9 Great Day Hikes to Historical Spots

Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

Best trails to see Dry Tortugas’ wonders
Among the best ways to see Dry Tortugas National Park’s top sights is via a day hike. Just three short walks allow you to enjoy each of the park’s highlights – a historic fort, a tropical key, and a Gulf of Mexico beach.

19th Century Mining Town
Crossing a thick rolling woodland, the Colorado River Trail offers nice views of Colorado River, arguably the Southwest’s most important waterway. The trail to the ruins of an 19th century mining town, Lulu City, in a 6.2-miles round trip with 320-foot elevation gain.

Great Smoky Mountain National Park trails
A number of great day hikes allow visitors to explore the Great Smoky Mountain National Park’s rich history. Pioneer cabins and mills await on several short day hikes.

Mount Rushmore National Monument
Among the iconic sights of South Dakota’s Black Hills region is Mount Rushmore National Monument. The gigantic carving of the heads of four presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln – took fourteen years and 400 workers to complete. Nearly 3 million people annually visit the monument.

Pinery Trail
Guadalupe National Park
Along the Texas-New Mexico border, families can step back into the Old West and experience the remoteness of what once was a welcome sign to travelers: a Butterfield Stage station in the Guadalupe Mountains. The 0.75-mile round trip Pinery Trail marks a great day hike for families at Guadalupe National Park. The trail leads to the ruins of the Pinery Station, a once favored stop on the original 2,800-mile Butterfield Overland Mail Route.

Learn more about national park day hiking trails in my Best Sights to See at America’s National Parks series.

Help preserve historical and archeological sites when day hiking

Resist the urge to touch petroglyphs when hiking,
as skin oils destroy the paint pigments. 

Excitement and mystery always surrounds coming across old sites – whether it be a pioneer cabin from the 1800s or a petroglyph left on a desert cliff thousands of years ago – during a day hike. Unfortunately, the urge to engage in behaviors that diminish and even destroy these sites is strong, especially among children.

To preserve a historical or ancient site that you come across on a hike, follow these five commandments:
g Don’t remove artifacts – Doing so reduces the experience of future hikers (Would you have wanted a hiker before you to have taken away artifacts so you couldn’t enjoy them?). It’s also illegal. Instead, take pictures or make sketches of them.
g Don’t climb on sites – Though they’ve survived decades or even centuries, many of these sites are fragile structures that crumble easily and often will collapse if weight is added to it.
g Don’t touch items at a site – Skin oils actually destroy paint pigments (especially on petroglyphs) and alter the chemical composition of walls. Just brushing a finger against adobe will flake off bits of the wall.
g Don’t move items at a site – Doing so reduces archeologists’ and historians’ ability to understand the purpose and use of the items as their positions gives them context. Such items might range from potsherd to corn kernels, from bones to glass bottle fragments.
g Don’t write on site’s walls – Graffiti destroys the site and amounts to nothing less than vandalism. Such graffiti can range from spray painting to etching initials with a knife…or even writing on wood with a pencil.

Read more about day hiking with children in my Hikes with Tykes guidebooks.