#coastal-trails

#coastal-trails

"It's not exactly a dream vacation to come and be harassed by mosquitoes," says Hervé Bossin, director of the medical entomology laboratory at Tahiti's Institut Louis Malardé.

"They didn't even try to fly away. They just feebly made noise," a woman told the Santa Barbara Independent on Saturday after spotting over two dozen dead or dying cormorants near Goleta Beach. "A few were on their stomachs, wings spread [and] gasping for breath.... Heartbreaking."

San Sebastián, the capital of La Gomera, served as Christopher Columbus's provisioning point in 1492, with historical sites like the Columbus House Museum and Torre del Conde nearby.

These reefs are living, breathing snapshots of a watery world that you can peek into: refreshing oases where the noise of the land falls away; in its place, an intricate and utterly at-ease slice of life that you're lucky enough to witness.

Bryce Canyon National Park is home to the world's largest concentration of hoodoos, making hiking here feel like you're on another planet. I recommend hiking around the rim to take in the vastness of the spires.

Abiqua Falls is a stunning 92-foot waterfall that tumbles over a wall of columnar basalt into a wide pool, perfect for swimming. The surrounding area features a pebbled beach that provides breathtaking views of the falls and lush greenery.

Get up early to drive into the hills and park in the main lot, which opens 30 minutes before sunrise. This will leave you with enough time to make your way to the peak through the wildflower-scattered trails and watch the sunrise over the Bay.

For 2025, there was good news and bad news: overall, these areas were visited 323 million times over the course of the year. That's the good news; the bad news is that this figure was down ever so slightly - specifically, 2.7% - from a record-setting 2024.

Last night I had a dream and you were in it, and I was in it with you. I was doing the packing I never did. Not sure how it started, that's how dreams go. But I was nervous that you might show up. Just like you were nervous I'd be there. Eventually you did show up, but your head was buzzed and dyed orange.

Wildlife populations are in decline. Recreation sites are crowded and often underfunded. Wildfires are larger, more destructive and harder to control. Climate change is reshaping natural systems, from ocean fisheries to mountain snowpacks, faster than institutions can respond. At the same time, communities are being asked to host new energy projects, transmission lines and mineral development - often without clear processes, adequate resources or trust that decisions are being made in the public interest.

Growing up in the midsize city of Vancouver, Canada, I always dreamed of living in a big metropolis - a cultural hub where something was always going on, with endless places to explore. For a while, I did. When I started dating a Brit, I moved to his hometown of Birmingham, England, the second-largest city in the UK population-wise, with over a million residents.

The body is a shifting landscape transformed by surfaces and sensations. Each look captures a different tactile world: the heat of blood, the cool weight of metal, the yielding drift of water. The result is a sculptural study of how the elements carve, shield, and release the self. The materials we embody become the emotions we carry, and the body becomes a materialised exhibition of our emotions, from the pulse of Blood to the discipline of Metal to the surrender of Water.

Not only do we have an amazing trail with 10 waterfalls (four of which you can walk behind), but it's a great place to see and learn about plants and wildlife. We also have several historic buildings that are open to the public-all built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s and 1940s.

It looked like the silvery blade of a knife. Peering through his goggles, diver Ted Judah had laid eyes on a deep-sea creature rarely encountered by humans. He and wife Linda were diving off McAbee Beach in Monterey County in late December when, near the surface, he spotted the undulating thing. It was some kind of ribbon fish, he wrote in a post on the Facebook group Monterey County Dive Reports. Kevin Lewand solved the mystery.

For decades, whale watching has been a seasonal ritual along the Sonoma Coast, drawing locals to wind-swept bluffs, binoculars in hand. Now the pastime has earned national notice: Travel + Leisure has declared Sonoma County the best place in the country to see whales. In a story published Feb. 3, the magazine said there is "no better place" in the United States for whale watching than the stretch of coastline

The idea that hiking trails are a tool for conservation is based on a simple premise: people protect what they know. That requires making conservation areas accessible. There's no point telling people you only protect what you know, if you don't give them the tools to know. The trail is this tool. People who hike, people who camp, these people often become defenders of the environment.

For travelers looking to get to know the many-varied charms of the Golden State, discovering it through the best beaches in California is never a bad idea. The state's coastline spans a vast 3,427 miles after all. Among its 420 public beautiful beaches are plentiful opportunities to swim, lay out, look at tide pools, surf to your heart's content, or watch the sunset.

Many of them were built for purposes that no longer exist - cattle drives, mining prospecting, early U.S. Forest Service fire patrols - while others were packed by the footprints of the Chumash people well before the colonization of North America. Sections of trail cling to steep slopes that seem to barely resist gravity, shedding soil and stone with each winter storm.

California marked a milestone this month with the return of an uninterrupted Highway 1 through the perilous, yet spectacular cliffs of Big Sur. The famed coastal road was closed for more than three years after two major landslides buried the two-lane highway, and it took unprecedented engineering might and precarious debris removal to once again connect northern Big Sur with its southern neighbors.

I'd been on the island for less than a week when I opened my glove box looking for sunglasses, only to find the wrapper of my emergency granola bar torn open and the corner nibbled, right next to a neat little pile of mouse droppings. As I inspected the rest of the car, I was mortified to realize it was likely more than a single mouse. I texted the friend I was housesitting for in disbelief. "Ugh, I'm sorry! That's so island," she wrote back.

The Creole Nature Trail is a 180-mile scenic byway that cuts through Louisiana's Cajun Country, also known as Acadiana. The area, which is often called "Louisiana's Outback," is different from the Louisiana you thought you knew; instead of bayous, this part of the state is home to vast marshes, coastal prairies, waterways, and undeveloped Gulf beaches. And it's all accessible off of the Creole Nature Trail.

AllTrails, a hiking app with trail maps and reviews, dug into insights from their 90 million-plus members and team of trail experts to spotlight lesser-known places where the trail alone is worth planning a trip around. Their guide, Travel-Worthy Trails for 2026, spotlights eight unexpected destinations around the world where the trail is the destination.