National treasures
Kristen Wells got this shot of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln during her visit to Mount Rushmore.
Matthew and Michael Mansfield of North Strabane Township walk through Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park in the Gulf of Mexico. The six-sided building was constructed of 16 million handmade bricks and served as a prison during the Civil War.
Dry Tortugas National Park is one of the most remote U.S. national parks, and sits more than 70 miles off the coast of Key West in the Gulf of Mexico.
This wagon once held a cannon in Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park. The fort, capable of holding 420 heavy guns, was never completed.
Dry Tortugas National Park is a 100-square-mile park that lies mostly underwater. It is accessible only by boat or seaplane, and is home to Fort Jefferson, built during the Civil War.
Kristen Wells took this photo at Arches National Park
Kristin Wells took this photo of the Badlands during a tour of national parks.
Kristin Wells and her husband visited six national parks this summer. She took this photo at Glacier National Park.
Diane Holder and her husband visited Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks in June.
Seventy miles off the coast of Key West, in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, sits Dry Tortugas National Park, one of the most remote and least visited parks in the national parks system.
Accessible only by boat or seaplane, Dry Tortugas is home to Fort Jefferson – a massive, unfinished coastal fortress constructed with more than 16 million bricks, it is the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere – and beneath its clear blue water lies the third-largest barrier reef in the world.
The islands are also a bird-watcher’s paradise, and nearly 300 hundred species of seabirds and migrating land birds have been spotted in the Dry Tortugas.
Teresa Lewis of Canonsburg, who visited Dry Tortugas in June with her husband, Ed, and daughters, Megan, 16, and Melanie, 11, had never heard of Dry Tortugas until she started researching things to do for the family’s vacation to Key West.
“Honestly, I didn’t even know it existed. It’s out in the middle of nowhere,” said Lewis, “But the history of the fort is interesting, and it was beautiful.”
Construction on Fort Jefferson spanned 1846 to 1875, but the fort was never finished or fully armed.
Built as a military outpost to provide shipping access to the Gulf of Mexico, Fort Jefferson later was used as a prison for Union deserters during the Civil War. Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth following his assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, was sentenced to life in prison at Dry Tortugas for conspiracy in Lincoln’s murder. He was released from Fort Jefferson after he treated and saved the lives of many people during an outbreak of yellow fever on the island.
The only residents of Dry Tortugas are park service rangers, who spend eight days on the island for every six days at home (the round trip commute to the island is five hours by high-speed ferry and three hours by seaplane). The rangers use satellite phones and limited Internet access to stay in contact with the mainland.
But, the remoteness of the Dry Tortugas is precisely what makes it special, said Allyson Gantt, chief of public affairs for Everglades and Dry Tortugas national parks.
“It’s amazing, to be riding in a boat and all of a sudden this island and a giant brick structure rise out of the ocean. It’s a sight to behold,” said Gantt. “Dry Tortugas is a wonderful combination of history, underwater resources including the sea life, coral reef and shipwrecks, and bird life. That’s phenomenal.”
This year, the National Park Service, created to oversee and protect the country’s national parks, celebrates its 100th anniversary.
Dry Tortugas is among the 58 national parks and 353 national monuments and historic areas such as Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the San Antonio Missions and Ellis Island, comprising 84 million acres, that fall under the domain of the National Park Service.
Tiny Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Pennsylvania, at .02 acres, is the smallest, while Alaska’s massive Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which spans 13.2 million acres, is the largest.
Near to this area of the Friendship Hill National Historic Site and Fort Necessity National Battlefield, both in Fayette County, and the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville.
The extraordinary beauty of the country’s national parks and historic sites drew more than 307 million visitors in 2015.
This year, the National Park Service is encouraging people to “Find Your Park,” and is waiving entrance fees to national parks and park service sites on Aug. 25.
Said Gantt, “This centennial is a great opportunity to recognize the wonderful parks that represent our natural heritage.”
Kristin Wells, 33, of Aleppo, has visited 20 national parks over the past two decades.
In June, Wells and her husband, Robert, toured six parks: Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Capital Reef, Canyonlands, Arches and Rocky Mountain National Park.
“There’s just something special about the national parks. I love to look at the wildlife and the scenery. I take thousands of pictures,” said Wells. It’s beautiful.”
Wells took her first trip to a national park in 1996, when she was high school student, She and her younger brother piled into their parents’ Ford Windstar minivan, and drove to Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Arches, Petrified Forest and Badlands national parks as part of a whirlwind, 16-day trek.
“We had the time of our lives. I was hooked on national parks after that. I remember one year we went to Acadia National Park and while we were driving through New England, my brother collected maple syrup in sample sizes, and then he would drink them,” Wells said, laughing. “I have so many memories of our trips and videos that I love to watch.”
Carol Holder and her husband, Dave, visited Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks in June.
After years of beach vacations, the couple decided to visit a major park.
“We weren’t sure what we were getting ourselves into, but it was awesome,” said Carol Holder.
National parks are one of our country’s greatest treasures, said Gantt. But many of them, including Glacier National Park, where glaciers are in retreat, and Rocky Mountain National Park, where pine beetles that survive the warmer winter season are changing the landscape on trails and in park campgrounds, are being affected by climate change.
Rising sea level and increased frequency and severity of storms raise questions about the maintenance and preservation of Fort Jefferson.
“It’s a concern. It’s an issue. We have a sandy island with a giant brick fort on it. It’s at ground zero for climate change,” said Gantt. “We have to decide where to go from here, and how to engage people to preserve our national parks and sites to ensure that the next generation of kids gets to enjoy them.”