Thanks for visiting! We’re Dustin and Allison, and we created Trail and Hearth to share our love and knowledge of the national park system with others. Located in Michigan with our son Warren and two cats, we spend every chance we get exploring the parks.
Allison has spent her professional career making it easier for people to access and use information to solve problems. Planning our own park trips revealed a familiar challenge: there is no single reliable place to start planning your trip. Travelers piece together information from NPS sites, map services, blogs, and Reddit posts, spending dozens of hours trying to find kid-friendly trails, nearby activities, and trustworthy recommendations—and still wondering if they’ve made the right choices.
Dustin’s career has been in software leadership, but his passion is photography and he’s spent over a decade photographing the parks. All photography prints we offer are his own, taken on our journeys together as a family. (Warren enthusiastically contributes by plunking down on scenic mountaintops with his cars for 20 minutes while Dad finds the perfect shot.)
Trail and Hearth is a combination of these passions, and our goal is to build a stress-free starting point for your journey to the national parks. Trail represents our love of being on the trail and actively experiencing the park, and Hearth represents the warmth we want to provide by enabling visitors to bring home their memories of the park through photography and gifts for the home.