Lost with Lydia

Lost with Lydia A travel blog focused on outdoor travel, hiking tips and hidden gems!
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06/17/2026

Add this unique adventure to your national park bucket list!

This adventure with involves rafting down a class III river, enjoying a beautiful picnic on a remote beach and then getting picked up in a bush plane! 🛩️(hosted)

It was incredible to get a little deeper into the wilderness of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. We didn’t see any other people for miles. We enjoyed rocky cliffs, saw some beautiful birds, and admired the beginning of the leaves changing in the surrounding mountains.

And I was beyond impressed by the epic picnic set up by our guides… nothing like fresh fruits and veggies in the backcountry!

We ended the journey with our own personal pick up service from a bush plane. On the way back, we flew over the river we just rafted on, and over the Root Glacier. It was the perfect day!

Details 👇

💲The raft + flightsee trip with is $433 per adult and lasts about 7 hours
🏠You’ll leave from McCarthy in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park
📅Offered daily between June 10th and September 1st
🚣The guides do the paddling for you, so you can sit back and relax!

Would you enjoy this adventure?

06/15/2026

These were the 10 least visited national parks in 2025! Do any of them surprise you?

I’m grateful to have been to all of them, and 7 of them within the last year! I think that they’re all worth a visit. However, I can understand why most of them are the least visited… a lot of them are very hard and expensive to reach.

Here is a little bit of information about each one:

⛰️Great Basin, NV
⚪Home to a beautiful cave and hiking trails that feature alpine lakes, a glacier, a 13er, and more.
⚪Receives few visitors due to its remote location… the park is several hours from a major airport, and truly feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere.

🧊Wrangell-St. Elias, AK
⚪The largest US national park! I had an amazing time rafting, ice climbing, hiking and touring a historic copper mill.
⚪Receives few visitors due to its remote location. Most visitors arrive by driving on the infamous McCarthy Road, which can be rough. The drive is 7-8 hours from Anchorage.

🏝️Dry Tortugas, FL
⚪A beautiful park off the coat of Key West. It’s home to a fort and great snorkeling.
⚪You can only reach this park via ferry or seaplane, and the ferry often sells out a couple months in advance.

🏔️North Cascades, WA
⚪A STUNNING place to hike and backpack, home to many mountain peaks, alpine lakes, and more
⚪The most easy to access areas are actually in recreation areas, so I feel like the visitation number is slightly misleading. The park is an easy drive from Seattle, but the main roads are not all open year round.

🐟American Samoa
⚪A beautiful park home to volcanic rocks, beautiful snorkeling and adventurous trails
⚪This park is not quick to reach. It’s located a 5.5 hour flight from Hawaii, and the flights don’t run everyday.

🐻Katmai, AK
⚪Incredible park where you can watch brown bears catch salmon
⚪You’ll need to take a small plane, and it’s expensive

⛺Isle Royale, MI
⚪Great park for backpacking and seeing wildlife
⚪Only reachable via ferry or seaplane

🌋Lake Clark, AK
⚪Another remote Alaska park home to lakes, mountains, volcanoes and wildlife
⚪Typically reached via an expensive

Sloths, colorful birds, waterfalls, cloud forests… Costa Rica is magical 🌈🦥🦜I spent a week exploring Monteverde, La Fort...
06/15/2026

Sloths, colorful birds, waterfalls, cloud forests… Costa Rica is magical 🌈🦥🦜

I spent a week exploring Monteverde, La Fortuna, Rio Celeste, and more stops along the way, and I can’t recommend it enough. Steal my itinerary for your future visit!

Any questions about visiting Costa Rica? Let me know! 👇

06/13/2026

Would you walk on a catwalk 851 feet in the air?

This is the New River Gorge Bridge, located in New River Gorge National Park, and it’s the third highest bridge in the US!

This was my second time doing the bridgewalkwv, and I think that it offers such a neat perspective! You’ll be safely harnessed in, so there’s no way to fall.

Here are the details:
💸Starts at $79 per person
🚌You’ll walk one way across, and then you’ll be bussed back over the bridge
🥶Consider that is might be windier on the bridge - we were SO cold this time

Would you do this? The insta360 makes it look worse than it is!

06/11/2026

I went to the LEAST visited US national park! But unfortunately, I couldn’t set foot there 😢

Don’t get me wrong, flying over Gates of the Arctic and doing a brief landing in Kobuk Valley was a great experience overall. The landscapes here are stunning and it’s incredible to be somewhere so remote and mostly untouched.

The part of Gates of the Arctic we saw was full of braided rivers that were a brilliant aqua blue, and it was surreal to see a HUGE area of sand dunes in the middle of the arctic wilderness in Kobuk Valley.

However, this trip wasn’t cheap, so I would only recommend it for those trying to see all 63 national parks. You’ll need to take a small plane to reach these parks, so it’s going to be expensive no matter which operator you go with. I paid $1,750 per person (with Golden Eagle Outfitters) to visit these parks, and that doesn’t include our flight from Anchorage to Kotzebue and hotel in Kotzebue.

What do you think? Would this be worth it for you?

(Btw, I’ll finally be posting a full budget breakdown for all 7 Alaskan national parks that I’ve visited next week!)

Have you been to Madison, Wisconsin? It's a town that might surprise you! From lakes to delicious food, there is a lot t...
06/10/2026

Have you been to Madison, Wisconsin? It's a town that might surprise you! From lakes to delicious food, there is a lot to do in Wisconsin's capital city.

Plan the perfect weekend getaways to Madison, Wisconsin! This Madison travel guide includes delicious food, hiking near Madison and more.

06/09/2026

I went on an epic road trip around South-Central Kansas and was blown away by all of the unique places we went!

(hosted by Kansas tourism)

Here are 6 epic places to go in South-Central Kansas:

🕳️Take an underground tunnel tour at the These tunnels were built by German settlers in the late 1800’s and were used for a variety of retail spaces. They’re said to be quite haunted today 👻 (they also have an epic haunted house set up there right now!)

🌳Sleep in a treehouse at the Next door to the treehouse, is a large barn you can rent where each bedroom has a different theme!

💃Admire dala horses, shop for Swedish goods and learn about Swedish culture in One of the best times to see Swedish dancing is this weekend at the annual Svensk Hyllningsfest!

🧂Tour an underground salt mine at The underground museum has movie costumes that are stored there due to the good conditions. Plus, you can take both a train and a tram to learn all about what goes on here. Salt is still being mined here today, mostly for icy roads.

🚀Visit which has one of the largest collections of both US and Russian space artifacts. It compares the early space exploration of both the US and Russia, and they even have the Apollo 13 command module (on loan from the Smithsonian).

🦬Get up close to a bison herd at You can take their tram tour through the field and admire bison, wildflowers, elk and more!

Did you know you could find all of this in Kansas? See my stories for more Kansas adventures!

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