Celebrating 110 Years of the National Park Service With a Summer of Postcards

This summer, we tried something a little different.

We called it the National Park Travel Club, and joining was pretty simple: send us a postcard from your travels, and we'd send a little something back. A patch, a sticker, and a note welcoming you into our community of people who love getting mail and getting outdoors. We weren't exactly sure what to expect. Then the postcards started showing up.

They came from national parks, small towns, big cities, roadside stops, and a few places well beyond the U.S. Some had stories scribbled across every available inch. Others just said hello. We pinned them up as they arrived, and before long, we had this wonderfully imperfect record of where everyone had been. That's really what we hoped the Travel Club would be about. Not checking parks off a list or taking the biggest trip. Just going somewhere, collecting a memory, and sharing a little piece of it with someone else.

Now summer is winding down, and so is this year's Travel Club. As luck would have it, we're wrapping things up just as the National Park Service celebrates its 110th birthday.

That feels like a pretty good reason to spread out the postcards one more time and celebrate all the places you've been.

Thanks to everyone who sent us a little trail mail this summer. We had a lot of fun opening it.

Happy 110th, National Park Service. And here's to wherever we all go next.