How? By riding an electric bike for a mile along the Julian Trail, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The trail is popular with hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians.
It was an accident. That old fire road is part of a vast regulatory muddle involving (a) a global boom in e-biking, especially among travelers; (b) a sudden move in August by the Trump administration to ease e-bike access to public lands; (c) an opposing lawsuit by environmental groups; (d) the labors of dozens of national park superintendents to tailor the new policy to their parks; and (e) National Park Service red tape.
As it turns out, e-bikes are multiplying faster than public agencies can make rules to regulate them, with estimated U.S. sales of $144 million in 2018. Consulting firm Deloitte predicts 130 million e-bikes will be sold worldwide in 2020-23.
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When it comes to national parks and California state parks, the rules are often site-specific. If you’re thinking of taking an e-bike somewhere cars can’t go, the prudent move is to check the National Park Service’s FAQs and the specific park’s website, then call for clarification. If you’re renting an e-bike, don’t rely on the rental company to know the law.
Renata Lima, left, and husband Lucas Lima, from Sao Paulo, Brazil, ride their e-bikes on Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Was I prudent? Well, I thought so. I read the Aug. 30 NPS policy memorandum directing park superintendents to ease e-bike access “as soon as possible” and a detail-laden Golden Gate National Recreation Area explanation of how park e-bike rules were evolving. I talked to cyclists. I left phone and email messages with the recreation area’s public information office.
But the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the busiest unit in the national park system, is complicated.
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“There are a lot of great conversations happening at the local and national level around this issue,” Golden Gate spokesman Charles Strickfaden said in an email that arrived after my ride, “so we cannot give a time frame for when we expect to finalize any e-bike approval. Until that time Golden Gate NRA cannot allow e-bikes [beyond the roads] in the parks it manages.”
Oops.
San Francisco residents Matt Dove and his son Elijah take a break from riding their e-bike at Hawk Hill. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Come to think of it, I saw mountain bikes, gravel bikes and hikers on that trail. I saw e-bikes on the road, but no other e-bikes on that trail. I’m pretty sure the rest of my ride was legal, though.
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Back on the daunting slope of Conzelman Road (legal for cars and all kinds of bikes), I felt exhilarated but oddly coddled as the e-bike motor boosted the effect of my pedaling. The views were breathtaking — the sea, the city, the bridge, the creeping fog — and my respiration was untroubled.
In fact, with the little motor humming just above my rear wheel, the killer climb to Hawk Hill was no problem. No wonder e-bikes are multiplying.
“We’re seeing more and more of them almost every day,” Tom Boss, off-road and events director for the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, had told me a few days before.
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Many traditional cyclists were “initially skeptical” about the bikes, Boss said, but “we’ve definitely evolved on it. And the reality is, they’re here. If they’re going to be out there, we want to lead on education and trail etiquette.”
Ride leader Shanna Sauer, second from right, says her bike club’s policy is “All cyclists welcome except for e-bikes.” (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
I met Kimball and Wendy Thomas, 40 and 39, respectively, of San Francisco as they prepared to zoom down from Hawk Hill with two friends visiting from São Paulo, Brazil.
The Thomases were on traditional bikes, but their friends, Lucas and Renata Lima, had just crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and climbed the hill on e-bikes rented in the Presidio.
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“Great! Sent from God!” Lucas, 30, said of his ride. “We’re not here to do sport. We’re here to look around and enjoy ourselves.”
And, said Renata, 32, “There’s nothing difficult about it.”
Although his guests were happy, Kimball said he saw plenty of reason for caution about e-bikes. If you’re limited to the speed your legs can deliver, he said, you have a lot of kinetic awareness of yourself and your bike, “and there’s a safety to that. On the e-bike, you lose some of that.”
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The motor adds about 20 pounds, so my e-bike was more cumbersome than any road or mountain bike I’ve tried. But it was quiet, used no fossil fuel and emitted no pollution. These bikes, boosters say, will allow more of us to see more of the natural world.
“This enables our lifestyle,” said Matt Dove, a 41-year-old San Francisco dad who sat atop an e-bike with his 3-year-old son strapped (and helmeted) in a child seat.
Dove, who runs a youth bike education program, said he’d spent most of his life working and playing around bikes and had started e-biking about a year ago.
“Kids that grow up in an urban context need to be taught or welcomed to love nature, and sometimes that means removing barriers,” he said. Moreover, he said, nodding at his bike and then his son, “this thing will allow us to keep riding together as my knees give out.”
For others, the administration’s e-bike green light is a hastily imposed, potentially dangerous intrusion into territory that’s always been engine-free.
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Former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis called the move part of the “systematic dismantling of a beloved institution, like pulling blocks from a Jenga tower, until it collapses.” (His opinion piece, which appeared Jan. 10 in the Guardian, was co-written by his brother, public lands advocate Destry Jarvis.)
The change could bring increased noise, trail damage, disturbance of wildlife, “high speeds, increased likelihood of collisions … and the startling and disturbance of hikers, runners, and horse and traditional bicycle riders,” advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility contends in its lawsuit seeking to block the new e-bike policy.
In that action, filed Dec. 5 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the group is joined by three individuals and the organizations Wilderness Watch, Marin Conservation League, Environmental Action Committee of West Marin and Save Our Seashore.
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The groups say the new policy conflicts with existing regulations, should have been preceded by environmental review, and is improper because the Interior Department and NPS officials who issued the policy lacked the authority to do so.
P. Daniel Smith, the NPS acting director who issued the policy, stepped down in September and was succeeded by Deputy Director David Vela.
“We strongly disagree with the premise of PEER’s lawsuit and will continue to work with park superintendents to implement our common-sense e-bikes policy,” said an NPS spokesperson in Washington, D.C.
What’s an e-bike?
E-bikes, introduced more than two decades ago, have pedals and look like traditional bikes but have small motors (typically up to 1 horsepower) that cut off once the bike reaches 20-28 mph, depending on the model.
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Some motors are triggered by the use of the pedals; others have throttles on the handlebars like a motorcycle and require no pedaling.
The National Park Service’s new policy requires that e-bike riders use their pedals, prompting this rejoinder from parks watchdog Kurt Repanshek of Nationalparkstraveler.com: “So, how many park rangers will be needed to monitor whether [e-bikers] are pedaling or not?”
By 2015, tens of millions of e-bikes were rolling in China. In the last few years, prices for low-end models have fallen below $1,000 in the U.S., more mountain-bike-style models have appeared and sales are zooming. The sales-tracking NPD Group reported that e-bike sales jumped 91% in 2017, then 72% in 2018 (to $144 million for the year).
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Many of these cyclists will be travelers. One recent survey found that tour operators were offering e-bikes on trips to the Natchez Trace, Namibia, the Swiss Alps, several Italian islands, Taiwan and the covered bridges of Vermont.
