National Parks Passports

If you're a real nerd like me and thousands of others, you should get yourself a National Parks Passport. It's a little blue book, just like a US Passport. At each NPS site you visit, there is a stamping station at the visitor center where you can get your passport stamped with a cancellation, just like your US Passport in the old days. The standard cancellation stamp is a circle with the park name and date. Some parks have a unique site-specific stamp, like Mount Rushmore. Others, like Lewis and Clark NHP, have multiple sites and stamp for each.

National Parks Passport

Every year a new set of stickers comes out. You stick them in the booklet, and hopefully you'll get the sticker and the cancellation for each site you visit. Each sticker set comes with a sticker for an NPS site in one each of nine regions, plus a national sticker. The regions are color coded. The edge of the passport page for the region's section in the booklet, the ink for cancellations, and the border of the stickers all stylishly match.

Valley Forge NHP matching sticker and cancellation

The regions are North Atlantic (brown), Mid-Atlantic (light blue), National Capital (red), Southeast (purple), Midwest (orange), Southwest (gray), Rocky Mountain (yellow), Western (green), and Pacific Northwest and Alaska (blue). I am proud to report that I have been to at least one park in each region, but I only have my passport stamped for parks in six regions.

Mount Rushmore's standard cancellation stamp
and it's own special stamp 

Lewis and Clark NHP stamps for Fort Clatsop
and Salt Works