ABOUT AN HOUR from Disney World, Florida preserves another world: the swamps and live-oak hammocks of Lake Kissimmee State Park, bobcats screaming in the night. Not far from Houston, Brazos Bend shelters wild boars, flamingos and gallinules, alligators numerous and formidable.
Stillwater State Forest sells its timber for the benefit of Montana schoolchildren - and offers visitors "more deer, more moose, and more bears" to look at than its storied neighbor, Glacier National Park. At Sinks Canyon State Park, Wyoming, a midsummer camper finds a solitude enriched by birdsong and river music - just a day's drive from the throngs of Yellowstone and the Tetons.
America's Outdoor Wonders is a story of our state parks, a choice sampler of surprising range and diversity. Some are known the world over: Niagara Reservation in New York, now the oldest state park; Adirondack Park, a historic pleasuring ground, with its 2,000 lakes and 46 mountains over 4,000 feet tall; the fluted cliffs of Na Pali Coast State Park in Hawaii. Many others, though locally cherished, are scarcely known outside of their regions.
They vary widely in theme and size. New Salem relives the years Abe Lincoln spent in the Illinois village. Fort Robinson, Nebraska, recalls the thunder of cavalry, the days of Dull Knife and Crazy Horse, the twilight of the great Sioux Nation. Anza-Borrego, 600,000 acres of desert badlands and mountains, encompasses half the acreage in the California state park system. Chugach State Park spreads a wild mountain realm at the very doorstep of Anchorage, Alaska. In New Mexico, Rock Hound State Park invites collectors to hunt for its treasures and - within reason - to carry them off.
In no small measure our state parks are a gift of the Great Depression. In those years when people were desperate for jobs, peaceful armies of the Civilian Conservation Corps went to work restoring and beautifying the land. Their handiwork still stands. At West Virginia's Watoga State Park visitors wind through dense forests planted by the CCC, stay in cabins hand-crafted from chestnut logs, with hand-hewn furniture and hand-forged hardware. In Mississippi, CCC veterans return with pride to the Tishomingo State Park they built with the strength of their youth. The memories are golden - toil, comradeship, antic days. Across the land the legacies are green - lands redeemed, well wooded and watered, outdoor wonders.
Paper birches with red and sugar maples bring fall color to New York's Adirondack Park in early October - one instance of the outdoor beauty found in state parks throughout the nation and throughout the year.