Finding Our Park

When Jude was three we decided we were going to travel to all fifty-nine national parks together as a family. He didn't know what fifty-nine meant. We didn't fully know what we were getting into. By the time we figured out what we were doing, there were sixty-three.

He's fifteen now. We've been to thirty-seven parks. We're not going to finish before he leaves home, and we've decided that's fine. Some goals are better as direction than destination.

This is the record of what we've found so far, and a place to store what we find in the future. Our own writing and photographs and film, alongside the best writing and photography and film ever made about these places. The passages we've borrowed—sentences lifted from books about the parks, and from books that had nothing to do with the parks but knew something true about wilderness or time, lyrics to a song, fragments lifted from a poem or an article or an ancient essay—we’ve credited in an appendix. Nobody asked us to do any of this, so we set our own rules about what goes in.

The wilderness does not make you forget your normal life so much as it removes the distractions for proper remembering.

The parks are in trouble, and not for the first time. The fight over what these places are for—whether they exist for the people who love them or for the industries that want them—is older than any of the parks themselves. We'll talk about that too, because you can't spend twelve years visiting these places without watching what's happening to them, and because some of what we've watched has pissed us off.

The website grows as we go. The remaining parks are the hard ones—Gates of the Arctic has no roads, there is a park in American Samoa, places that require time (and money) we haven't found yet. When we get back from the next one we'll add to it. When Jude goes to one of them on his own someday—or brings his own kids—we’ll add that too.

That's the project. Marq makes the films and writes the words. Angela takes the photographs and gets us where we're going. We're all three collectors — sentences, songs, old photographs, a paragraph from a book someone we handed us once and we forgot to give back, a thing Jude said at age seven that nobody wrote down and we've been trying to remember since. Jude has been doing this his whole life without knowing that's what it was called.

We’ve seen thirty-seven of the sixty-three parks. The other twenty-six are out there waiting, which is a wonderful thing to look forward to.

Finding Our Park is a project of Marq, Angela, and Jude Evans

Bremerton, Washington
May 3, 2026