Just three away from having visited all 20 National Park Affiliated Areas, which he’d like added to his total. And at 78, this goal-orient man has other goals in mind.
Martin showed a penchant for striking out on his own at age 3 when, on a snowy Chicago day, his mother and four older sisters couldn’t figure out where he was. Following his boot tracks, they walked three blocks to a bar, where the amused patrons had been feeding the boy snacks and pop since he showed up with his sled.
Whether they had organized a betting pool on what time someone might arrive to claim the kid is lost to history. But Martin himself bets that being one of eight children in the family likely motivated him to distinguish himself from the crowd.
“Everybody is part genetics and part their environment,” said Martin, whose maternal genes sent him hopping trains in the Chicago rail yards and whose stop at Carlsbad Canyon National Park at age 20 set his current course.
With him on his first trip to a national park were neighborhood friend Ron Malatesta whose family let him use a car; Ron’s brother, Chuck; and football friend Ray Bienias, who, like Martin, was a two-way player on their high school team.
“We also visited White Sands, Saguaro, Grand Canyon, Sequoia, Golden Gate, Grand Teton and Yellowstone,” Martin wrote in a note to the Travelers club, “sleeping in the car, alongside the car, on the car, in campgrounds and occasionally in a cheap hotel.” As a young, active man, he focused on “the major national parks and the natural ones. I would skip a lot of the historical and cultural ones and do the best climb or hike or paddle in the park.”
Those interests led Martin to a career in health, physical education and eventually exercise physiology and science, which brought him to Wittenberg University.
He had just graduated from the University of Maryland in 1968 when he married and then honeymooned with wife Helen at Virgin Islands National Park. Misled by a National Geographic article saying there were plenty of accommodations, he failed to reserve a honeymoon suite or anything else and the two slept on the beach the night of their arrival.
The newlyweds added a few more parks when driving from the University of Maryland to a pre-doctoral program at the University of Washington. When Martin achieved that goal, his eyes were on another one. For that reason, they drove back to complete his doctoral program at the University of Maryland by a route that took them to other parks.
As their four children arrived and grew, they got in on the fun, going on yet another goal Martin set for himself in the 1980s: To visit the high points of all 50 states.
As Martin’s penchant for setting goals is matched by a habit for collecting data, material from the parks are now crammed into a four-drawer file cabinet. His meticulous streak is revealed in Martin’s habit of saying he reached 49.8 of the 50 high points.
His best guess is that he fell two-tenths short of scaling Alaska’s highest point, the mountain that gave travel icon Molly Denali her last name. But there’s an explanation: The mountain had claimed the lives of six hikers just before Martin’s party began its ascent, and was the site of earthquakes and avalanches that forced the party to withdraw after 17 days.
“And this was in July,” said Martin, who turned 52 on the mountain.
Having done that he asked himself a familiar question: What do I do next?
“I didn’t make the decision to do all the major National Parks (63) until 2008,” he explained. “That’s after we got back from Sri Lanka,” where they went on a Fulbright appointment.
Getting to all the parks required eight years and added more red lines (designating highway travel) and blue lines (for water travel) to the master map he kept. The final stop was the National Park of America Samoa — the only major park in the Southern Hemisphere — on Helen Martin’s birthday in 2015.
But Tom Martin’s “goal rush” still wasn’t over.
He next set his sights on visiting all the so-called National Park units, which include a National Historic Park in Guam, and one of the least frequently visited units, Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve in the Aleutians of Alaska.
“The only way to get there is bush pilot,” Martin said. “There’s a number of them in Alaska like that.”
Although Martin admits all this travel had its costs, “I’ve kind of done it on a shoestring,” he said. “I camp, I drive my own car.”
He also tacked park travel on to professional travel, when the opportunity arose. And the only state he mentions with some annoyance is Alaska — not because of the Denali experience but because a park seems to be added there just after he returns from checking a previous one off.
He now has his sights set on new unit in Hawaii (#423) — one that’s not open yet.
Now dabbling with the idea of visiting all 129 National Monuments, one of Martin’s monumental achievements can be seen at www.tomhelenmartinblog.com.
Started during their year in Sri Lanka, it offers details of the Martins’ travels to National Parks and other sites up to the present. Those interested in scouting out parks of interest can consult the blog’s travel guide, which lists the Martins’ trips by years, then go to the appropriate year’s blog.
As you might expect of Martin, it’s a blog with a purpose — “the main objective being to promote personal health and fitness while educating individuals as to the importance of preserving and protecting our National Park treasures,” he says.
And that is the overarching goal of this very goal-oriented man.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
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