Purple mountain majesties
January 19, 2017 10:15 AM   Subscribe

Conor Knighton is a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. During the course of 2016, he visited all 59 U.S. national parks in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. At every park, he stopped and recorded himself singing “America The Beautiful,” and made this compilation video in which you can get a glimpse of them. (Instagram) [h/t Miss Cellania]
posted by Johnny Wallflower (5 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
This was the highlight of Sunday Morning for me last year. We watched this week and it felt like there was something missing. (It also made me long for the lost days of Current TV and InfoMania...)
posted by librarianamy at 10:30 AM on January 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


Innocent, joyous, amazingly so.
posted by Oyéah at 10:53 AM on January 19, 2017


CBS Sunday Morning, forever unchanging, gets better as the Sunday morning talk shows get worse.
posted by willie11 at 11:30 AM on January 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


I was glad to see the piece on Big Bend in Texas this year. It is such a beautiful and unforgiving place. I went there many times as a boy scout and was mystified by it's serenity. Makes me want to plan a trip this year!
posted by Benway at 7:01 PM on January 19, 2017


This montage of innocent joyous fun in nature made me choke up HARD. The National Parks were my antidote to 2016, and this feels like a good bite-size expression of why.
Last January, after my dog and Bowie and apparently hope itself died and nothing else seemed to make sense, I decided to quit my job, sell my stuff, leave my apartment, ignore as much of the news as possible, get a National Parks pass and go on a year-long Great American Road Trip . It really is cliché for a reason. The experience was transformative.
The natural wonders, the purple, the mountains, the majesty, that met all my expectations. What I didn't anticipate was that I would be so moved by the humanity of the parks. Deep in my misanthropic phase, I was expecting to be annoyed by the tourists, peeved by the souvenir kiosks and dumb human garbage everywhere, but it was totally the opposite. Each park exists because people saw all this beauty and took a stand to defend it, as best they could. Even the tourists are there because they decided that taking selfies in front of those wonders was a better use of their hard-earned time and money than whatever other bullshit they have going on.
One of the last parks we visited was Teddy Roosevelt NP. It's not the flashiest park, the main attraction is T-Ro's tiny cabin. After reading the eulogy he wrote for the buffalo, which he was certain would disappear within a generation, we drove through the park and watched herds of these impossible animals grazing happily where they shouldn't be, all because of that guy in that cabin and subsequent generations of similarly inspired people. In every single park, cradled in the canyons and the streams and the woods, there are hundreds of these wonderfully human stories.
I made it to 20 of the 59 parks in 12 different states, and it went a long way to reconcile me with the US and its inhabitants. On this Doomsday Eve, I cannot recommend it enough. These places BELONG to you, GO! More than ever, the parks need you, and you need them.
posted by Freyja at 5:13 AM on January 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


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