National Parks hiking vacation in America

Planet

To help keep the national parks of America beautiful our local guides are trained in minimal impact principles and also provide a responsible travel code of conduct to travelers who participate. Each group size is maximum 11 people which helps once again to minimise our impact on each visit.

Our philosophy since 1975 has been to leave only footprints and take only photographs. To reiterate this, every customer who travels with us receives a copy of our award-winning Responsible Travel guidebook. This detailed book outlines our environmentally sustainable principles, and outlines how each customer can minimize their impact while traveling.

The root cause of Global Warming is society's dependence on emission creating fossil fuel. Planting trees is not going to reverse this trend or cancel our carbon emissions very quickly or effectively. We believe the way to reduce these dependencies is to create clean energy production. Therefore, we support renewable energy projects like wind and solar power, and we are aligned with Climate Friendly, the gold standard setter in effective, meaningful action addressing climate change. So, while we believe that tree planting can play a small role in greenhouse gas abatement, we have gone the extra mile in promoting a longer term solution. Is this cheap? No. Is it responsible? Absolutely.

People

During the tour we support rural tourism by buying from local outfitters, Native Americans and small, locally owned family run hotels, restaurants, markets and transport providers. By visiting rural communities you are helping local rural development by as the majority of local people are invested in conservation as most towns we visit are attached to national parks.

By traveling on this tour you are also helping to support the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Sierra Club as our local operator passed on a donation from every tour to these organisations.

Local cash payments are becoming increasingly popular with many operators in the adventure travel industry. This policy seems to benefit the tour operators more than the local economies or the travelers, as it avoids local taxes and transfers the costs and risks of cash handling onto the travelers. In accordance with our Responsible Travel practices, we have chosen a policy of not asking for such payments.