By Ethan Maurice | July 26th, 2018

The phrase, “To see the sights!” is one of the most common Airbnb booking messages I receive as manager of a lodge a mile outside the northeast gate of Yellowstone National Park.

It’s a limiting, yet apt phrase, as many who visit our national parks get caught up in “seeing” a national park—reducing one of life's most immersive, transcendent experiences to simple observation.

The point is not to merely observe Yosemite's monolithic walls, the striated eons of the Petrified Forest, or Yellowstone's swirling of geologic, plant, and animal life, but to feel connected to Earth’s eternal procession. To recognize we are a part, not apart from, these fantastical displays of nature, evokes profound awe and mysticism within us that has been all but extinguished from our day-to-day lives.

I have found bottomless contentment in that wonder:

Teary-eyed, savoring each light step through Le Conte Canyon backpacking the John Muir Trail; lying under the brilliant Milky Way on Halape Beach in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, miles away from lights and every other convenience that obscures our connection to Earth; in such dry desolation in Canyonlands National Park that I felt not unlike Captain Jack Sparrow wandering the salt flats of his mind.

Simply put, many of the best experiences of my life have occurred in wilderness, many in national parks. And after witnessing so many overlook these awesome experiences in the hollow endeavor to “see” as much as possible, a few pointers on how to more fully engage with wilderness, and national parks, seem of great use.

Here are nine tips for losing yourself in a national park, from someone who wrings more from wilderness than most things in this world:

1. Leave your car behind.

John Muir once complained that it was impossible to see anything worthwhile from a stagecoach traveling forty miles a day. If John Muir cannot see anything worthwhile traveling forty miles a day, we cannot see anything worthwhile traveling forty miles an hour. The first step to experiencing the outdoors, is to get out of doors. That means leaving our cars behind and engaging all our senses.

2. Quality not Quantity.

At the end of our summer season in Yellowstone country, I help close rental cabins. In each, we leave a notebook for our guests to write about their stay. I leafed through a bunch last fall to discover that most entries included painstaking counts of animal sightings: “1000+ Bison, 6 Black Bears, 2 Grizzly Bears, 5 Mountain Goats, 17 Antelope, 7 Elk, 1 Bald Eagle, 4 Wolves, and 2 Moose.” Nothing is inherently wrong with counting animals, but this was more than counting. These were attempts to quantify experience—to measuring “success” in Yellowstone through numbers.

In wilderness, as in life, our intentions should have less to do with quantity and more with quality. It is not seeing four sunsets that matters. It's the sunset that tugged on something deeper within and for a breathless moment you could see how lucky you are to be alive and thought you could never get so lost in life's trivialities again.