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When researching our Hawaii trip, the mountain tubing eco-tour with Kauai Backcountry Adventures came highly recommended. The outfitter has leased the lands of the old Lihue Sugar Plantation in order to run tubing expeditions through the irrigation ditches that once carried water from the mountains to the cane fields.

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Lihue Plantation was one of the oldest (founded in 1849) and best financed sugar plantations in Hawaii. One pound of sugar requires 500 gallons of water to be produced, so the plantation workers dug the irrigation ditches out by hand, tunneling through rock and mountainsides.

The Hanama‘ulu Ditch, the one used by Kauai Backcountry, was built in 1870. It served as the conduit…

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Zion National Park: Angel’s Landing

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Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.

So in my previous post on Scout Lookout, we established that there was no way I was climbing the narrow ridge to Angel’s Landing. My husband however, was determined to do it and my teen was on the fence. So we began the two-mile ascent to Scout Lookout at 8 AM.

While this section of the hike has a nice wide path that is paved for a good part of the way, the elevation gain makes it a tough climb. We had to take frequent breaks to catch our breath and enjoy the beautiful the view.

By the time we reached Scout Lookout and the base of the Angel’s Landing stretch, it…

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Pearl Harbor National Memorial

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When I first visited Pearl Harbor in the eighties, it was called the Arizona Memorial. In 2008, President George Bush made it part of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument which included sites in California and Alaska as well as Pearl Harbor.

Now it is a separate unit again. Legislation in March 2019 designated it The Pearl Harbor National Memorial. It is run by the National Park Service in cooperation with the US Navy. Since we were visiting only a month after the law passed, they hadn’t yet changed the sign.

The Memorial commemorates the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese and the United States’ subsequent entry…

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Vanderbilt’s Eagle’s Nest NRHP

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Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.

The Vanderbilt family, building on the shipping and railroad business started by Cornelius Vanderbilt, became prominent during the Gilded Age (the period after the Civil War.) William K. Vanderbilt was a great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt and he built Eagle’s Nest on the Long Island Sound in 1910 as his summer home.

I’d previously visited the Hyde Park and Biltmore Vanderbilt mansions…those were built by grandsons of Cornelius, uncles to Centerport’s ‘Willie K.’ Some friends and I were looking for a rainy-day activity on Long Island’s North Shore, so we headed to the Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium and took the guided tour of Eagle’s Nest.