At VBT Bicycling Vacations, a Vermont-based tour operator that takes small groups on cycling trips in North America and Europe, e-bikes are now offered on 56 of the company’s 58 tours. In bookings for the year ahead, brand manager Ashlea Sullivan said, 37% of guests are requesting e-bikes instead of conventional bikes.
Where can an e-bike go in state and national parks?
In August, U.S. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt issued an order to increase e-bike access to land controlled by the Department of the Interior, including national parks and wildlife refuges. A day later, the NPS issued its policy memorandum directing parks to comply as soon as possible.
But the memo gave park superintendents the option of banning e-bikes from some bike routes for safety reasons.
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Since then, superintendents have scrambled to sort out details and exceptions. At least two dozen national parks have new e-bike rules in place — some with exceptions, some without — and more are expected in coming weeks.
Don’t expect to find e-bikes invading trails set aside for hikers. Nobody has proposed that. But in many parks, they can go everywhere old-fashioned bikes are allowed.
The speed limit on those routes is often 15 mph, a rate that both kinds of bikes routinely surpass when heading downhill.
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•In the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, e-bikes are allowed everywhere that motor-less mountain bikes and road bikes go.
•In Joshua Tree National Park, cyclists are forbidden on hiking trails but permitted on roads open to vehicles.
•In Death Valley National Park, e-bikes are not mentioned on the “biking” web page most visitors consult, but the park’s compendium — a collection of park-specific rules set by the superintendent — affirms that e-bikes can go anywhere conventional bikes go. Thus, they’re banned from all trails and wilderness areas and permitted on all roads (some paved, some gravel) open to the public. They are also permitted on the mile-long path between the Furnace Creek Visitor Center and the Harmony Borax Works.
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•In Yosemite National Park, all bikes are banned from hiking trails and wilderness areas but allowed on regular roads. And for the moment, e-bikes cannot join conventional bikes on Yosemite Valley’s more than 12 miles of bike paths.
But in coming weeks, when the acting superintendent signs a new park compendium, “we’re going to be regarding e-bikes as bicycles,” said park spokesman Scott Gediman. Until then, he said, park law enforcement will keep in mind that rules are evolving and visitors may be confused.
On April 10, the park’s two bike rental stands, run by concessionaire Aramark, will open for the season at the Yosemite Valley Lodge and Curry Village. Aramark spokewoman Lisa Cesaro said the company has no current plans to rent e-bikes.
• In Marin County, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area proposed new rules in late September and received public input through late November, but nothing has been finalized. That means e-bikes need to stay on the road and off any trails.
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“We’re trying to keep up with the technology as best we can,” said spokesman Strickfaden. “The devil is in the details.”
Most of the traditional riders I met on my ride — about 20 of them — were in favor of increased access for e-bikes.
“Anything that gets someone out of a car and onto a bike is good,” said Eric Smith, 50, of San Francisco. “It creates a bigger constituency of people for cyclists.”
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“There’s going to be an accident or two,” said Arthur Fraser, 73, of San Francisco, who has been mountain-biking since the 1980s. “The typical e-bike rider is less experienced. They’re more inclined to misjudge. … From a selfish perspective, I’d rather not see it. From a global perspective, it’s opening up these beautiful trails to more people. … As long as they don’t let scooters in.”
In California’s state park system, a spokesman said top officials are still deciding on a system-wide policy; trails are limited to pedestrians unless an individual park superintendent makes an exception.
If you go
E-bikes can be heavy and awkward to fit into a car; it’s better to ride from where you rent it.
Sports Basement San Francisco Presidio, 610 Old Mason St., San Francisco; (415) 934-2900. Of 10 locations in the Sports Basement chain, this one is most convenient if you’ll be riding across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. E-bikes rent for $45 for three hours, $65 for a day.
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Blazing Saddles San Francisco, 2715 Hyde St., San Francisco; (405) 202-8888. The company, focused on rentals and tours, has six S.F. locations. E-bikes rent for $48 for two hours, $70.40 for a day.
Sausalito Bike Rentals, 34 Princess St., Sausalito, Calif.; (415) 332-8815. A block from the ferry landing on Princess Street. E-bikes are $25 per hour, $95 per day.
New Wheel, 14 E. Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Larkspur, Calif.; (415) 524-7362. This shop, which sells e-bikes, has locations at Larkspur Landing and Bernal Heights in San Francisco. Rents e-bikes for test drives ($90-$125 per day, one to two days) weekdays only.
“Photos: Earth Day 50”
“A road trip around the landscapes of southern Namibia”
It sounds dramatic, but I mean it literally. I’m on the edge of Fish River Canyon, in southern Namibia, near the border with South Africa. This canyon, the second largest in the world after the Grand, is around 650 million years old.
Okay, so it might not be an eternity, but that’s pretty old. When a shallow basin formed in the rock, which eventually carved out the canyon – now some 550 metres deep at points – the continents of America and Africa were still joined. Fast-forward a few million years and I’m now peering into it, hoping the strong gusts of wind don’t blow me in.
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The rubbery quiver trees, fat with weaver bird nests, came later: these spindly, umbrella-like trees erupt from the gunmetal-grey slate stones that line the canyon’s edge, while the concrete balcony belonging to the chic lodge I’m staying at tonight is a mere few steps back. Helpfully, the slogan for Fish River Lodge, the only lodge in Namibia to sit on the lip of the canyon itself, is “the edge of eternity” (see?). Sink too many Namibian red wines in front of the firepit in the lodge’s open bar and restaurant, forget your torch (thankfully provided) and perhaps stumble over a dassie lurking outside your room and you’d tumble straight into the chasm, never to be seen again.
