A pilgrimage is possible anywhere. It asks only that you arrive somewhere with intention, and let the place do its work.
Begin hereWhat is secular pilgrimage?
For thousands of years, people have set out toward meaningful places on purpose: to mark a passage, to grieve, to give thanks, to understand where they came from.
Secular pilgrimage keeps the practice and sets aside the requirement of religion. You bring your own questions. The journey is structured but unhurried: a place chosen with care, time set apart, attention paid. What you make of it is yours.
It works because the impulse was never really about the destination. It was about going differently: slowly, deliberately, and open to being changed by what you find.
A pilgrimage can begin exactly where you are, as long as you travel with intention.
Four pilgrimage pathways
The perfect destination is the one you choose. These four pathways are simply doorways. Pick the one that calls, or move between them over a lifetime.
The full 433: not only the 63 marquee parks but the battlefields, seashores, monuments, and historic homes that hold the country's nature, heritage, and civic memory.
Courthouses, county museums, state parks, the overlook ten minutes from home. The places you already pass, approached this time on purpose.
Where land, history, and public service converge: the trails, lodges, and stonework built by a generation that believed the commons was worth shaping by hand.
Anywhere that already holds meaning for you: a river, a grave, a kitchen table. It can be steps from your door — what matters is going differently.
Three kinds of journey
Every site speaks in more than one register. Most pilgrimages lean into one of these three.
Canyon, prairie, old-growth, fossil bed. The pilgrimage of scale and deep time, where standing in the right place quietly rearranges your sense of your own.
The places where memory is kept, including the hard ones. Going to bear witness, to connect a lineage, to let a story be more than a paragraph in a book.
Civil War battlefields, civil rights landmarks, courthouses and capitols, the sites of public reckoning. The pilgrimage of belonging: to a community, a country, an ongoing and unfinished experiment.
Upcoming & example journeys
Two Colorado sites that show the range: one a journey into deep time, one a journey into hard, recent memory.
July 16
5:00 PM MST
An easy first step, free to join and yours to explore. Email info@parkspilgrim.org to reserve a spot.
Florissant, Colorado
A meadow that is also a 34-million-year-old graveyard of redwoods and butterflies. A pilgrimage into deep time, where the scale of the past quiets the noise of the present.
Granada, Colorado
The site of a WWII incarceration camp where Japanese Americans were held. A pilgrimage of witness: going so that what happened here is held, not abstract.
Next live session: August 18 on OLLI
About the founder
Founder · PhD · MTS · Lifelong pilgrim
American Parks Pilgrimage grew out of one person's practice. Over 350 documented visits across all 63 national parks and 250 of the official 433 NPS sites, as a way of paying attention.
With a PhD and a Master of Theological Studies, Bobbie brings together the scholar's eye and the pilgrim's heart: rigorous about history and place, unhurried about meaning. The work now is sharing the practice: guiding others to approach the sites around them with the same intention.
Start a conversation
No booking funnel, no pressure. Reach out, tell me what you're drawn to, and we'll find the right next step.
info@parkspilgrim.org