A short while back, as autumn colours swept south, I commenced on a roadtrip, covering 10,000mi (16,000km) across the United States to visit numerous national parks along with many other spectacular sights. A fair amount of photographs in this gallery are from that trip. Zero nights were spent in hotels, motels, inns or lodges.

The first national park stop was Rocky Mountain National Park to survey the golden aspens (unfortunately the colour was winding down), and then headed north to Grand Teton National Park. This was planned more as a stop of convenience on my way to Yellowstone - or so I thought. What I found was some of the most impressive and under-appreciated landscapes of the parks I visited and the autumn colour was at its prime. After a good number of days, I moved onwards to Yellowstone National Park, where days were spent surveying the amazing geothermal sites, woodlands, and wildlife; while the nights were typically spent shaking snow from my tent.

After a large snowfall, I left the east entrance of Yellowstone (the west entrance was closed and the north inaccessible) on my way to Devil's Tower National Monument - the first National Monument in the United States - which is located in the northeast corner of Wyoming. In contrast to Yellowstone, Devil's Tower was relatively warm and had only a handful of visitors. The campground looked out onto stunning scenery - namely the rock formation itself.

I then eventually made my way to Custer State Park, along the Needles Highway (which I thoroughly enjoyed, and by proximity, Mount Rushmore which was what it was) and onwards through Badland National Park of South Dakota (which is perhaps the least expensive way to visit another planet - a truly magical place) and then in the direction of the Great Smoky Mountains (which greeted me with a week straight of rain, and thus was, much to my chagrin, scratched from the itinerary). In between some state parks in Kentucky and national forests in Virginia, I found myself at the calm & sparsely visited Congaree National Park, which was officially named as a National Park in 2003. Congaree is the "largest remnant of old-growth floodplain forest remaining on the continent" and certainly a change-up from the more frequently visited parks.

In the future, visits will be made throughout the parks in Utah, California, the Pacific Northwest, Montana, Alaska, and Maine, to cover a few. Photographs of Canada & Mexico are but a matter of time as well.

To enter the picture gallery, click here: North American Photo Gallery