You’ve probably car-camped in one with your family, contemplated rock formations with friends in another while high as a kite, or hiked through their ancient trees and desolate peaks. Our national parks are turning 100, and today this vast network of rugged landscapes, biblical weather swings, and roving wildlife represents some of the last places where we can still come face-to-face with a vision of America as it once was. Here, a few vocal partisans (some of them from our archives) testify to the parks’ continued power to shock and awe.

Russell Banks, September 1994

On Everglades National Park, Florida

“Out on the Anhinga Trail, the only sounds you hear are the wind riffling through the saw grass and the plash of fish feeding on insects and one another and the great long-necked anhingas diving or emerging from the mahogany waters of a sluggish, seaward-moving slough. You hear a hundred frogs cheeping and croaking and the sweet wet whistle of a red-winged blackbird. A primeval six-foot-long alligator passes silently through the deep slough to the opposite side, coasts to a stop in the shallows, and lurks, a corrugated log with eyes. An anhinga rises from the water and flies like a pterodactyl to a cluster of nearby mangrove roots and cumbrously spreads and turns its enormous wings like glistening black kites silhouetted against the noontime sun. It’s mid-May, yes—but what century?”

Terry Tempest Williams, April 2012

On Grand Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, and Arches National Parks

“In the end, it may be solitude that the future will thank us for—the kind of solitude our ancestors knew; solitude that inspired in their imaginations the creative acts which made our survival as a species possible.”

Sue Halpern, September 2009

On Yellowstone National Park, Montana

“A few years ago, my daughter and I hiked up Mount Washburn. It was a glorious summer day, and although we had planned to climb no more than halfway, the top of the mountain beckoned. Standing at the summit, we had a tremendous sense of accomplishment—and if the adventure had ended there, it would have been sublime. But mountains and mountain weather have a way of changing the story, and almost as soon as we started down, dark clouds sizzling with lightning charged across the valley like an advancing army. The rain arrived first, sheets of it, and then the wind picked up, sending those sheets sideways. We joined hands and ran down the trail, counting the seconds between a flash of lightning and the sound of it, until they were the same thing. We were well above tree line, completely exposed, running for our lives and feeling hunted—the most primal fear. We made it, obviously, but just barely. As soon as we reached the parking lot and dashed into the car, a bolt of lightning shot by overhead, entered the ground, ran up the roots of a nearby pine, and exploded out of the earth like a missile. And so, instead of leaving the mountain triumphant, we left it feeling grateful and stupid and humble and rightfully small in the face of the powerful, wild, spectacular indifference of the natural world.”

Guy Martin, April 2010

On Joshua Tree National Park, California

“Through the netting, we can see the Milky Way stretching in a symphonic arc east into high, bright space, a staggering view of the cosmos, but as we see it, fighting to sleep in God’s own aerodynamic test tunnel, the cosmos is a huge joke of which we are the butt.”

Great Smoky Mountains National Park Getty

Francine Prose, August 1993

On Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee