Where every day’s the best day ever

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike."

— John Muir, The Yosemite

DOUGLAS — When the National Park system was born 100 years ago this month, did its pioneers foresee that a century later these 58 wilderness meccas would provide a rare respite from crowded highways, strip malls and food chains? National Parks like Yosemite, Great Basin and Denali give us the space and solace to experience the sound of a waterfall, the sight of a bighorn sheep, the scent of a pine tree and the feeling of mountain sun on your face, warming your soul.

We live near Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, recognized by the Park Service in 1916, thanks to the advocacy of William Skinner Cooper, an ecologist studying which plant life emerged after glacial succession. These days, Glacier Bay is just as beautiful as it was then, with its stunning fjords and majestic peaks, albeit disappearing glaciers.

Douglas Island, where our family lives, has no official designation as a national park, but like much of Alaska, it sure can look and feel like one. (Granted, we live in the largest national forest in the country.) Despite our proximity to nature's majesty, I tend to get distracted by house projects like weeding the yard.

On a hot summer Sunday, though, my husband, Karl, and I drove out to where the road stops on the north end of Douglas Island. We parked the truck in a nearly empty parking area and took the short walk on hemlock planks to a beach of smooth dark rocks, portable beach chairs strapped to our backpacks. The heat on the wind-sheltered shore felt California-like. We assembled the chairs and reclined, gazing on silky blue water, cold beverages in hand and salmon dip and crackers at hand. The only sound was a humpback whale, diving and surfacing a mile offshore.

We were the only people on the vast expanse, until another couple showed up with camping gear.

After a swim and more sunbathing, we hiked to a promontory overlooking miles of uninhabited rocky shoreline. Admiralty Island, the place with the largest population of brown bears per square mile in the world, was on the horizon. We were in that zone, where you are so enamored by the natural world that your "real" world falls away. Our weedy front yard didn't matter anymore. We may as well have been in a national park. But there was no gate, no fee, no park rangers.

When I was a kid in California, we camped in the mother of all national parks, Yosemite, where Teddy Roosevelt, at the invitation of John Muir, spent what he called "the greatest night of my life" in a grove of giant sequoia trees.

[In Southeast Alaska, your vacation is my life]

Twice I hiked to the top of the iconic Half Dome. There's a photograph of me taken by my dad, sitting on a strip of granite jutting out from the summit. The rest of the world is thousands of feet below. Hiking up the backside of massive monolith tops the list of great days of my life, one that began growing up in a suburb.  The last 400 feet to the top and over the hump of the dome, you grab for dear life onto steel cables that enable day hikers to reach a place otherwise accessible only to technical rock climbers. I spent the night up there, watching the sun set and rise over Yosemite Valley.

My days of hiking at least 4,000 feet have become murky memories. Now I live in a place where, merely reading in bed, I'm distracted by the view before me: sunlight illumined foggy mist rising over Sitka spruce, transcending the gloom of yesterday's rain. Revealed are a verdant, velvet fjord, and an alabaster vein of water flowing from summit to saltwater. We're in the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, along one of the most scenic coastlines, where, as our family friend Rosie puts it, everyday can be "another best day ever."

A recent how-to-visit-the-national-parks article in Sunset magazine advised readers to visit Yosemite "anytime other than Memorial Day through Labor Day." That's the entire summer. And it reminds me of a declaration I made to my daughter as we were stuck in California traffic over the July 4 weekend. "This is why we'll never live here again."

Last month, across the channel from Douglas, I joined a group organized by Parks and Rec for a hike up Perseverance Trail to Granite Creek basin. It's a moderate meander through a salmonberry Shangri-La to a valley reminiscent of a cross between rural Iceland and the foothills of the Italian Dolomites, where oh-so-green grasses ringed by slate ridges invite you up for a look-see.

David, a retired university facilities worker with a sixth sense for marmots, served as our defacto park ranger. He'd suddenly stop in the middle of the trail, peer sideways from beneath a big, floppy sun/rain hat and point to a modest promontory ahead. "There's a family of marmots," he'd announce with absolute certainty. I couldn't see anything.  Then, sure enough, came a little movement and, if we were lucky, the enchanting whistle of the prairie dog's mountain cousin.

Also in the group was Julie, a retired journalist from Douglas Island. Julie prefers group hikes in the mountains to group exercise classes at the gym.  Aside from hiking, she enjoys kayaking from her back door to wetlands. "World class birding out there," she notes. And in winter, Julie skis at Douglas Island's Eaglecrest Ski Area, loved by locals for its untracked bowls and views of peaks all the way to British Columbia.

Julie and I got to talking about the virtues of our home on the other side of Gastineau Channel. "Douglas Island for an outdoors person is a paradise," she observed. "The miles of trails; I don't know if there's another place so accessible to so much. Getting outside and enjoying the world while maintaining your physical fitness is not something readily available to most people, especially in a drop-dead-gorgeous setting."

Julie is on to something. The Municipality of Anchorage website notes some 160 miles of local, unpaved trails, while the cartographer for the City and Borough of Juneau calculates about 175 miles of trails between Douglas Island and the Juneau area. That gets my attention, considering the Juneau-Douglas population is about a tenth of Anchorage's.

["The National Parks: America's Best Idea"]

In Ken Burns' 2009 PBS series, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea", writer and ranger Shelton Johnson mused, "It's commonplace to have transcendent experiences." That was his take on places like Yosemite and Yellowstone — places I'll assume millions of Americans visit just a few precious days and remember all their lives. For the 5,000 or so residents of Douglas Island, that best day ever is ever-present.  And, like Julie, I'm forever amazed, and grateful.

Freelance writer Katie Bausler is a recent graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage MFA Creative Writing Nonfiction program, and a devoted resident of the island kingdom of rainy Douglas, Alaska.