The Inspiration
In the early decades of the 20th Century, the automobile was still a relatively novel invention, but becoming more prolific. With the growth of automobile ownership, people found more freedom in their mobility. For the first time, travel to the wide-open West could be accomplished without needing to book expensive and limited transportation via train.
Many adventurers took advantage of the automobile as a way to visit the National Parks—also a relatively novel concept. In late 1919, Zion National Park became the 15th Park organized under the three-year-old National Park Service. A dozen of these Parks were in the American West and they were beckoning to the American populace—most of whom lived in cities in the Midwest and East Coast.
There was one catch; in order to visit a National Park by car, adequate roads were required. That’s why in 1920, AAA sponsored a caravan journey in which automobile enthusiasts drove for 76-days on old wagon trails and rutted dirt roads stopping at 12 National Parks en route. Their goal was to encourage the federal government to invest in quality automobile roads in the West. What better locations to connect with these new roads than our National Parks?
Dubbed the National Park-to-Park Highway Tour, the route began in Denver stopping first at Rocky Mountain National Park. They continued North to Yellowstone and Glacier, then turned West to Mount Rainier. Heading down the Pacific Coast, they visited Crater Lake, Lassen Volcano, Yosemite, General Grant (now Kings Canyon), and Sequoia. In the desert Southwest, they scuttled the plan to visit Zion, but saw the Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde before heading back to Denver. (They also drove through the Petrified Forest National Monument—which would become a National Park in 1962—making up for the loss of Zion, and allowing us to count 12 Parks on the the trip.)
Throughout the trip, they faced rugged conditions, flat tires, mechanical failures, and illness. They carried all they needed to sleep and eat in their early-model, open-carriage cars. In towns and cities along the route they were greeted like conquering heroes and used the opportunity to promote their cause—the ”Good Roads” movement.
Ultimately the campaign worked. The federal government authorized funding for roads within and highways between the National Parks in the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps more importantly, the intrepid journeymen and women who blazed this trail in 1920, laid out an exceptional road trip challenge that is still quite a venture today—even with the benefit of interstate highways.
To commemorate the centennial of the National Park-to-Park Highway Tour and to celebrate the Every Kids outdoors program, we are pleased to launch our multi-year road trip in 2020. Our route will cover all of the National Parks visited by the original tour, as well as most of the Parks along or near the route that have been established in the last 100 years.
More details on the stops along the route will be explained in future posts, and you can read more about our route here.
For more information on the 1920 National Park-to-Park Highway Tour, we recommend the deeply researched book by Lee & Jane Whitely entitled The Playground Trail, The National Park-to-Park Highway: To and Through the National Parks of the West in 1920. We can also recommend a documentary film about the journey from director Brandon Wade entitled Paving the Way: The National Park-to-Park Highway.