Agran tour of 63 national parks
Until she was 85, Joy Ryan never strayed far from the Ohio home where she grew up without electricity or running water.
‘‘I grew up out in the country, tending cows and hoeing corn,’’ she said. She married, raised three children and ran a gift shop, in the back of which her husband made hats and shirts. As a holiday they would go to a fishing hole.
Then, widowed and working in a grocery store to help cover the bills, she told her grandson Brad that she had never seen a mountain.
In the past seven years, they have formed a travelling partnership to rival the great adventurers of the age. They have driven 80,000km across the US and visited 62 of the country’s 63 national parks. Only the National Park of American Samoa remains. To get there she has got a passport for the first time in her life. ‘‘I never thought I would be shooting the rapids,’’ she said, speaking from a hotel in Baltimore. ‘‘It was like a rollercoaster.’’
Brad, 41, a veterinarian who lives in Washington DC, had not planned so grand a trip. He had offered to show her a mountain at a national park in Tennessee. ‘‘He took me, made me walk up it,’’ Joy said, grinning.
‘‘She was just there, in complete gratitude. It was an infectious moment for me, where I realised I was getting as much out of it as she was,’’ Brad said. He used to spend his holidays backpacking seeing ‘‘how fast I could climb that mountain’’, but said: ‘‘Then you are suddenly walking with an 85-year-old woman, you learn to experience nature in a new way.’’
For 10 years, after his parents divorced, he and his grandmother had been estranged. Now they found they had a lot to talk about. Joy had lost her husband in 1994, and later two of her sons. Seeing ‘‘her personality and her spirit’’, Brad did not like to think that ‘‘after all that she had overcome . . . she would continue to sit on a seat in her front porch, where she had been sitting for decades’’.
They knocked off the first 28 parks on a tight budget, camping and eating noodles. ‘‘I got pretty good at taking the tent down,’’ Joy said.
‘‘We got in over our heads on certain trails, where I begged her to let me carry her on my back,’’ Brad said. ‘‘But she wouldn’t let me do it.’’
A photograph of them on a sandy beach in Acadia National Park in Maine in 2019 went viral. The Hyatt hotel company offered to sponsor a 45-day trip. A cooking show and a clothing company then helped to fund two and a half weeks in Alaska, visiting eight national parks.