Shape Created with Sketch. The landscapes of southern Namibia Show all 17 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The landscapes of southern Namibia 1/17 Kolmanskop Kolmanskop Getty Images/iStockphoto 2/17 Deadvlei Deadvlei Getty Images/iStockphoto 3/17 Fish River Canyon Fish River Canyon Getty/iStock 4/17 Namib-Naukluft National Park Namib-Naukluft National Park Getty Images/iStockphoto 5/17 Sossusvlei Sossusvlei Getty Images/iStockphoto 6/17 Quiver trees Quiver trees Getty Images/iStockphoto 7/17 Hartmann’s mountain zebra Hartmann’s mountain zebra Getty Images/iStockphoto 8/17 Eagle’s Nest Eagle’s Nest Tom Morris 9/17 Desert horses in Luderitz Desert horses in Luderitz Tom Morris 10/17 Desert Grace Desert Grace Gondwana Collection 11/17 Ballooning in the Namib Desert Ballooning in the Namib Desert Wilderness Safaris 12/17 13/17 Heaviside’s dolphin Heaviside’s dolphin Tom Morris 14/17 Rockhopper penguins Rockhopper penguins Tom Morris 15/17 Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge 16/17 Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge Tom Morris 17/17 Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge Tom Morris 1/17 Kolmanskop Kolmanskop Getty Images/iStockphoto 2/17 Deadvlei Deadvlei Getty Images/iStockphoto 3/17 Fish River Canyon Fish River Canyon Getty/iStock 4/17 Namib-Naukluft National Park Namib-Naukluft National Park Getty Images/iStockphoto 5/17 Sossusvlei Sossusvlei Getty Images/iStockphoto 6/17 Quiver trees Quiver trees Getty Images/iStockphoto 7/17 Hartmann’s mountain zebra Hartmann’s mountain zebra Getty Images/iStockphoto 8/17 Eagle’s Nest Eagle’s Nest Tom Morris 9/17 Desert horses in Luderitz Desert horses in Luderitz Tom Morris 10/17 Desert Grace Desert Grace Gondwana Collection 11/17 Ballooning in the Namib Desert Ballooning in the Namib Desert Wilderness Safaris 12/17 13/17 Heaviside’s dolphin Heaviside’s dolphin Tom Morris 14/17 Rockhopper penguins Rockhopper penguins Tom Morris 15/17 Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge 16/17 Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge Tom Morris 17/17 Fish River Lodge Fish River Lodge Tom Morris
Fish River Canyon is possibly, maybe, I think the most spectacular landscape I clap eyes on during a two-week road trip around southern Namibia. I’ve gone south because… well, not many other people do. Anecdotally, many visitors arrive in dusty capital Windhoek before pinballing north to safari-stuffed Etosha National Park, west to the wind-blown coast and then onto the burnt orange dunes of Sossusvlei. I wanted something a bit different: to drive the great southern loop of Namibia, to take the path less-trodden. I wanted to find as many different landscapes in just two weeks as possible – easy in a wonderfully varied country like Namibia. Which is what brought me to Fish River Canyon in the first place.
After a day or so in Windhoek – really all you need in this flat, 1950s-style African capital, home to the Lutheran Christuskirche and the fun Joe’s Beerhouse, a honeypot for hungry out-of-towners – we drive south west out of the city towards the barren Namib-Naukluft National Park.
Travel in Namibia, unless you’re particularly outdoorsy, involves bouncing between perfectly situated lodges on long, long drives. Our destination, 184 miles and four hours’ drive mostly down a gravel road, is Desert Grace, a contemporary-cool lodge overlooking the charred brown rocks of the park.
And so here is the next landscape: the scrubby orange-brown flatlands of the Namib-Naukluft National Park, home to antelope of all sorts – springbok, oryx, eland – and, thrillingly, a shy dazzle of Hartmann’s mountain zebra that run across our path one dimly lit morning. Sitting on the private deck of our lodge at Desert Grace, glancing up at razor-sharp skies (oh look, there’s Orion’s Belt and the Southern Cross, a mere 88 million light years away from Earth), with a margarita in hand from the lodge’s neon-lit, urban-in-feel cocktail bar, feels otherworldly.
The Namib-Naukluft National Park, at more than 19,000 square miles big, encompasses the giant dunes of Sossusvlei in the Namib Desert, the world’s oldest. Further back in time we go. The sands of Sossusvlei, meaning “dead end marsh”, are just 50 million years old… a baby compared to Fish River Canyon.
This landscape, these burnt orange dunes inching out of the dry clay pans, are Namibia on celluloid. Despite seeing them in a hundred Instagram pictures, in person they’re even more impressive: smooth curves of sand rising high from the horizon, rendered in a boiled sweet shade of orange. Some are sweetly named things like “Big Daddy” and “Big Mama”, or there’s the more prosaic “Dune 45”, at mile 45 along the paved track from the main road at Sesriem. We drive until the road turns into sand, and from here it’s a further two kilometres to Deadvlei, the shiny white clay pan home to blackened stumps of acacia trees. They were once thriving in this valley, until the river changed course and left a cracked heel of ground, between 600 and 700 years ago. I imagine these arboreal skeletons are what my plants at home look like.
The Namib-Naukluft National Park is so vast – indeed, it’s the largest game park in Africa – that it stretches beyond the dry-as-dust Namib Desert both further south and towards the coast. Which is where we’re headed now. Our next destination is the Eagle’s Nest lodge in the Klein-Aus Vista Reserve, a mere 100 or so kilometres from Luderitz, a town developed around the region’s diamond mining heritage, now less about sparklers than seal colonies, African penguins and dolphins; and the eerie, cinematic beauty of Kolmanskop, a once-thriving miners’ town now buried almost entirely by sand.
To close the southern loop, after meandering south to Fish River Canyon, we skim through Keetsmanshoop – a nondescript town that serves us well as a stopover point for noodles and bottles of Windhoek beer, but nothing else – towards the Kalahari Desert.
The Kalahari is an entirely different desert proposition to the Namib. For starters, it’s scrubby, with lightly rolling rust-red dunes that are studded with vegetation. It’s also super-disorientating: walk a few dunes over and you’ve completely lost your bearings. The Kalahari also offers a chance to catch the big game that we’ve missed from not heading towards the safari lands of Etosha. There are giraffe, blue and black wildebeest (a confusion of them even chase directly across our path one morning) and the perennial antelopes, which happily come to feed at the watering hole of the cosy Kalahari Red Dunes lodge while we’re having a braai – a traditional southern African barbecue – on the terrace.
After almost two weeks, we’ve got two deserts, one canyon and some Imax-wide open spaces under our belts. We wind our way back to Windhoek, where our last destination is Omaanda, part of luxed-up European group Zannier Hotels, which opened in 2018 between the capital and the airport. This resort, which sells itself as safari-lite, lies in a bush-speckled private game reserve stuffed with oryx, eland, white rhinos and a pride of lions. The landscape has morphed into a scrubby savannah with the backdrop of an infinity pool and a poolside gin bar with locally made spirits (when in, er, Namibia…).
Sipping on a Desolate and tonic around the firepit, the only light for miles around, I remember what our guide, Chamberlene, at Kalahari Red Dunes Lodge told me: “You get Namibian fever and you have to come back.”
Travel essentials
Visiting there
A 10-day self-drive safari to Namibia with Expert Africa starts from £5,010pp, including car hire, accommodation, activities and some meals. International flights (involving a stopover from the UK) from £830. expertafrica.com, 020 3405 666
“New Big 5 wildlife photography project – in pictures”
The New Big 5 project is supported by more than 100 of the world’s leading photographers, wildlife organisations and conservationists. It is asking people around the world to vote for the five animals they want to be included in the new big five of wildlife photography
“Dossier: The failure of Britain’s national parks”
Britain’s national parks were born in a heady, post-war atmosphere, offering physical and spiritual refreshment for a country that had endured six long years of conflict. Our most precious landscapes were finally to be protected not just for nature, but for people to explore and enjoy.
