Alaska is a national parks paradise. The state is home to the largest national park in the country(Wrangell-St. Elias) the tallest mountain in North America (Mount McKinley, at Denali National Park and Preserve) and the awesome spectacle of Glacier Bay, to name just a few among the state’s 19 federally designated parks, historical sites and wild rivers.
These kinds of statistics are extremely important to a growing number of travelers affectionately known as “park baggers.” Park baggers have made it their goal to visit and spend time in every one of the 380-plus national parks in the country. Not surprisingly, Alaska is often one a park bagger’s ultimate destination.
“I’ve only met a few people who have done park bagging, who are really serious about it, and when they came to Alaska, they would have to make one or two trips up here over a period of one or two years,” said John Quinley with the National Park Service in Anchorage. “They often will go to as many places as they can during one visit. If you’re taking a cruise ship, frequently ships will stop in Sitka, Glacier Bay and Skagway, and
you have three parks right there.”
For San Francisco Bay-area resident Mark Minguillon, the park bagging habit started innocently enough. In 1991, he was on his way to San Diego from Colorado when his family stopped at a national park in Arizona. At the visitors center he noticed a little blue Passport to the Parks book – in which some park baggers record their travels – and
he bought it.
“I thought, ‘That will be really cool for my daughter, to get her into it,’ “ he said. “So from 6 weeks old to 14 years old, she’s been collecting, too. It’s kind of a neat history of her that we will pass on to her. ... Once we started getting her book stamped, I got hooked, too.”
It wasn’t long before Minguillon turned his attentions to Alaska. There is something about this Last Frontier that he wanted to see, and adding a few stamps to his and his daughter’s passport book was an added bonus.
“We took a cruise about five years ago up through Alaska and the Yukon Territory,” he said. The family flew to Juneau and from there bagged several parks in Southeast Alaska: Sitka National Historical Park in Sitka, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Skagway. Then they headed over to Denali National Park and Preserve in Interior Alaska and Kenai Fjords National Park in
Southcentral Alaska.
But it was the family’s visit to Katmai National Park and Preserve in Southwest Alaska that got Minguillon really addicted to Alaska’s grandeur.
“My daughter and I, after that cruise five years ago, we have gone up five times since then,” he said. “In fact we’re going again in July.
“We absolutely fell in love with Katmai after the first time we went there,” he said. “We saw herds of (caribou), which was just unbelievable ... and from the visitors center we went to a platform area to watch the bears. There’s another boardwalk that takes you to where the bears are right at a waterfall feeding on the salmon. There are like 10, 20 bears, and you’re standing on this platform and they couldn’t care less about it.”
Minguillon said park rangers escort visitors along the boardwalks and warn them to stay at least 50 feet away from the bears. On one return trip to the visitor center, a salmon- stuffed bear stretched out across the trail and fell asleep.
“The trail did not allow for us to pass, so we stood there waiting for three hours until the bear woke up and meandered away,” he said.
So far, Minguillon has collected 280 park stamps, including seven in Alaska (he also has been to Lake Clark National Park and Preserve). He said his 2003 Alaska trip will also include a stop at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which has a new park headquarters and more than 13 million acres of land to explore. During one of his previous trips, he tried to reach the Bering Land Bridge National Park, surrounded by the Chukchi and Bering seas, which is accessible only by plane. Foul weather dampened that plan, but he has visions of one day seeing all the national parks in that area have not faded.
“My ideal is to be able to contract with some Bush pilot to take me out to all the sights in the western part of Alaska,” he said.
If you want to start checking off the Alaska national park list in a passport booklet, start by picking one up at a national park or gift shop that carries national-park memorabilia.
The passport book costs $7.95. Commemorative sets of stamps from 1986 to the present are available for $3.95 each, or the entire 18 years’ worth of stamps can be had for $58.95.
The fun and challenging way to collect them, though, is to visit the parks and collect stamps as you go. There are 19 national park-affiliated areas in Alaska, eight of which are national park and preserves. Others are designated as historically significant sites or areas of special interest and protection.
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