This is a quick rumination after spending a day at one of this nation’s greatest attributes – its national parks.

In 1872, President Ulysses Grant established the world’s first national park – Yellowstone, mostly in Wyoming, but with small portions in Montana and Idaho. It was designed to preserve some of the beauty of this nation while there was still the chance – stopping overwrought from tapping these lands purely for profit.

I haven’t been to a lot of U.S. national parks. But I have been to Yellowstone and Grand Teton in Wyoming, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon in Arizona, Joshua Tree in California, Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, Shenandoah in Virginia and Haleakala in Hawaii.

There are all treasures. They are also an example of the wonders creative thinking can perform when it comes to making a better place to live.

The proponents of Yellowstone feared that the area of the Rockies would suffer the fate of Niagara Falls, which had already become a seedy tourist trap obscuring the magnificence of the waterfalls. Designating Yellowstone a national park not only protected Old Faithful and the grizzly bears from unscrupulous profit-seekers, but it gave a boost to tourism as an American industry.

The park I went to today was clean and beautiful. It left me – a city boy – in awe of what natutre can create. And it made me grateful that someone in the 1870s thought enough to preserve our natural heritage so that Americans they’d never meet would marvel at these wonders.

Would that we approached all our problems in the same way – getting ahead of them and protecting them from the unscrupulous and exploitive.

I’ll write more about this in the future. But for now, consider packing your loved one(s) into the car and exploring the most beautiful array of parks in the world.