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Yet, more than 70 years on, the health and future of the UK’s 15 national parks is now uncertain. An independent review of England’s national parks last autumn reinforced this concern. The report, Landscapes Review by Julian Glover, offered a damning critique of both the health of national parks and their management and called on England’s national parks to be made ‘greener, more beautiful and open to everyone’ and to ‘reignite the founding spirit in which they were created’. Glover, a journalist and former special adviser and speechwriter in the Cameron government, was seen as having the suitable analytical skills and the ability to co-ordinate a wide range of experts and differing views.
Climate change, biodiversity loss and a trend towards increased urban living all meant fresh ideas were needed to give England’s protected landscapes new purpose, wrote Glover. Furthermore, the report found that national parks, despite being ‘open and free for all’, could actually seem exclusive: ‘A lot more must be done to meet the needs of our many fellow citizens who do not know the countryside, or do not always feel welcome in it,’ said Glover. Above all, he called for national parks to be reconnected with the people who live and farm there with more affordable housing needed to create viable communities in villages that had seen schools, shops and pubs close down and property gobbled up by second-home owners.
The report contained some positive elements: the principle of national parks was robust enough to justify new national parks in the Chilterns, the Cotswolds and Dorset, along with the creation of a national forest in Nottinghamshire. An eye-catching proposal called for 1,000 park rangers, echoing the approach of the United States national parks. Every schoolchild in England, said Glover, should ‘get the opportunity to spend a night under the stars in an idyllic landscape.’
Visitors clamber on rocks at Dartmoor National Park, Devon
VISITING RIGHTS
If wildlife should thrive anywhere, it should be in Britain’s national parks. Yet nearly 75 per cent of the Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) in England’s national parks are in an ‘unfavourable’ condition (the total UK figure is little better, at 61 per cent). We have lost all our large carnivores and most of our large herbivores. While the global average forest cover is 31 per cent, and the European average is 37 per cent, in the UK it is just 12 per cent.
Unlike parks in the United States, none of Britain’s national parks are truly wild. More than 90 per cent of the Peak District is farmland, while the drystone walls, fields and hedgerows of the Lake District that inspired Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter have combined to create a landscape that may be picturesque but is far from natural. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) places the UK’s national parks in category V (the second lowest out of six) and defines them as ‘a protected area managed mainly for landscape/seascape protection and recreation’. In contrast, the IUCN considers its Category II rating – Yellowstone in the US, or Hohe Tauern in Austria – as being the international standard for national parks.
At the heart of Glover’s report lies what, to many observers, seems a contradictory demand: that the UK’s national parks become richer in wildlife and simultaneously more enterprising and encourage more visitors. ‘If these places are to be saved, we need to reconnect more people,’ says Glover. Yet the national parks are already heavily visited. The Peak District is home to just 38,000 people but sees more than 13m visits a year, with 20m people living within one hour’s car journey. Just over 41,000 people live in the Lake District but more than 19m people visit it each year. The South Downs is the most populated park, with 120,000 people calling it home, and receives around 16m visitors every year. Since its inception as a National Park in 2005, the New Forest has seen 14 per cent more visits; there were 13.9m trips to the New Forest National Park in 2017, with a projection that this will rise above 16.5m within 20 years. Even where national parks are well served by trains, the vast majority of visitors come by car – in the New Forest that figure is 96 per cent.
The challenges are recognised by those who promote the parks. ‘We just don’t have massive areas of wilderness,’ acknowledges Andrew Hall, campaigns officer at the Campaign for National Parks, ‘but we do have beautiful landscapes framed by man over centuries. That means the mission of our parks is less straightforward than if there were no people living in them. Enhancing our parks is inherently difficult, we will never please all the people all the time.’ Hall denies that visitor numbers are too high. ‘Visitors are a small part of the pie – intensification of farming, land management, climate change, these are having a bigger impact.’
Hall believes a balance between visitors and wildlife can be struck. ‘They are not mutually exclusive,’ he says. ‘We have to address concerns of there being too many visitors, but we also have to encourage people into the parks. There won’t be any wild areas to protect if people don’t experience national parks and, as a result, want to protect them.’
BAME VISITORS
One element of the call for greater access to national parks is unquestioned and reflects poorly on those that govern them. Barely one per cent of visitors to national parks are of BAME backgrounds and the Glover report called for action to help people from all walks of life experience the parks’ ‘inspirational beauty’ and condemned national park boards (the policy-making bodies) as ‘deeply unrepresentative’ of England’s diverse communities. Of the 1 ,000 people on the boards of National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the great majority are male, many are of retirement age and only a tiny fraction are of black, Asian or minority ethnicities. ‘This is wrong for organisations which are funded by the nation to serve everyone,’ the report notes.
‘We’ve lost the “national” from national parks,’ admits Hall. ‘They’ve become a little too local. It should be like the NHS, there for everyone.’
The CNP says the need to attract new audiences is crucial and it points to the success of its MOSAIC scheme to attract people from ethnic minorities. This identified influential leaders within BAME communities who promoted the parks.
However, funding for MOSAIC was cut in 2016. ‘There are cultural barriers, often people tell us they did not know national parks existed, or how to get to them, or that the parks were for them as much as anyone,’ says Hall.
National park boards have been criticised for other measures that have made it difficult for incomers to rent or buy property in them. These include rigorous planning laws that have made it hard to convert derelict farm buildings on the grounds that the ruins add to the landscape. On this point, however, Hall has some sympathy. ‘The first purpose of national parks is to preserve the landscapes, so it seems quite fair that they exercise their powers in this way.’ Most national parks now have rules in place designed to restrict the spread of second home ownership, including requirements to live or work in a national park before buying property.
WILD AT HEART
Support for making national parks better for both people and wildlife also comes from advocates for rewilding. ‘We believe people are part of the natural world – separating us will create a false barrier,’ says Rebecca Wrigley, chief executive of Rewilding Britain. ‘People have been influencing the land for millennia, it’s only in the past couple of centuries that we have taken more than our fair share of our ecological niche. Encouraging more people and improving wildlife are not incompatible.’
Others fear that the push for more access has been detrimental to the landscapes that those same visitors flock to see. In February, hundreds of people protest in the Lake District against proposals to allow holiday house boats on lakes, introduce a zip-wire and continue to allow off-road driving. ‘To be an effective national park you need to focus more on nature recovery than on recreation,’ says Debbie Tann, chief executive of the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. ‘National parks need to lead the way in the restoration of nature. Nature is crashing. We have insect declines. We’re over-using pesticides, draining peatlands, undermining biodiversity, all this is happening in national parks. Surely wildlife in a national park must do better than it does outside the parks? What’s the point of a national park if it is not better for nature than anywhere else?’
