FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HE’S SEEN IT ALL: LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR VISITS ALL 388 NATIONAL PARK SERVICE SITES
Visit to Virgin Islands Coral Reef Caps 50-Year Effort

October 21, 2004 - Loyola Marymount University faculty member Alan Hogenauer will this week again complete a visit to every one of the 388 U.S. national parks, monuments, and historic sites managed by the Interior Department’s National Park Service. Hogenauer, an associate professor and director of LMU’s Center for Travel and Tourism in the College of Business Administration, has taken more than fifty years to visit each NPS “unit.”

It’s a significant challenge, as the NPS units are found in 49 of the 50 states and the territories of American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the system keeps expanding. It’s also a unique accomplishment: Hogenauer was the first to visit all NPS units in 1980 when there were 320, and again the only one to reach all 362 in 1995. The late Robin Winks, noted Yale history professor, finished visiting all the units shortly thereafter, before his death. No one else, in or out of the Park Service, is known to have achieved this ambitious goal.

The circuit ends once again on October 22 in the Virgin Islands, when Hogenauer will visit the recently-designated Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument off St. John’s, contiguous with the Virgin Islands National Park.

Hogenauer wryly notes, “It seems absolutely incredible that no one else has been motivated to reach all these superb places, preserved for all by the dedicated National Park Service team. Yes, there are over 280 million visitors to the parks each year, according to the NPS, but considering there are nearly that many people in the U.S. alone, it would take nearly 400 years for everyone to visit the system at the current rate!”

The list of park visits, including hundreds more to detached units and significant portions, can be found at http://www.cheklist.com. The official National Park System list can be found at http://www.nps.gov.

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