Georgia coast
Cumberland Island, Georgia
Georgia's largest barrier island has no bridge and no cars - just wild horses grazing the ruins of a Carnegie mansion.
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Club Journal
Field reports from places winning the argument
Barrier islands, wildlife refuges, empty coastlines, and other places where the grounds crew never stood a chance
New Mexico
Bosque del Apache
Every winter, a hundred thousand snow geese drop out of the sky onto the same stretch of New Mexico marsh - and every morning they all leave at once.
California
Carrizo Plain
The largest single piece of undeveloped grassland left in California sits two hours from the coast, dead flat, and once a decade it turns the hills solid yellow.
Lake Superior
Isle Royale
A wilderness island in the middle of Lake Superior, home to the longest-running predator–prey study on Earth: wolves and moose, watched without pause since 1958.
Oregon coast
Cape Perpetua
A forested headland on the Oregon coast where the old growth runs right down to the rocks, and the surf, at the right tide, goes off like a cannon.
Montana
Red Rock Lakes
A high mountain wetland in the far southwest corner of Montana that quietly saved the trumpeter swan from disappearing entirely.
Colorado · Utah
Dinosaur National Monument
A wall of rock on the Colorado–Utah line with roughly fifteen hundred dinosaur bones still embedded in it, left exactly where they were found.
Kansas
Tallgrass Prairie
Almost all of the tallgrass prairie that once covered the middle of the country is gone. The largest piece left is in the Flint Hills of Kansas - because the ground was too rocky to plow.
West Virginia
Dolly Sods
A high plateau in the West Virginia mountains that looks like it was airlifted out of Canada - wind-bent spruce, open bog, and one-sided trees that all lean the same way.
Virginia · Maryland
Chincoteague & Assateague
A barrier island off the mid-Atlantic coast with wild ponies on the beach - and, every July, a swim across the channel that the whole region turns out to watch.
Maine
Schoodic Peninsula
The only piece of Acadia National Park on the mainland - all the granite-and-surf drama of Mount Desert Island, with almost none of the crowd.