Yet Tann is sceptical that the health of national parks can improve unless wildlife is prioritised. She points to the New Forest, the smallest national park but one that is surrounded by large population centres. ‘From a recreational point of view the national park is great but its biodiversity is in decline,’ she says. Ground-nesting birds, such as nightjar and woodlark, are disturbed by dogs, while soil erosion and compaction is being reported both on road verges and along the busier footpaths.
The New Forest is under pressure, says Tann, because housing developments have failed to take into account the need for more open spaces for their new inhabitants. ‘Without bigger spaces, people naturally turn to the national park. The expectation was that the park can just absorb this pressure, and so it gets busier and busier. The forest is being nibbled away at the edges. The forest soils are fragile, they are rare in Europe, and not robust enough to deal with large footfall.’
More than 19 million people visit the Lake District each year
FARMING OPINION
Farming – self-evidently – is at the heart of both the landscapes of the national park and their communities and Hall believes how crops are grown and livestock reared is under greater scrutiny than ever. ‘There were things that the pioneers [of national parks] couldn’t have foreseen,’ he says. ‘In the 1950s, agriculture was seen as a benign thing, contributing to the character of the land. But since then there has been widespread intensification of farming and that has driven the degradation of these landscapes.’
Farmers listen to such views, and to their many critics, and express exasperation. The Glover report called for the creation of viable communities, which would, one assumes, have farming at their heart. Yet farmers often feel demonised. ‘People outside of farming form an opinion from social media, or what might have happened in the past when government was paying farmers to produce more,’ says Caroline Harriott, who farms a mixture of arable and livestock at Lychpole Farm in the South Downs. ‘It’s difficult for us to change that perspective. We want people to come and see the true story. We want to put the record straight. Farmers recognise the importance of wildlife and hedgerows.’
Harriott, who is the local chair of the National Farmers’ Union, has established a network of farms, that seek to grow crops and rear livestock in ways conducive to biodiversity. While she supports Glover’s call for more people to be able to enjoy the countryside, she cautions: ‘People want to walk all over our land – that’s fine. But they need to respect it and the communities that make up the countryside and give the same respect to the biodiversity of wildlife, insect and birds. Perhaps they need to look inwards at themselves. As well as questioning what farmers are doing for wildlife, they need to look at their own impacts on birds and livestock.’
‘The way debate is polarised is not helpful,’ admits Wrigley, ‘but it’s dysfunctional to have farming driven by a subsidy system designed years ago to prioritise plentiful and cheap food.’ Hard questions must be asked of farming, she says, particularly when some elements, such as upland sheep farming – a real fixture of most national parks – are only viable if supported by subsidies. In such circumstances livestock farming may be phased out and farmers paid instead to manage the land better for wildlife and for what Wrigley describes as ‘more nature-based experiences’ for visitors. ‘We need to scale up our thinking. It’s difficult to make changes of the scale that we need at an individual level – it puts huge pressure on farmers.’
PONDHEAD INCLOSURE, NEW FOREST
Enhancing wildlife while making their habitats more accessible to people is no easy task, but a small project in the New Forest has shown benefits for both humans and biodiversity. Pondhead Inclosure dates to the 11th century and was once the centre of a royal deer park. Traditionally it was managed as a hazel coppice, with the wood used to make charcoal. The inclosure is unusual, in that it is a crown freehold, which means that, unlike much of the New Forest, it is not subject to common rights. It is fenced off, which means that the New Forest’s 12,000 cattle and ponies have never been able to nibble its inviting shoots and branches.
Neglected for many years and with coppicing discontinued, the inclosure became overgrown. ‘People would never walk down these because it was dark and gloomy,’ says Derek Tippetts, who set up the Pondhead Conservation Trust to bring the coppice back to health. ‘Hazel coppices like this once covered a great deal of Hampshire,’ he says. ‘But most of it and its associated wildlife has been lost. I just fell in love with the coppice. Our prime objective has been to improve biodiversity and increase public enjoyment. We tell the public why we are there and we hold open days. With six full-time people and more than 200 signed up as volunteers, the inclosure has undergone a transformation, with almost all the hazel trees now coppiced.
The main benefit of coppicing in rotation – typically each tree is coppiced every ten years – is that a woodland with different aged vegetation attracts different species and becomes more biodiverse. Now, 32 species of breeding bird have been recorded and wildlife is returning: firecrests, goldcrests are being seen for the first time, and nightjars have nested in the cleared areas. The pearl bordered fritillary has been coaxed back.
In addition, Tippetts and his colleagues turned to the 1869 Ordnance Survey map of the forest to see where the rides (tracks) were within the inclosure and cleared these to allow access for walkers. The light allows bluebells to come through. Charcoal is now produced from the hazel and sold locally for barbecues. This is more sustainable than most charcoal sold in the UK, Tippetts points out, much of which is imported from Namibia.
‘The reasons most woodlands become neglected and lacking in biodiversity value are generally down to lack of knowledge by the landowner plus the high labour cost of restoration,’ says Tippetts. ‘A volunteer project can overcome these issues. If your woodland has public access, you also get to know the locals who use it for exercise and recreation.’
LOCAL VOICES
Disconnection is a huge problem, says Harriott. ‘People are cut off from the countryside from an early age, it’s a separation that manifests itself in adult life as the treatment of the countryside as a strange place, the ‘other’. Every town and village used to have a slaughterhouse, a butcher, baker and candlestick maker. Instead we now have out-of-town supermarkets.’
On this point at least, most are in agreement. Hall at the CNP talks of the need to improve people’s understanding of national parks ‘and how to behave in them’; and he sees merit in the proposed ranger scheme which will, he says, enable staff to visit cities and get people to love and respect national parks.
In the New Forest, Derek Tippetts, who works on a hazel coppice conservation project, believes education is key to the creation of a long-term healthy relationship between people and nature. ‘The New Forest is unique – it is steeped in history, you can lose yourself, even now I still find new things to wonder at,’ he says. ‘But it sees a lot of pressure, people tend to think of it as their right to use the forest as they see fit. The local economy is very tourism-based so you can’t do anything to affect that. The public pays for national parks so they should not be excluded from being there. There has got to be that interest in wild areas and woods for people to come. You need the young schoolchildren to come. Get people engaged and they will take pride in it.’
The John Muir Trust, which manages land around Glenridding and Helvellyn in the Lake District – one of the most popular walking areas in the whole of the UK – operates an award scheme that takes children and young adults from towns and cities and introduces them to the countryside. ‘We just need to give kids more and earlier access to wild spaces,’ says Tom Hayek, the trust’s England and Wales development manager. ‘It goes back to teaching people about landscapes. We have a nature deficit disorder. If people don’t appreciate where they are, then they won’t respect it. But if they do respect it, you have a win all round.’
