Buy an "America The Beautiful" Pass!

If you are in the United States, or plan on visiting, and you enjoy the outdoors and the beauty of nature, buying an America The Beautiful Annual Pass is some of the best money you can spend. One of these babies will get you in at over 2,000 amazing sites all over the country, including National Parks, Forests, Wildlife Refuges, Grasslands and more, as many times as you want for a year. And it will only set you back $80! You can even get one for FREE if you are active military, permanently disabled, or an American 4th grader (part of a program to gets kids interested in the outdoors before they get too old and interested in other things).

We had guests come to visit us for a week, and we would have spent the entire $80 in the single week to go to all the places the card got us in free, including White Sands, Bosque Del Apache Reserve, and the Tent Rocks. You just need to have the pass and your drivers licence, and it covers your whole car or up to 4 adults in places that charge by the person. Kids under 16 are free all the time, but the 4th Grade Pass allows a kid to get in the whole family. The pass covers entrance fees and day use fees, and is honored by 6 federal agencies: National Park, US Forest, and US Fish & Wildlife Services, as well as BLM, Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. (BLM is Bureau of Land Management not Black Lives Matter, haha).

Seniors (62 and up) can pick up a pass at a steep discount - $20 for the year or $80 for life! Volunteers with the various agencies can also earn free passes by racking up hours on various cleanup and restoration projects. All the money from the passes goes to the parks, with most of it staying at the park where the pass was purchased. Or you can go online and get one from the NPS website. Though it's sad that America mismanages its money so badly that citizens have to pay to get into their own property, I still highly recommend this small investment. It gives you access to more hiking, cultural sites, biking, bird watching, boating or dozens of other activities than you can possibly take advantage of at thousands of our nation's most amazing places.