“Congratulations On Your Extremely Expensive Emptiness” Award: Denali
Denali feels less like visiting a national park and more like attempting to schedule an appointment with a mountain that does not respect you.
First of all, there’s a very high chance you simply won’t see the mountain at all. Denali spends most of its life hiding behind clouds like a celebrity avoiding paparazzi. We're the paparazzi. People will visit, wait three days, spend thousands of dollars, and leave having technically experienced “weather near a mountain.” And even when the mountain does appear, it almost feels too far away to emotionally connect with. You will not get too close. This is not California, in Alaska you'll likely die in the mountain.
The scale of the park is absurd in a way that stops feeling majestic and starts feeling inconvenient. Everything is unbelievably vast, remote and expensive. You don’t casually “stop by” Denali. Visiting Denali requires logistics, like Napoleon's in Russia. It requires planning and you will do just as well as Napoleon in Russia. It requires accepting that a granola bar now costs fourteen dollars because it arrived by dogsled from... somewhere.
And the wildlife viewing somehow makes humans look even more pathetic. People in Denali will spend six straight hours on a bus whispering “is that a bear?” while staring at a tiny moving dot through binoculars strong enough to detect submarines. Yes Mary it may have been a bear or a chicken, who the hell knows. I was here only once. It was great to check it. I won't go again since it was so inconvenient as to make me wonder why did we buy Alaska in the first place. Oh wait, the oil.