Yellowstone in the US is considered the ‘gold standard’ for national parks
Even in the busiest places it is possible to balance nature and people, says Hayek. Above Glenridding, the trust has restored paths so that walkers are less tempted to skirt around boggier bits (which leads to scarring of the land). They have also encouraged fell running races to avoid sensitive areas and climbers to avoid winter routes during periods of thaw when the crags and faces are more vulnerable.
The co-operation of local people is also essential in order to improve wildlife in national parks, he feels. ‘Increasing access is not just for tourists, it’s important for people who live there,’ he says. ‘These are cultural landscapes. National parks are always going to be popular and populated. People are not going to stop coming.’ The Trust also works with commoners – local people who have legal rights, mostly to graze livestock, on land that has not been enclosed and has been communally owned since time immemorial – to persuade them to remove stock from the uplands during winter. ‘We manage juniper scrub in some craggy areas and this gives it a better chance of regenerating,’ says Hayek. Another link is the willingness of villagers around Glenridding to propagate cuttings of the wild plants that are being restored to Glenridding common as part of efforts to make the area a little bit wilder.
PUBLIC ACCESS
There will always be times when public access is detrimental to wildlife. This raises the notion – uncomfortable for some – of no-go areas, or sanctuaries, which may be seasonal or longer term. Tippetts says same harsh truths need to be faced, which may prove unpopular. ‘I’ve never seen a dog owner who says their dog is out of control but you see dogs running around in areas where birds are nesting. I see a minority of cyclists who just press on past signs that read “no access, conservation area”. I’m fully in favour of sanctuaries.’ These need not always be explicit, he suggests, but national parks can use signage or other policies to subtly nudge people elsewhere. In the New Forest, for instance, he suggests reducing the number of tented campsites within ancient woodlands.
Tann recalls how, during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, when access to the New Forest was severely limited, woodlarks were reported to be nesting in the empty gravel car parks. ‘We are certainly not saying “no” to more people,’ she says. ‘But we need to make conditions better for wildlife. It can be unpopular to say this sort of stuff. People have got used to going to certain places. The New Forest has 130 or so car parks. Why not close 30 of them during the breeding season and give birds a bit more of a chance?’
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The CNP believes there may be limited scope for this approach. ‘It’s not an idea we are inherently against,’ says Hall. ‘It may be that you get less access to some places at certain times of year. Some might be abandoned and left to go completely wild.’
Yet qualifying the concept of public access, the right of which was achieved – in England and Wales, at least – barely 20 years ago, leads conservationists on to sticky ground. ‘The question of closing access to some areas is tricky, particularly in the uplands where the Right to Roam gives pretty much open access,’ says Hayek. ‘It could be argued that if you have a greater number of more responsible users of a landscape, that is a more powerful [influence] than nobody being there at all. But we have a biodiversity crisis, so it’s a tricky one.’
Wrigley is also uneasy about people effectively being fenced off from the countryside but feels designated wild areas within national parks are still entirely possible. ‘Rewilding is not about kicking people off the land and introducing large predators,’ she says, ‘but it is about working with nature. There are many places where the footfall [in national parks] is relatively low. There’s a need for an integrated spatial policy – where does it make sense to have wild areas, where to have low-impact forestry, where you have the honeypots – so that you end up with a rich mosaic in the landscape.’
Returning to the theme of education, Hayek believes a greater understanding of the countryside can relieve some of the pressures by encouraging more adventurous visitors to explore less-trodden areas. ‘You can find your own “wild” if you know how to,’ he says. ‘If you build confidence for people to walk a bit more off the beaten track, if we make those paths better, you can reduce the pressures and you’ll soon find solitude.’
FARM CLUSTERS
Caroline Harriott took on Lychpole Farm in the South Downs 13 years ago. ‘It was just arable then, fields of set-aside land filled with weeds,’ she recalls. The landlord, she says, ‘wanted the soul put back into the farm’ and was prepared to accept a rent lower than market rates to help put this vision into practice. Over time, Harriott has converted the farm to a mix of different crops, introduced livestock and also grows pumpkins. ‘It’s not for the faint hearted,’ she says. ‘You make life harder for yourself with livestock, you need water, fences, troughs, pipes, there’s never a quiet time.’ Each year, funding enables Harriott to focus on supporting a particular species, whether that be butterflies, or a bird such as the lapwing.’
As the owner of just one farm, Harriott’s impact would be limited, but she has established a network of like-minded and neighbouring farmers. This has enabled wildlife-friendly practices to be rolled out over a meaningful area. More than 85 per cent of the South Downs National Park is farmland. ‘We are all different, what we farm, our soils and this benefits biodiversity,’ says Harriott. Six farm clusters have now been established across the national park. These groups of farmers, land managers, foresters and other local partners are able to collectively secure funding and benefit the environment in ways that they would not be able to achieve alone.
One of the first was set up around the village of Selborne in Hampshire. The cluster created habitats that benefited species such as the barn owl and harvest mouse; the latter was classed as a flagship species because it was first identified as a separate species by the naturalist Gilbert White in Selborne in 1767. ‘It’s gone back to the way farms were traditionally, with rotated crops and livestock. We’ve cut down on fertilisers and sprays because we get what we need from manure. We’ve put vibrancy back into the land. We feel we are the custodians of our beautiful landscapes. We wanted to show that you can both farm green and farm in the black.’
PROPER USAGE
Ultimately, though, excluding people from some parts of national parks goes against their raison d’être and Tann, for one, wonders if it will be in other areas of Britain where wildlife will truly thrive. ‘Perhaps it’s unrealistic that national parks can lead the way,’ she says. ‘Maybe national parks are only part of the picture. We need a lot more space for nature, not just in national parks but everywhere.’
Yet others feel such a move would send the wrong signal. Wrigley believes national parks must be at the heart of improving nature. The health of national parks is wrapped up in wider issues of climate and ecological emergencies, she argues: if you improve the former, you make progress on the latter. ‘We have to have nature recovery and enhancement on a massive scale,’ she says. ‘If we use national parks, we could be ahead of the curve as a nation. Restore ecosystems and you restore the natural predator-prey relationship and meandering free rivers. It would be shaming if national parks weren’t the shining examples of what nature has to offer.’
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That wildlife richness and improved access should be intertwined is not a new idea. John Muir – the conservationist regarded as the inspiration for the US National Parks system – recognised this over a century ago, saying, ‘Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul’. In the UK national parks’ honeypots, many might feel this is harder to achieve when someone two metres away is ‘Instagramming’ the view you are trying to appreciate.
‘In a few years’ time we can’t still have everyone driving to national parks and milling around in the same spaces,’ says Hayek. ‘There’s a risk with concentrating on the headlines. Giving every child a night under the stars is eye-catching and laudable. But the more logistical elements are key – the calls to improve public transport must not be underestimated. The knock-on effect of fewer cars is less noise and a more natural landscape.’
