With the addition of the Great Basin National Park’s EV Travel Guide, we’ve now covered both the top ten most and least visited national parks! Sadly, a number of the parks in the bottom ten are in remote areas of Alaska and are simply not reachable by car, so they all got put together in one placeholder guide. But, there are guides for the rest.

The next step will be to make sure every state has at least one park in each state with a guide written. After that, parks will be added by reader demand and by our own interests. If there’s a park you’d like a guide written for sooner, be sure to reach out in the comments or on social media!

After taking some time to visit two national parks and one recreation area in an EV over the last few days, I made some updates and improvements!

First off, I updated Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains national parks with new information and updated photos from my visit. There’s no much more information about attractions nearby, especially on the backroads behind both parks. I have more trips planned for that area in the fall and will be adding more and updating. An important thing I added to both pages was information about the Guadalupe Rim, a great but rugged path into the area.

Another important thing I did was add a page for a very underrated recreation area near Socorro, New Mexico: San Lorenzo Canyon. There, you’ll find a very nice set of sandstone canyons that almost any EV can not only get to, but drive in the bottom of!

We’re chugging along with EV travel guides, and now we have the top ten national parks (by 2023 visitor numbers) covered. These parks (among others with guides) are:

1. Great Smoky Mountains National Park
2. Grand Canyon National Park
   1. North Rim
   2. South Rim
3. Zion National Park
4. Yellowstone National Park
5. Rocky Mountain National Park
6. Yosemite National Park
7. Acadia National Park
8. Grand Teton National Park
9. Joshua Tree National Park
10. Olympic National Park

Our next steps will be to cover some of the least visited national parks, and then try to seek your input on what parks to cover next. Also, we’ll be starting on the first trip logs to the national parks in just a few days, where we’ll link to trips we’ve taken and work to improve the guides.

Featured image by NPS (Public Domain).

I’ve been busy adding more EV travel guides to the website, including one that isn’t really a guide.

Let’s talk about the guides, first! We’re now up to 11 parks covered, now including the top 5 most visited parks. These parks so far are:

• Great Smoky Mountains NP
• Carlsbad Caverns NP
• Guadalupe Mountains NP
• White Sands NP
• Gila Cliff Dwellings NM
• Saguaro NP
• Grand Canyon South Rim
• Grand Canyon North Rim
• Zion NP
• Yellowstone NP
• Rocky Mountain NP

You’ll notice that I split Grand Canyon into two pages, largely because the north and south rims are so different from each other. Sure, they’re only 10-20 miles apart, but the drive from one to the other is over 200 miles and takes several hours. So, it made sense to make sure it’s clear that one is easy to reach while the other can be reached only with some extra work.

Another page I added was for the least popular national parks, and most of them are in Alaska. It’s not that these parks aren’t amazing as much as that they’re super tough to get to. ICE cars can’t even get to them, even if they’re the best four wheel drive off-roading machines. So, it made sense to cover these all at the same time so that people can see why we skipped over so many parks and monuments in that state.

The good news? Three of them can be reached by EV, so I’ll cover those soon.

Right now, I’m working on covering the rest of the top 10 visited parks, and then I’ll start working on the 10 least visited parks. After that, I’ll work on getting the rest of the national parks covered!

I also added a page describing the mission and purpose of Charge to the Parks. You can read that here.

Featured image by the National Park Service (Public Domain).

So far, four parks’ worth of information for EV drivers has been added to the map and list, and the basics of EV backroad driving is now live!

Parks added so far:

• White Sands National Park
• Guadalupe Mountains National Park
• Carlsbad Caverns National Park
• Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument

Next up is Saguaro National Park, followed by some parks further away from this cluster of parks to spread things out a bit. This project will take several months to finish, along with other plans for this site. Stay tuned!

Featured image on this post: White Sands National Park from the nearby Sacramento Mountains. Image by Jennifer Sensiba.