OVID — During her time with Corning Inc., Christine Nagel crisscrossed the globe, traveling to Asia, Europe and South Africa as a plant manager and worldwide manufacturing and engineering manager.
“Just all over,” said the chemical engineer, who ended her 32-year career with the company in 2015. “But when I retired, I said I really haven’t seen this beautiful country the way I should have.”
Now she has.
Last month, Nagel visited Hot Springs National Park, the last national park left on her list to explore. During an eight-year period, she traveled to 30 states to experience the 63 national parks that she calls the “crown jewels” of the National Park System. (The NPS oversees 425 individual units, including the 63 national parks, but also national battlefields, monuments, historical parks and recreation areas, among others.)
Nagel, who with her husband raised their three children in Horseheads, purchased Seneca Lake property in 1992, intending to retire there. The couple now summers in the Finger Lakes and winters in South Carolina.
However, the national parks project was a solo project for Nagel, who wanted to see and experience the parks at her own pace, her own way.
She told her family — Christine and her husband, Jim, have three grown children, Elizabeth, Adam and Christopher — that “this is going to be my gig to do alone and I’m so glad I did.”
Each year Nagel would plan a journey or two to knock off several parks at a time. Often, she would choose to travel in the spring and fall off seasons, with fewer tourists and cheaper airfare. Lodging was not a priority, as accommodations for her were simply “sleeping and moving on.” Comfortable with traveling, she planned all of the trips herself, except to Alaska, which has eight national parks, many of them remote and some accessible only by plane. Nagel relied on a travel agent to help her organize that 26-day trip and navigate transportation that included train and ferry travel as well as 15 bush pilot flights. That was her longest outing; most of her trips averaged about 10 days to include several parks grouped by locale.
A big walker, Nagel made a point of taking a hike in each of her destinations. She developed a routine that she recommends for any park visitor to maximize the experience: Start at the visitors’ center to “get grounded,” watch the park movie to learn about that particular park’s history, talk with a ranger, and pick one or two trails to explore (“they have wonderful maps and brochures”). Oftentimes, there are handicapped accessible trails as well.
Another part of her routine at each park was to buy 15 or so postcards and get them “passport” stamped at the park office before sending them to family and friends.
Emotional visits
With 63 national parks, it seems impossibly unfair to pick a favorite. And whether big or small, remote or urban, featuring sand dunes, glaciers or marsh lands, Nagel said she cried at all of them.
“If you just think about it, no other country has this where the parks belong to the people,” she said.
Still, some stand out.
Nagel’s first national park was Acadia in Maine, which she visited in 2012 before retiring. She called it “absolutely spectacular” and said the nine parks in California were “pretty gobsmacking.” At Yosemite, which she described as “a small, tight park,” she said one can stand anywhere and be left breathless looking in any direction.
People flock to the popular parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, but Nagel said she was equally amazed by some of the lesser-known parks — like California’s Kings Canyon and Pinnacles, where she saw 15 California condors — and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado.
“Some of these you don’t hear about,” she said.
Another lesson she learned over the years is to keep an open mind.
Her last trip to Hot Springs National Park also included a stop at the Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, where she flew into before taking a loop drive through the Ozarks en route to Hot Springs in Arkansas. She thought she’d simply cross the arch park off her list but found herself really enjoying the well-done museum, a ferry ride on the Mississippi and tram ride inside the arch itself. With her engineering background, Nagel was captivated by the story of the arch’s construction.
“These guys pulled it off by good skilled-trades training and discipline,” she said.
The most distant park on her list was the National Park of American Samoa in the South Pacific, which Nagel added on at the last minute while visiting Hawaii’s national parks. She realized American Samoa was only a 6½-hour flight from Hawaii and she would likely never be that close again.
“I called my husband and asked if he minded if I took another week, and he said, ‘Do it,’ “ recalled Nagel, who found the Samoan people very friendly and their territory breathtakingly beautiful.
When at the visitors’ center at Hot Springs last month, Nagel mentioned it was the last of her 63, and learned that the Arkansas park was actually the first federally protected land set aside for recreational use 40 years before Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872. Her final stop was serendipitously made at the first place the American government earmarked land for public use.
Nagel is grateful she had the means, support and health to travel to all the national parks, but her lasting message is that the parks and the system’s recreation and historical areas are for everyone to enjoy. And, by sharing her experience, she hopes to entice others to take advantage of them.
She is a big proponent of the NPS App, which makes it easy to plug in your location and find a nearby parks site to explore. Although Nagel was laser focused on her goal of visiting the 63 national parks, she said the app can be very helpful to scope out all kinds of nearby parks’ sites when people are traveling.
Now that she’s reached her goal and is processing the accomplishment, Nagel intends to use this winter to put pen to paper and create an outline recounting her adventure. She has thousands of photos, all taken on her iPhone, but no written travelogue (although she has given some talks about a few of her trips to the 20th Century Club in Ovid, area libraries and retirement homes in South Carolina and New York).
“I haven’t written a summary of my thoughts now that I’ve done all 63,” she said. “I owe that to the kids and to Jim. They really supported me.”
A recurring theme when conversing with her is gratitude. A patriotic person at heart — she spent four years in the Army, leaving as a captain — Nagel said despite our country’s problems its protected parks exist for all to enjoy as she did.
“I met so many wonderful people from all countries … it’s really filled me with a sense of pride,” she said.