Tann hopes that the passage of time will prove her concerns unfounded. ‘We have always assumed that our national parks are the best place for nature but they are just not. In 20 years’ time I’d like to think that they will be. Perhaps humans need to change some of the things we do. It just needs some compromise.’
Harriott is encouraged by the emergence of localism. ‘I hope things become much more local and community led,’ she says. ‘We need to perhaps step backwards a bit in order to go forward – to an older way of dealing with life, people talking to farmers. We’re starting to see this with an awareness of eating local food produced in season rather than asparagus in December.’
Recent cultural and social trends are encouraging, agrees Wrigley, who points to movements such as Extinction Rebellion and the Greta Thunberg phenomenon. ‘It’s as though the UK suffers from cognitive dissonance. We are a country of nature lovers but our biodiversity is poor compared to that of many countries. The environment is now really high up the agenda, the pressure for change is building.’ Wrigley’s ambition is for the UK to improve its national parks to the point where some may be elevated to a higher IUCN category. ‘We can use the genius of nature to restore biodiversity. This is a huge moment of opportunity.’
“Even if you can’t travel, your Zoom meetings can”
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The free images are your mental ticket to travel. (The websites provide instructions on how to download the photos.) You just need to pick a destination or scene, preferably one that will also please the crowd on the other side of the screen. To help, we have curated a sampling of backgrounds that will hopefully move to the foreground one day soon.
Transportation
Upgrade your desk chair (really, your kitchen table chair) for a business-class United Polaris seat, one of a half-dozen images from the airline. Or give yourself a promotion and settle into the cockpit. Close out your meeting with a moment of calm: a plane wing coasting over a cushion of clouds, with no self-quarantined land in sight. If your spirit animal is a dolphin, then download an oceangoing photo from Royal Caribbean, such as one of CocoCay, the Bahamian island playground owned by the cruise line.
Nature and theme parks
Lose yourself in the great outdoors without leaving the indoors. The Wilderness Society has assembled 10 videos and 10 photos of national parks, wilderness refuges, monuments and other natural sanctuaries. Warning: You might end up hypnotizing your colleagues with the videos of swaying grass in Colorado’s San Juan National Forest and swirling clouds in the John Muir Wilderness in California. Explore the many properties and active adventures of Xanterra Travel Collection, which owns biking and walking tour companies, as well as hotels in or near national parks, such as the Grand Canyon Railway & Hotel in Arizona and Cedar Creek Lodge, which sits 18 miles outside Glacier National Park in Montana. The National Park Foundation shares six parks from coast (Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts) to coast (Olympic National Park in Washington state). The egret has landed, thanks to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which offers eight landscapes, including two of the stately suspension bridge. Even though Cinderella and Prince Charming are self-quarantining in her eponymous castle, you can still enjoy the Magic Kingdom with more than a dozen photos from Disney theme parks around the world, including Paris, Shanghai and Orlando. Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, adds a pinch of Sesame Place to its collection of soothing images, which includes a covered bridge, a lavender farm and barrels of beer at a brewery.
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Beachy and snowy destinations
With Uncommon Caribbean, you’ll be pardoned for wearing work clothes — at least from the waist up — on the beaches of such island getaways as St. John, St. Croix, Barbados and Anguilla. To avoid dragging imaginary sand into your imaginary bungalow, opt for a resort pool in St. Thomas, Nevis, Antigua or the Dominican Republic. For kicks, pretend to hitch a ride on a sailboat or sea lion in La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur in northwestern Mexico. Feel the Bahamian waves lapping at your back with tropical settings from the Nassau Paradise Island Promotion Board. Pump up the party vibe with a snapshot of a Junkanoo, the boisterous street parade celebrated throughout the Bahamas. If you’d rather be skiing than sunning, choose among eight wintry images from Liftopia. You will find perfect conditions: groomed trails, powdery snow and no crowds.
U.S. cities and states
Liven up meetings with a game of Name That State. For example, throw up a backdrop of Denali, Cumberland Island, the DeZwaan Windmill, Parkview Field or Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, and see if your workmates can pick the correct member of the union. (Cheat sheet: Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, Indiana and North Carolina.) For a city version, check out the pictures from Galveston, Tex.; Seattle; San Diego; historic New Orleans; Philadelphia (the Eastern State Penitentiary cell block . . . too soon?); or San Francisco, which includes a video of sea lions lolling on Pier 39 at Fisherman’s Wharf.
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Cultural landmarks
Become a character a la “Night at the Museum” with backgrounds from New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, such as a diorama of a giant squid doubling as a face mask for a sperm whale. Hide your Harry Potter obsession with a photo of the New York Public Library’s stuffed stacks, book train or literary lions, who are inspiringly named Patience and Fortitude. Zoom back to another challenging — but, spoiler alert, victorious — time period with the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. If you are late signing on to a meeting, you have the perfect excuse: You were helping George Washington cross the Delaware. Even if you live in a basement apartment, you can still create the illusion of height with Skydeck Chicago, the observation platform on the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower, the second-tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.
Travel trove
A number of specialized travel websites have created a grab bag of images, so you can mix it up during the workweek and keep your colleagues curious about where you might take them next: to see hot-air balloons in Cappadocia, Turkey (Virtuoso), a penguin colony in South Africa (Trip Savvy), the neon-lit skyline of Shanghai (Smarter Travel), the mysterious moai on Easter Island (Airfarewatchdog) or moonwalkers at the Space Center Houston (The Points Guy). Lifestyle photographer Gray Malin has released a handful of his pieces to the public, such as a seaplane view of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. If you need to step out of a meeting to, say, shush your barking dog or console your wailing child, don’t click off the video function. Instead, switch to Malin’s beach photo displaying the message, “I Am Busy,” spelled out in balloons.
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“10 of the best virtual tours of the world’s natural wonders”
At 277 miles in length, 18 miles across at its widest, and a maximum 1,857 metres deep, this vast Arizona landmark is grand in nature as well as name. Around 40 sedimentary layers are visible in its steep cliffs, with the oldest basement rocks formed around two billion years ago. Hike the canyon’s Bright Angel Trail via a Google Street View Trek. One of the most popular long-distance routes in the national park (9.3 miles), it zigzags up from the Colorado River to the south rim. Like with other entries in the list, wider exploration is on offer with Google Earth view, which lets users zoom in and out and click into points of interest – the peaks of Wontons Throne or Angels Window, for example – for further information. Another VR project, AirPano, has high-definition 360-degree images for a bird’s eye view of the Red Rocks.
