One Rider, 63 Parks

Nobody Plans To Ride 12,000 Miles

Jonathan Baker was in San Francisco for work. That's the whole origin story, and it's almost disappointingly small for what it became. He rented a motorcycle for the weekend — the kind of decision that feels inconsequential at the time — because he wanted to see a little of the coast before his flight home. He had heard people talk about the Pacific Coast Highway the way people talk about places they've never been: reverently, vaguely, secondhand. He'd always wanted to see redwood trees in person, the kind of want that sits in the back of a life for years without ever quite becoming a plan.

Forty-eight hours later he'd put 900 miles on a rental engine that was never supposed to see that kind of use. Not because he'd gotten lost. Because he couldn't make himself stop.

There's a particular kind of story that only makes sense backward. You can't plan to fall in love with 900 miles of coastline over one weekend; you can only notice, three years and 12,000 miles later, that it happened. Jonathan's next trips were built around parks near his home state of Utah, and somewhere in that stretch — nobody can point to the exact day — the goal stopped being "see some parks" and became something closer to a vow: ride through all of them. All 63.

The Nights That Refuse To Be Forgotten

Ask anyone who's done something like this which moment stands out, and you brace for a favorite view, a nice sunset, something safely picturesque. Jonathan's answer was a volcano actively erupting.

It's worth sitting with that image for a second: a man on a motorcycle, riding toward an active eruption, visor up, letting ash hit him in the face on purpose because it meant seeing the thing clearly. Most of us build our lives around not doing that. The parks Jonathan kept returning to in conversation weren't the ones that were merely beautiful. They were the ones that asked something of him first.

Take Kings Canyon — a park he'd genuinely never heard of before planning the trip. "It had elements of Yosemite and Sequoia, all in one," he said. "I loved the smells of the pines, and a small hike where I was able to observe a black bear play with her two new cubs." No fanfare, no famous overlook. Just pine smell and a bear being a bear, and it became one of the parks he'd go back to before almost anywhere else.

Blown Tires, Broken Chains, And The Cost Of Going Alone

There's a version of this story that's all wonder and no wear, and that version would be a lie. Riding solo across a continent for three years, on and off, means the road eventually collects its toll, and Jonathan paid most of it in mechanical failure and bad weather at the worst possible time.

The improvising is the interesting part, because it's where the whole trip's philosophy shows itself most plainly. Jonathan never planned more than about ten days out. He didn't book where he'd sleep or what he'd eat — he'd figure it out as he went, usually sleeping next to the bike, usually eating gas station food, because a plan that detailed would have meant less room for the road to surprise him. When your itinerary is that loose, a broken chain isn't a crisis so much as a Tuesday.

He carried a satellite phone, checked in with people who'd notice if he went dark, and kept a running mental ledger of the things that go wrong when you're the only mechanic, navigator, and cook for months at a stretch. The gear list that came out of three years of learning this the hard way is short, unglamorous, and exactly the kind of advice that only sounds obvious after someone else has already paid for it in flat tires.

Durango, And The Thing You Can't Plan For

Every long journey story eventually arrives at a moment with a stranger, because journeys are secretly about the people you weren't looking for as much as the places you were. Jonathan's happened at a gas station near Durango, Colorado, and it's the one detail from the whole three years he tells like it happened yesterday.

There's no park in that story. No mileage, no elevation, no permit. It happened at a gas pump between two national parks that don't even get named in the retelling — and it's the one memory that survived three years of lava and bears and blown tires as the thing he leads with when someone asks what the trip was really like. That's usually how it goes with journeys long enough to change you: the landscape gets you out the door, but it's rarely the landscape you remember most clearly at the end.

The Ranger Who Said Yes

Ask most people to name the rule-breaking part of a three-year road trip and they'll invent something dramatic. The real one, for Jonathan, was small, official, and handed to him by the very institution that exists to say no.

It's a small moment, but it says something true about what these parks actually are, underneath the gates and the fee stations: they're run by people, and people notice when someone in front of them is doing something for the right reasons. A quiet park in the middle of a pandemic, one ranger on patrol, and a decision made not by policy but by judgment. Jonathan didn't ask for a story. He just got one, because he showed up honestly and asked a person instead of reading a sign.

Twelve Thousand Miles Later, What Actually Changed

This is usually where a story like this reaches for a big, tidy lesson, and Jonathan mostly resists that. What he offers instead is quieter and more honest: three years on a motorcycle didn't convert him to conservation — he was already a believer — it just re-anchored the belief in something felt rather than argued.

There's a whole body of research on why direct, physical experience of a place changes how people advocate for it more than any statistic ever could — call it the difference between knowing a fact and knowing a smell. Jonathan didn't need the research. He had the pine smell at Kings Canyon, the ash at Kona, the bats at Carlsbad. Each one did more persuading than a pamphlet ever could.

Asked which parks he'd go back to first, he didn't hesitate: Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite — for the smells, specifically — the Smokies, Glacier, Olympic, Acadia, Death Valley. A list that skips almost every park most people would name first, which tells you something about what three years on a bike actually teaches you to value.

Sequoia Smoky Mtns Glacier Olympic Acadia Death Valley

And now, with the dust more or less settled, the goal has changed shape one more time. Not more parks — or not only more parks. "Take family and friends to the national parks to enjoy them together, now," is how he put it when asked what's next. The solo odyssey was never really the point. It was the reconnaissance. Now comes the part where he brings people.

His motorcycle, more than a mode of transport, became a conduit connecting him to the pulse of the country — not the postcard version, the actual one, with bats and lava and a stranger's blessing thrown in without being asked for. Sometimes the most profound stories aren't written with pens and paper. Sometimes they're written with the hum of an engine and 12,000 miles of road most people will only ever see through a windshield.

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