Sign at the entrance to Palo Duro Canyon State Park near Amarillo.
Ron Buskirk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
An Austin woman is traveling to all 89 state parks in Texas this calendar year and she’s bringing thousands of people along for the journey.
Emma Keteler, 29, isn’t quite halfway through her list — she’s made it to 36 parks so far — but she’s confident she can finish by the end of the year. And she has nearly 16,000 followers on Instagram and YouTube following along the way.
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There have been hiccups along the way and “a lot of life happening in between,” she said — including her own wedding.
“This is not a comfortable journey to take,” Keteler said, laughing, in an interview with the American-Statesman. “I’ve always felt this call to adventure. The joke is, when I was a kid, I used to tell my parents, ‘Drop me off on the side of the road, I’ll find my way home.’”
Her 10-year-old self, she says, is not too far off from where her mind is nearly two decades later. She felt compelled to start the adventure after feeling a bit stagnant in her day-to-day, and taking note of the recent narratives shaping perspectives of her home state.
“The last five or six years, I have visited countries outside of the U.S., and looking back, I realized that there’s still so much of Texas that I haven’t seen, especially in the time that we’re in right now, where people talk a lot of [expletive] about Texas,” Keteler said. “It’s like, okay? But is it really like that? We live in our Austin bubble, but is it really a bubble? What are other Texas people in Texas thinking and feeling? I wanted to see for myself.”
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Going solo across Texas
The logistics are tough, Keteler said. Some of the state’s parks are roughly 500 miles away, such as Palo Duro Canyon State Park — not easy to knock out in a weekend.
Scheduling can be a problem, too — with life obligations getting in the way. For this reason, she said she travels alone a majority of the time. It’s something she’s used to — she’s done solo trips outside of the U.S. — but she knows she has to stay aware of her surroundings as a young woman traveling alone.
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“You just have to question, is that someone being odd, or is that someone being unsafe? It’s a double-edged sword. The more I travel, the more I feel comfortable, and the more I’ve met nice people, and it’s been great,” Keteler said.
Keteler said she has not had any overly concerning run-ins while out at a park so far this year. She said her time has actually cemented her trust in the safety the state’s park system provides. Every park is different, she said, but most have an on-call ranger who checks sites at the beginning and end of each day.
Most of the day-to-day stresses involve timing her travel with normal life or forgetting things like her propane tank to heat up food or dealing with dropping water temperatures if she’s out swimming in the winter.
A rule for every park
Keteler has developed “rules” for herself along the way. If a park has a body of water, she has to swim in it — she joked that she has “done some cold plunges.” If a park is known for camping, she camps. If there’s something else a park is known for, she does it — like hiking the Lighthouse Trail in Palo Duro Canyon State Park alongside her dog, Indy, or doing the wild cave tour at Longhorn Cavern State Park.
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There’s also the content component, where she creates a YouTube video and shares posts on Instagram for each park. She said she’s not trying to be an influencer but instead wants to document her memories and share her experiences.
“In Palo Duro, I was recording videos, and a couple asked me if I was a YouTuber,” Keteler said. “The next day, the husband came out and said, ‘My wife and I watched some of your videos, and realized we had already watched an old one from when we were getting ready to hike Guadalupe Peak National Park.’”
Creating social media content also forces her to do more research instead of just showing up at a park with little knowledge of what it’s known for, what animals live there and what makes up its ecosystem.
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She said one of her favorite parts has been learning from park rangers, which has inspired her to consider enrolling in the Texas Master Naturalist Program, which trains volunteers to assist with natural resource education, outreach and conservation.
She said her main motivation is to encourage people to get outside, particularly amid debate over environmental issues and how they are portrayed in the news.
“The truth is a double-edged sword. I’ve seen a lot of conservation projects and restoration that we’ve done, a lot of good,” Keteler said. “But, on the other side, you drive through miles of oil refineries before you get to the one mile of pristine beach that is still full of trash because it was the Fourth of July and people went and popped off fireworks, grilled and left all their trash behind.”
The road ahead
As of August, Keteler has more than half of Texas’ state parks left to visit and several months left on her self-imposed timer, but she’s not worried.
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So far, her favorite stops have been at parks in Brownsville and McAllen because of the surrounding communities and the beauty of the wildlife in the Rio Grande Valley. She still needs to go to several out west and has some quick hits in the Austin area for when she needs to get to a park in a pinch.
“I’m going to finish this, then who knows? I’ll do 30 countries under 31 or 35 or something,” Keteler said. “I don’t want to be sitting at home every weekend or living the same life every day. We’re put on this planet to experience being humans, so you should go out and do whatever that is to us.”