A couple of decades ago, Garland Frankfurth was in a store in Yellowstone National Park when he noticed a booklet for sale.
On the front, it read "Passport to your National Parks." Inside, there were blank pages, waiting for stamps from hundreds of National Park Service sites around the country.
Frankfurth was in the middle of a five-month trip around the perimeter of the United States with a 30-foot camper trailer. Along the 21,000-mile route, he planned to play golf and see a whole lot of things, including several national parks.
He thought it might be cool if he got 10 stamps in one of those passports, so he bought one.
Over the years, though, it became clear that one wasn't enough.
"I filled three of them," Frankfurth said.
Frankfurth, a graduate of North Central High School, has gathered 425 stamps in his passports, creating a physical record of his travels to sites all over the Lower 48 and beyond — this year, he made trips to Alaska and American Samoa to collect more passport stamps.
The passports and the stamps are part of a program run by Eastern National, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. It started in 1986, and the passports are available for sale in stores at national parks throughout the country.
Stamps are given out at nearly all of the places managed by the National Park Service, which goes beyond national parks. They can also be collected from every other kind of place the agency oversees — national monuments, battlefields, seashores and more.
Add them all up and the total number of sites comes to 431. In other words, Garland Frankfurth has been nearly everywhere, man.
Frankfurth's total puts him in the upper echelons of national park aficionados. The National Park Travelers Club gives out lifetime achievement awards to its members who rack up hundreds of passport stamps, beginning with those who visit more than 100 of the sites. Yvonne Manske, president of the club's board, said about 100 of the club's 3,400 members have been to all of them.
It's the sort of thing that takes a lifetime.
Frankfurth is 79. He was born in South Dakota and moved to Spokane in high school.
After graduating from North Central, he went to Eastern Washington University, where he studied to become a teacher. He and his wife moved to Sequim, Washington, after college, and he taught U.S. history at schools there for 30 years.
Since then, he's pretty much been traveling.
He has a story for every place. Watching and listening to climbers at Devil's Tower in Wyoming. An old fraternity brother recognizing him at the Nez Perce National Historic Park. The time he drove an RV trailer from Florida to Washington state for his son, stopping to hit a not insignificant number of parks along the way.
Given that he spent so much time teaching history, it should be no surprise that many of his favorite sites are ones rich with it. Virginia is probably his favorite state, he said, for that reason.
He also loved the Dry Tortugas National Park in Florida, which consists of a series of islands and Fort Jefferson, a military outpost built to protect a key shipping channel that later became a prison for Union deserters.
"As time passes and I look back at some of these places, it's wonderful," Frankfurth said.
This summer, he was in Alaska, collecting the last few stamps in his collection. It took 17 flights, but he was able to hit Kobuk Valley National Park, Katmai National Park and a World War II site on the Aleutian Islands.
"It was a busy, busy time," he said.
He may be six stamps short of hitting every site, but that's not exactly his fault. Parks keep getting added to the system, so the goalposts for hitting every site keep moving. If he were to continue chasing the goal of seeing each one, the quest might never end.
Frankfurth is satisfied with 425. He likes seeing a park on TV and thinking, "Hey, I've been there."
Now he just has to deal with an unavoidable question: What's next?
"Here I am, I'm 79 years old thinking 'Where do I go from here?' "
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