Mount Everest, Nepal
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Screen shot from AirPano
Known in Nepali as Sagarmatha and Tibetan as Chomolungma, the world’s highest peak sits on the border between Nepal and China. Explore Everest’s south base camp in Nepal, at an altitude of 5,380 metres, with interactive 360-degree views of snowy peaks and colourful prayer flags. Via an interactive map, and a 3D rotating viewer, you can gaze at the 8,848-metre summit, plus other Himalayan peaks stretching west into Pakistan and east to Bhutan. Clicking the human-shaped icon on this page highlights all the points around the mountain range that can be explored further at ground level. Views from other peaks, including over the Imja River and mountain villages, are visible in these 360 degree images. There’s also shot of a busier south base camp – it sees about 35,000 visitors a year, after all.
The northern lights
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Northern lights at Lake Torassieppi, Finland. Photograph: Antti Pietikainen
The aurora borealis is a dazzling natural phenomenon caused by Earth’s magnetic field interacting with electrically charged particles from the sun. The lights are visible from countries at high northern latitudes, such as those of Scandinavia, Russia, Iceland, Greenland and Canada. The Norwegian Lights over Lapland project takes travellers on a five-minute journey through a series of 360-degree videos. The virtual trip starts in the Icehotel in Abisko national park, northern Sweden, heads into the wilderness on a reindeer sleigh, passing Lake Torneträsk and an Arctic birch forest on the way to a cosy wooden Sami hut at the base of Mount Noulja. A series of time-lapse videos then show the lights dancing overhead in vibrant streaks and arcs of rippling green. There are 360-degree images with a view from elsewhere in the world, including Iceland, over the Goðafoss waterfall; in Yamal and on the shore of the Barents Sea in Russia; and in several locations around Norway. You could even be lucky enough to witness the lights live via webcam in Manitoba, Canada.
Hang Sơn Đoòng, Vietnam
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A screenshot from Sơn Đoòng 360. Photograph: National Geographic
The world’s largest cave, Hang Sơn Đoòng in central Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang national park, was explored by scientists for the first time in 2009, after a local man, Ho Khanh, discovered it in 1991, but did not locate it again until many years later. Sơn Đoòng 360 is a project by National Geographic aiming to preserve the cave in digital form before it becomes subject to extensive tourism development. A trek – created from 360-degree images and atmospheric sound effects – heads through light-filled caverns, passing a 70 metre-tall stalagmite called Hand of Dog, and huge sinkhole jungles. Keep an eye out for members of the expedition crew, and take advantage of the high- definition images to zoom into details of the cave’s geology, flora – and fauna, too, if you look hard enough.
Yosemite national park, USA
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Screen shot from Google Maps
Yosemite, in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, is a diverse and spectacular natural landscape. It’s home to more than 400 species of animals, including around 500 American black bears, rare snowshoe hares and endangered mastiff bats. Granite monoliths tower over meadows, rivers and forests, including one the park’s most notable sights, El Capitan, standing over 900 metres tall with a near vertical cliff face. US climber Lynn Hill was the first person to free climb (without aid equipment) the challenging Nose route in 1993. Scale the mountain with Hill and her team, learning more about skills, techniques and equipment as you ascend to dizzying heights. The climbers jam their hands into “flakes” of rock and swing across the face to reach vertical cracks, stopping on a ledge, El Cap Tower, for the night. Explore the national park further with these 360-degree images, complete with sound effects, including sound Ahwahnee Meadow and Nevada Fall.
Zhāngjiājiè national forest park, China
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Screenshot from AirPano
The quartz-sandstone pillars of Zhāngjiājiè – pronounced jaang-jyaa-jie – were the inspiration for the floating peaks of the Hallelujah Mountains in James Cameron’s Avatar film. Their unique shape is caused by physical erosion from water, ice and the roots of trees and foliage. Take flight around these towering natural columns – some stretching up over 1,000 metres – in an interactive video tour exploring the site, and zoom into high definition 360 degree shots from the sky. The park is also home to an ancient temple from 870AD, the cliffside Bailong glass elevator, and the world’s highest and longest glass bridge, strung between mountains 300 metres up, and a busy tourist spot – though seen in these 360-degree images with fewer crowds.
Giants Causeway, Northern Ireland
This fantastical section of County Antrim’s Atlantic coastline is made up of more than 40,000 interlocking, geometric (mostly hexagonal) basalt columns. Legend has it that the unusual rock formations are the remains of a stepping-stone causeway path to Scotland, built by giants. Scientists believe they were in fact formed by lava flowing into the sea, as molten basalt erupted through chalk beds 50 to 60 million years ago. The National Trust has created a series of virtual tours, with views from Aird Snout headland and by the water’s edge in the bay of Port Noffer at different times of day. There are also sweeping views from above to explore elsewhere, including the Carrick A Rede trail and rope bridge.
Perito Moreno glacier, Argentinian Patagonia
Despite the climate crisis causing many of the Earth’s glaciers to shrink, the defiant Perito Moreno remains largely undiminished; if anything, scientists say it’s growing. Covering 97 square miles of Los Glaciares national park, it is fed by the melting waters of the south Patagonian ice fields in the Andes. A set of interactive images on 360cities, give an impression of the scale (use the white arrows to click between views), as well as the variations of blue – the less oxygen in the ice, the bluer it gets. An immersive video tour of the wilderness beyond the glacier, created by the Guardian in 2018 (above), takes viewers around the varied landscape of the protected Parque Patagonia, passing turquoise rapids, a rainbow and a pack of guanacos roaming the plains.
Ambrym volcano, Vanuatu
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Film still from Spitting Distance. Photograph: Drehxtrem/Red Bull Media House
This virtual tour ventures down into one of the world’s most active volcanoes, just a few metres from a churning 1,200C lava lake. It follows adventurers Ulla Lohmann and Sebastian Hoffmann, a couple who make documentary films, along with volcanologist Thomas Boyer, who descend together to the third terrace of Benbow, one of the main vents of the Ambrym volcano, on the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.. The short interactive film joins the team as they prepare for the expedition, travel to base camp, up to the rim beyond the jungle, into the ash plain, and abseil down into the crevice, sitting just 60m away from the lava. The longer hair-raising 25-minute documentary, Spitting Distance – The Descent Into a Raging Volcano, is also available online.
Namib desert dunes, Namibia
The swirling sculptural patterns the Namib desert’s sand dunes stretch for 31,000 square miles across the Namib-Naukluft national park in southern Africa. Some of the largest can be found in the Sossusvlei area, home to mountainous swathes of pink-orange sand, including the 388m-high Dune 7, which sits opposite Big Daddy at 325m, and Big Mamma, 198m. There are several interactive 360-degree images offering views from the giant dune ridges. The tour also includes the iconic Deadvlei, a salty clay pan backdrop to blackened, dead acacia trees; mist approaching from the sea of the Skeleton Coast; and a starlit scene showing the Milky Way.