63
U.S. National Parks
Visited all 63 designated U.S. National Parks.
The story behind the field journal
About
Reading the Land
More than a decade of learning through landscapes, histories, communities, and water.
The project
Reading the Land grew out of more than a decade of traveling through National Park Service sites across the United States and its territories.
At first, the goal was simply to get outside, explore, and learn. Over time, those trips became a way of understanding history, geography, culture, wildlife, and the relationship between people and place.
Reading the Land brings those experiences together.
The site combines firsthand observations, photographs, research, and stories from National Parks, historic sites, monuments, preserves, seashores, trails, and other protected places. Some pages focus on landscapes and wildlife. Others look more closely at history, communities, migration, culture, and the ways people have lived with and moved through the land.
About Robbie
Robbie
Drinkard
Student, rower, traveler, and observer of place.
Robbie Drinkard is a high school student from Maryland with a strong interest in history, human geography, public lands, and the ways culture and landscape shape one another.
Over the past decade, he has visited all 63 U.S. National Parks and more than 300 National Park Service sites across 49 states and four U.S. territories. His travels have included remote parts of Alaska, historic and cultural sites throughout the country, national seashores, battlefields, monuments, trails, preserves, and tribal communities.
Before high school, Robbie served as a Student Ambassador to the National Parks through the National Park Trust and completed approximately 320 hours of volunteer service through the program.
When that program later ended, he continued traveling and exploring independently. The parks remained places to learn, recover, pay attention, and experience the world more directly.
Through those years, Robbie developed particular interests in American history, Indigenous history and culture, migration, conservation, wildlife, dark skies, and the ways geography influences human communities.
He has given educational presentations on subjects including dark night skies, bird migration, turtle migration, and the Underground Railroad, developing early experience researching complex subjects and communicating them clearly to others.
Through rowing and years spent kayaking and traveling on rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, particularly in Alaska and throughout the National Park System, Robbie has also developed a strong connection to water.
Being on the water has become another way for him to experience and understand a landscape through current, weather, wildlife, shoreline, human settlement, history, and movement.
Outside of Reading the Land, Robbie is a varsity rower at Walter Johnson High School and has served as a team captain. He rows with the school’s first varsity boat and will compete at the Head of the Charles Regatta in 2026. He also studies cello and Latin and is completing an academically rigorous high school program with extensive Advanced Placement coursework in history, government, literature, science, mathematics, geography, and Latin.
Why Reading the Land
Being somewhere is only the beginning.
After visiting hundreds of places, Robbie began to realize that simply saying he had “been” somewhere did not describe what those experiences meant.
Each place carried its own history.
There were landscapes shaped by glaciers and volcanoes, communities shaped by rivers and migration, places where people had lived for thousands of years, and places where the history was difficult or complicated.
There were also countless people who shared what they knew, including park rangers, historians, local residents, tribal members, guides, teachers, and other travelers.
Reading the Land is an attempt to return to those experiences with greater attention and understanding.
The project asks a simple question
What can we understand when we pay closer attention to a place?
Water, Rowing and the River Student Fellowship
Learning from the water itself.
Over time, Robbie’s relationship with the land has increasingly included water.
Through rowing, kayaking, and traveling on rivers, lakes, and coastal waters within the National Park System, he developed a particular love for experiencing landscapes from the water itself.
Being on a river changes how a place is understood. Rivers connect communities, carry histories, create habitat, shape migration and settlement, and cross many of the boundaries we draw between parks, cities, neighborhoods, and protected lands.
Rowing has deepened that connection. What began as a sport has also become another way of paying attention to place, including current, wind, weather, shorelines, wildlife, bridges, industry, restoration, and the communities that exist along a river.
River Student Fellowship
An emerging extension of the project.
The Reading the Land River Student Fellowship is an emerging extension of the project focused on learning from rivers and waterways through direct experience.
The fellowship will encourage students to spend meaningful time on and alongside the water, rowing, paddling, walking, observing, researching, documenting, and learning about the natural and human histories of a watershed.
The first work will center on waterways and public lands in the Chesapeake region, including the Anacostia and Potomac watersheds and places such as Anacostia Park, Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, the Chesapeake, and Piscataway.
Like Reading the Land itself, the fellowship begins with experience. It means going to a place, spending time there, noticing what is present, and then learning more about what shaped it.
The larger hope is to help young people understand rivers not simply as scenery or recreation, but as living systems that connect ecology, history, culture, community, and human movement.
Selected experience
A decade in the field
300+
National Park Service Sites
Field experience across 49 states and four U.S. territories.
NPT
National Park Trust Student Ambassador
Participated in the National Park Trust student ambassador program before high school.
320
Volunteer Service Hours
Approximately 320 hours completed through the National Park Trust student ambassador program.
04
Student Research and Presentations
Topics have included dark night skies, bird migration, turtle migration, and the Underground Railroad.
RTL
Reading the Land
Ongoing research, writing, photography, and interpretation of National Park Service sites and the communities and landscapes surrounding them.
A note about the project
Reading the Land is an ongoing student project. Pages will continue to be added and revised as Robbie works through years of photographs, field notes, Junior Ranger materials, research, and memories from the places he has visited.
The project is not intended to replace official National Park Service information. Readers planning a visit should always consult the National Park Service and other local authorities for current conditions, regulations, safety information, closures, and access requirements.