers.

Last year’s visitation was 1,666,265, according to Shenandoah National Park Management Specialist Sally Hurlbert, “so if you round it up, 1.7 million visitors is correct,” she said.

“We didn’t set a record for the most visitors in 2020. That happened in 1970 when we had 2.4 million visitors,” she said. “But, it is the first time we’ve had over 1.7 million visitors in 25 years. The last time we had 1.7 million visitors was in 1995!”

Of course many of those visitors simply take Skyline Drive for a Sunday spin, and those who drive through the Smokies to see the fall colors make up many of those who visit that park every year.

NPS: Most Visited Parks in 2020

We did a big camping trip out West in 2016, covering 6,000 miles in 28 days, and I’ve even considered moving out West for semi-retirement.

Snow capped mountain peeks over Yellowstone Lake: Glynn Wilson

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But the further west you go, the further you seem to get from the action of American power and democracy. So for the past seven years, I’ve made it a specialty to live and camp in the East, as close to Washington, D.C. and New York as possible for as much of the year as possible, before it gets too cold and many campgrounds shut down for the winter.

Perhaps I should publish a guide to camping in the East, but for now I just publish stories, pictures and videos online as I travel around and marvel at all the places you can go and see, and inexpensively too.

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Back in the 1990s, when I was living, teaching journalism and working on a Ph.D. in Knoxville, Tennessee, I spent a lot of time visiting the Smokies, and it is a special place. I drove through a few times this winter to get out of the house where I was hiding from COVID and Murder the Media.

About to enter the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on a winter Sunday on the way to Cades Cove: Glynn Wilson

But in more recent years, I’ve come to really appreciate and love Shenandoah, where I spent the past four days and nights in Mathews Arm Campground in the northern part of the park closest to D.C. As I hear from friends on the Gulf Coast about how hot and humid it is already in May, I sat outside even in the sunny afternoons about 3,000 feet above sea level and soaked up the immaculate spring weather and cool mountain air.

The view near the end of the Mathews Arm Trail by the 80-foot waterfall: Glynn Wilson

For the first few days of this seasonal trip, much time has been spent getting my setup organized and fixed up for the summer and fall. But I finally felt comfortable enough on Saturday afternoon to go for a four mile hike to and from an 80-foot waterfall. It was mostly downhill for two miles getting there. The challenge was pushing myself to make the two mile hike back up the mountain before dark.

It was a bit of a party in Mathews Arm this weekend, as others from the DC Metro Area came out in droves feeling more normal now that the CDC has lifted mask mandates for those who have been responsible citizens and gotten their vaccine shots. People were hiking the trails and languishing in their campsites with no masks, enjoying a cool beverage and the clean mountain air.

A rare, scarlet tanager flew across the trail in front of me, and landed just long enough to get this one shot: Glynn Wilson

A cotton-tailed rabbit along the trail to the waterfall: Glynn Wilson

A white-tailed deer doe, coming out on the trail near dusk: Glynn Wilson

A view of the 80-foot waterfall on the Mathews Arm Trail. Too bad you can’t get close enough for a drink: Glynn Wilson

Catoctin Mountain Park

A red-headed woodpecker in Catoctin Mountain Park: Glynn Wilson

Last week, before I came back to Shenandoah, I visited another of my favorite haunts in the East, and a much less known national park surrounding the presidential retreat of Camp David. Many Marylanders know about and visit Cunningham Falls State Park, camp on the weekends and take the easy, short hike to the falls. But as I talk to people in campgrounds all over, I find that far fewer people realize that there is a national, federal park right in the middle of the state park.

I hate to reveal too many secrets about these places, for fear of letting too many tourists know and potentially ruining them with too many visitors. That’s part of the problem with the big parks out west. There are often just too many people around, especially in the busy summer travel season, making the parks less enjoyable.

But I have this favorite little spot I will tell you about, only you my dear readers, since I have no fear that CBS News, NPR or CNN will ever send a crew there anyway. As you drive up in the Catoctin Mountains toward Cunningham Falls State Park after you pass the small town of Thurmont north of Frederick, keep a lookout on the right for a sign for Catoctin Mountain Park. You might get confused by all the different signs. But if you turn on Park Central Road, you will go right through the national park campground and drive right by the entrance to Camp David. There’s no big sign announcing the place, because it is, after all, sort of a secret guarded by the Secret Service.

But if you keep going just a little further, you will see a sign for the Chestnut Picnic Area. If you go there on a weekday, chances are there won’t be anyone else around. You can have a picnic less than a mile as the crow flies from Camp David, see what Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw in the place when he chose it, and hike an amazingly soft trail covered in moss. There are all kinds of birds there hanging out in the trees on the mountain, especially now during the spring migration. Just in the past week, I got pictures of a pileated woodpecker with so much white on its feathers that it almost looked like an ivory-bill. I also managed to get a few pictures of a red-headed woodpecker on another visit.

One of these days I’m going to get around to camping in this park, since there appears to be a decent cell phone connection now. This was not the case as recently as two years ago. The sites are small and there’s no power hookups, however, so I normally stay down by Thurmont in another area of the state park. I can get a lot of work done here, even if there is still some road noise to endure.

But there’s no road noise in Shenandoah. Only the occasional sound of a jet plane, and they are usually high up in the sky over 10,000 feet on their way to or from Washington from points further afield, so only a minor annoyance.

If you’ve never been there, and you are still sitting around the house in social isolation waiting on an excuse to get out, get your vaccine and get moving. A wonderful outdoor world awaits.

More Photos

It was a party Saturday night in the Mathews Arm Campground, and I got this arty shot of the moon through the sunroof window in the Roadtrek media camper van about midnight: Glynn Wilson

A Shenandoah sunrise as the first light made its way up in the mountains in the Mathews Arm Campground: Glynn Wilson

A distressed bird during the Spring migration in Catoctin Mountain National Park in Maryland: Glynn Wilson

A silouette of a pileated woodpecker in Catoctin Mountain National Park in Maryland: Glynn Wilson