Mikah Meyer is making a record-breaking attempt in a battered Hyundai his father left him when he died, hoping to highlight parks for gay people and millennials

'Eat, Pray, Love' in the USA: meet the man visiting all 413 national parks in one trip

There was the night when something big was sloshing around ominously in the river next to his tent and he was too terrified to look out, but knew wolves and moose were at large.

Then there was the sweaty night when he thought he would bake to death in his van but was too scared to open the windows because he was parked in a sketchy neighborhood in Ohio.

He’s cried in a Panera Bread in Michigan and laughed under a palm tree in the US Virgin Islands, been wowed by the Atlantic views in Maine and underwhelmed by sleeping in a Walmart parking lot in … well, all over.

Mikah Meyer is less than a quarter of the way through his epic, record-breaking attempt to visit all 413 US National Park Service sites in a single trip, but the journey has not been short of adventure so far.

He hasn’t even reached classics such as Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains or the Grand Canyon yet, and Alaska and Hawaii await.

The encounter with the Sloshing Thing wasn’t somewhere like Yellowstone, as you might expect, it was in the obscure Isle Royale national park, an island in Lake Superior.

“I’m pretty sure it was a moose. I wasn’t keen to find out for sure,” Meyer said. Fortunately, it didn’t trample him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mikah Meyer’s itinerary . Photograph: Courtesy of Mikah Meyer

He began his journey in the spring and weaved through the upper midwest, then New England for fall colors and south to New York and Washington DC.

He had just arrived in St John in the US Virgin islands on Tuesday, fresh from snorkeling over a coral reef in neighboring St Croix that was designated as a National Monument by John F Kennedy after a presidential visit.

“I sampled a beach on every side of the island,” he told the Guardian, adding a note of apology to the millions of Americans in the grip of the first big winter freeze.

Meyer, 30, grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and began taking long road trips at 19, shortly after his father died at 58 from cancer and he inherited his 2001 Hyundai Elantra “tattered from prairie hail storms”.

On one very early trip he narrowly escaped frostbite and hypothermia under canvas in California’s Joshua Tree national park, and while in Grand Teton in Wyoming he suddenly found himself just 20 feet from a bear cub.

“Mama bear was nearby digging into a tree and, thank God, she didn’t see me. I backed away behind a bush and then ran and ran, ending up in a dense forest feeling like Katniss Everdeen in the middle of the Hunger Games, panicking that I was still being chased,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stargazing at Theodore Roosevelt national park. Photograph: Courtesy of Mikah Meyer

Nevertheless, he fell in love with the open road and America’s wilderness and although he has been to many parts of the world he settled on the idea of going to every single park, monument, battleground, historic site, seashore, etc within the National Park Service (NPS).

He aims to complete the odyssey in 2019 as the youngest person to do so and the only one to touch base with all 413 designated NPS locations on a continuous trip.

Meyer is traveling in tribute to the fact that his father never reached retirement, when he had wanted to see a lot more of the country and its national parks, and in recognition that road trips helped him through his bereavement.

He also hopes to highlight the national parks for some of the groups that apparently under-utilize them – gays and millennials, which he embodies in one.

“Just two months after I started my trip in April, President Obama named the Stonewall Inn as a National Monument. As someone who is openly gay and was at his 2013 inauguration when he paid tribute in the same breath to Seneca Falls, marking women’s rights history, Selma, for African American civil rights and Stonewall for lesbian and gay liberation, I became tearful,” Meyer said.

The former two already had their places in the National Park Service. Now a plaque outside the old bar in New York marks it as a national monument, commemorating the riots sparked there in 1969 and “the birth of the modern lesbian and gay rights movement”.

Having swung by the Stonewall in the fall, Meyer is now lobbying furiously via government-worker friends of his in Washington for an invitation to meet Obama in the White House, to say thank you in person for the leaping advancement of LGBT rights that have occurred under his administration.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mikah Meyer hiking the Caprock Coulee trail in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt national park. Photograph: Courtesy of Mikah Meyer

The home of the president is also part of the national park system and would be the 100th site bagged by Meyer on his journey.

He said he’s had no anti-gay abuse on social media so far but has had gratitude from young gays writing to him from rural and small-town America.

“Growing up in Nebraska as a gay son of a pastor, I didn’t know anyone who was openly gay and I thought the only examples of that were models in Speedos, men with Aids and drag queens. I want kids to see me and know it’s OK to be gay,” he said.

Meyer didn’t come out as gay until he was 22, three years after his father died, but said that as a pastor who was known for being open-minded, he hopes his father would have been okay with it. His mother still lives in Lincoln and they don’t really talk about it, he said.

Any trolling he’s received has been to castigate him as a “lazy millennial or a trust-fund baby”, he said.

In fact the only thing he got from his father was that battered Hyundai.

He saved up over four years working as a professional singer at the Washington National Cathedral and a school administrator. Now he’s relying on those savings, donated funds and services along the way and “eating lots of sandwiches”, he said.

Joy, clay and nudity: a weekend in the woods with LGBT faeries of color Read more

Meyer met a boyfriend before he left DC, who has accompanied him on and off, and he meets up with old friends and makes new acquaintances as he travels.

In the new year he’ll begin making his way west and has a date to go rafting down the Grand Canyon in June. His favorite spot so far has been the remote Sleeping Bear Dunes national lakeshore in northern Michigan, with its azure waters and spectacular sand.

Some of the nicest surprises have been strangers who pinged him on social media to share local secrets on the best hiking trails and viewpoints, and gay and lesbian park rangers who’ve thanked him for elevating the NPS.

“You don’t need to ‘eat, pray, love’ in Italy, India and Indonesia to have a transformational experience or meet interesting strangers” Meyer said, joking about Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller charting her physical and emotional journey post-divorce.

On Donald Trump’s election victory he was restrained but hoped, pointedly, that in office the new president will protect the treasured parks legacy “for all Americans to enjoy”.