I love the DeLorme atlases (atli?)! Cruising up the Alaskan panhandle on a deck chair, watching the magnificent scenery go by, with their Alaskan atlas on my map, helping me pick out all the landmarks and inlets and stuff…
I’ve got about 46 of the 50 states now. Whenever we travel I drag the relevant states along, and we have made detours to see the Unique Features listed in them.
Locally, as a result of atlas study and a fair amount of hiking, I can identify the local kames, eskers, kettles, drumlins and moraines with ease. And it’s so cool to hike over terrain that is full of ridges and craters that weren’t carved by streams, but by melting boulders of ice.
Isle Royale (also a National Park “in” Michigan is just off the Minnesota shoreline (about 21 miles), just under 15 miles from Ontario, but 42 miles from the Michigan Keweenaw Peninsula.
I love the DeLorme gazeteers. I also spend a lot of time on Google Earth and the Microsoft Terraserver site. I collect maps wherever I encounter them. In addition, my stint as a water main inspector clued me in to county GIS systems. Fortunately, my county has one of the better GIS web sites and a couple of nearby counties have decent ones, so I can waste a lot of time poring over maps, comparing them to aerial photos. (I was able to confirm that a strange land formation I drove past each day was a long abandoned rail line, in this way. I also tracked down an airplane graveyard; the guy ran out of funds and health before he could restore most of his planes and his “street” was a private drive that did not show up on any maps. I found his neighborhood because his “street” had the same name as an old subdivision listed on a map at the back of a locally published phone book and the aerial photos helped me locate his land.)
Hey, I was right! There are smaller units within the National Park System, but Hot Springs (5,550 acres) is the smallest of the 58 units which are actually designated as National Parks.
Part of the problem that folks are having regarding the “smallest park”, (particularly as they rely on memories), is that originally there were parks, monuments, recreation areas, and a number of other designations. A few years ago, Interior decided that all of them were going to be classified as “parks” (even when they have additional designations as “monuments,” “dunes,” “seashores,” etc.). This means that someone might have a legitimate memory of a tiny park from 1985 that has now been undercut by a location that used to be something other than a “park.”
In this image (a large one, by the way) taken from Thornton Gap on the Skyline Drive, you can see several small hills to the left, and one down below in the center. These, and several others not in sight are interesting to geologists. While the Appalachian Mountains are all part of one very large geological feature called the Appalachian Syncline, these particular little hills are not.
The entire syncline is very old, and it has weathered away unevenly, leaving long ridges behind. We call the remaining ridges of compacted limestone the Appalachian Mountains. The Syncline has weathered away completely at this particular spot, just to the east of the first of those ridges. These hills are all that remains from another chain of mountains, which were here before the events that caused the original formation of the Appalachian Syncline. They are among the oldest above ground features in the entire world, dating back more than half a billion years and perhaps more.
Just thought I would share.
Tris
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ~ Lao-Tzu ~
I’ve known about the continental divide in this area for a while, but I just realized recently, when looking at a map showing its location in my neighborhood, that Ernest Hemingway was born practically right on top of it (within a block or two anyway).
