Road trip-ready

To say Becky Lomax’s life revolves around the national parks is not an oversimplification.

Even in the first few years of her life, the stunning vistas of Washington state’s national parks — Mount Rainier, the North Cascades, the Olympics — surrounded her.

“Probably one of the earliest pictures of me in a national park is me at six months old. And my parents had taken me to Mount Rainier — we lived in Seattle and that became our family park,” Lomax recalls. “We would go hiking there every summer, a lot of summers we’d go camping — we even skied the rope tows that used to be up there at Paradise.”

Lomax recently combined her national parks expertise with dozens of other writers in “USA National Parks — The Complete Guides to All 59 Parks.” The book seeks to be the ultimate guidebook for lovers of America’s parks, with tips and maps for the top experiences in each park, whether it’s Denali or the Great Smokeys. The book also features a detachable fold-out map and a special section to collect each park’s passport stamp.

Moon has been making travel guides, published by Avalon Travel, since 1973.

As a writer for Moon Travel Guides, Lomax has also published six editions of Moon’s Glacier National Park guide and plans to release the seventh in the spring.

The scope for “The Complete Guides” book is ambitious, and Lomax says a key focus was relying on local writers who know the parks the best, rather than sending writers to new locations.

“People will just travel, drop into this park for a week, get everything and go away. So what we did is pull from a lot of the Moon writers that have covered the national parks, and of course I’ve covered some too,” she said.

At each park the book helps travelers plan their time around entrance fees, traffic and where they want to start based on their tastes. Each park has a top three list of suggested activities, and hiking and backpacking trips are also recommended.

For Glacier National Park, the book recommends driving or biking the Going-to-the-Sun Road, gazing at glaciers from the Jackson Glacier Overlook or the Grinnell Glacier trail, and taking the time to enjoy Many Glacier Hotel and the peaks around it.

Lomax says the book is meant to be helpful to any traveler, regardless of experience level.

“We kind of aim at the general travel public that may not go out and backpack a ton, but they sure want to do some small hikes. In the big parks, like the Tetons or Glacier, where backpacking is so huge, we do cover that a bit, but it’s minimal compared to the other hiking options we put in the book.”

“I think right now with the huge influx in the last eight years in our national parks, I think that’s getting huge — to let people know how to handle the crowds and how to do the travel outside of those crowd seasons and how to get really cool experiences outside of those,” she said.

The guide also breaks down suggested trip priorities based on how long one has at a park. In Glacier for one day? Go drive the Sun Road and sneak in a hike at Avalanche Lake, St. Mary Falls or Hidden Lake. With a full week, the book has suggestions for hikes all over other areas of the park.

As a traveler herself, Lomax says she prefers to get down and dirty when getting acquainted with America’s scenic national parks.

“I’m the type of traveler that doesn’t like doing the blow-through, where you tag a park, drive through and it’s ‘been there, done that.’ I don’t particularly care for that style of travel, I prefer where you go in, camp, hike, backpack — you really sink into a park,” she says.

Lomax says she also makes a point to try and open a discourse on what’s happening to the parks.

In Glacier’s section of the book, she makes note of “The Extinction of Glaciers,” discussing how and why the glaciers are melting and what the ramifications of these changes are.

“I try to do this as un-preacherly as possible, but I want travelers to go to our national parks and understand the role of climate change and what’s happening in those parks,” Lomax says. “I think that’s really important to not just the parks themselves but to us and our future. In my writing I try to make sure that’s touched on here and there.”

The book is available at local bookstores around the Valley and on amazon.com. Visit moon.com for more information.