Bicycle tour of Utah parks long, glorious

Editor's note: Columnist Lee Benson is bicycling through Utah's five National Parks, beginning at Arches and ending at Zion. His columns will chronicle what he sees, hears and avoids along the way.

In tribute to a time-honored tradition that dates back to, let's see, last July, the annual Deseret Morning News traveling bicycle tour of Utah begins this week.

This year's destination: Utah's national parks, all five of them.

In a lot of states, this would be a short tour. In places such as Kansas, New Jersey, Georgia, Mississippi, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Alabama there would be no trip at all. Same goes for New York. Even in neighboring Idaho a national park tour would involve traveling to just one park, Yellowstone, and Idaho has to share that with Wyoming and Montana.

But here in Utah we are national park nirvana. Other states look at us with national park envy. Out of 58 national parks in the National Park Service system, we have 7.25 percent of the total.

Only two states have more national parks than we do — Alaska and California, with eight each — and Alaska is seven times as big as we are and California is 15 times as populated.

On a per-capita and per-square mile basis, no state comes close. We have one national park for every 200,000 people and every 15,000 square miles.

National parks are not to be confused with national monuments (of which Utah also has five), national historic sites (Utah has one), national trails (Utah has one), national memorials, national battlefields, national rivers, national seashores, national cemeteries and so forth. In all, there are 391 units that fall under the NPS umbrella.

But only those 58 that meet the criteria of great variety and official congressional designation qualify as National Parks.

"The national parks are what we call the crown jewels of the system, the icons, the ones most people recognize," says NPS spokesperson Kathy Kupper. "To become a national park a place really has to have a lot of different natural features and diversity."

The concept of national parks is an American invention that dates back to 1872 when President Ulysses S. Grant and the Congress of the United States declared more than 2 million acres in the untamed West as "Yellowstone National Park," thereby removing from public consumption and development the assorted rivers, lakes, geysers, hot springs and wildlife within the new sanctuary's boundaries.