The great American road trip is in peril

A journalist recounts a five-week, 9,000-mile family road trip across 14 national parks, made in June and July 2026, that turned into a firsthand look at how climate change is reshaping the country's landscapes. In Utah, more than a dozen wildfires forced the family to reroute around blazes like the Cottonwood Fire (94,000 acres) and the fast-growing Babylon Fire, which jumped from 300 to 16,000 acres overnight. Farther along, they saw shrinking reservoirs in Arizona, a Great Salt Lake that has lost an estimated 73 percent of its water, dead trees from bark beetles in the Sierra Nevada, extreme heat in Wyoming (110 degrees Fahrenheit in Worland), flood damage in Yellowstone, and a Glacier National Park exhibit showing the drop from 150 glaciers in 1850 to just 26 today.

The piece notes that billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. have jumped from an average of 3.3 a year in the 1980s to about 19 a year over the past decade, with 23 in 2025 alone. In Sequoia National Park, a felled tree's growth rings showed roughly one fire every 28 years over its 2,200-year life, but more than 85 percent of giant sequoia grove acreage burned between 2015 and 2021 alone, killing thousands of large trees.

For homeowners, the story is not about specific programs or rebates. It is a reminder that the wildfire, drought, and heat trends affecting public lands are the same forces driving local risk and insurance conversations at home, and that checking your own area's exposure to fire, drought, or extreme heat is worth doing before planning any trip or upgrade.