Jean Lafitte National Park and Preserve

It's been 130 years since the federal government designated Yellowstone the nation's first national park, and in that time it has added more than 300 forests, monuments and natural wonders to the National Park system as part of an effort to preserve our ecological and historical heritage. Places like El Capitan, Old Faithful and Mount Rushmore have been in our collective mind from grade school. So why is national park attendance declining?

Part of the problem may lie in increased fees and restrictions placed on visitors. Part of the blame may lie in the economy — fewer dollars out there, fewer people taking vacations. Perhaps, ultimately, it's that younger generations are simply disenchanted with things that are merely real, especially when those things turn out to be just big rocks, or holes in the ground, lacking the awesome, if unreal, power of "Diablo II" or XXX. But Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve — and especially the Barataria Preserve, a vast swampland lacerated by boardwalks and canoe channels just outside New Orleans — may just have what it takes to compete with those virtual realities.

Many national parks have a Disneyworld quality to them: so controlled, so perfectly pristine that visitors sit around and wait for a magical moment that never occurs. Nature is reduced to safe, manageable sections, where tired feet and sunburn are the most dangerous threats you face. Beyond the fantastic views, Yosemite and other top-billing national parks have little to distinguish them from any old state park down the road (and that state park also won't be visited by annoying Texans "roughing it" in their Lincoln Navigators).

In a nation where the sublime wilderness that inspired the American romantics has been replaced by a cultivated landscape best seen in Thomas Kinkade paintings, Lafitte is a breath of fresh, swampy air. It's everything that a national park has come not to represent: dangerous, uncontrolled and full of brazen wildlife. You can reach out and touch the creatures, but they might reach out and touch you, too.

The Barataria Reserve, the park's main site for hiking and canoeing, includes eight miles of trails that run through marsh and swamp; about a third of those trails run along (relatively) safer wooden boardwalks. The reserve also maintains nine miles of exclusive canoe trails and 20 miles open to boats of all kinds. The baldcypress and oak trees and the thick blankets of palmetto largely have grown back to their previous splendor after loggers harvested much of it back in the 1920s. The Kenta Canal, which still cuts through the reserve, was dug as a means of floating the timber away.

Lafitte is not for the faint of heart. Anyone at all afraid of spiders, for instance, would be wise to stay in the park's French Quarter Visitors Center; the Barataria Reserve (and the Bayou des Familles in particular) overflows with enormous golden-silk spiders, which can grow to five inches in length and weave beautiful, intricate webs — sometimes even across the boardwalks. Rangers clear many of these in the early morning, but it takes only a slightly errant hand to swipe right through a web and right into the thorax of a not-very-happy spider. (Their bite is painful but, fortunately, not particularly venomous.)

In late summer, lubber grasshoppers come out in large numbers to mate, transforming sections of the boardwalk into entomological orgies. Black, fat and longer than a grown man's middle finger, they are rarely eager to move out of the path of oncoming hikers. At some point, most visitors will hear the sickening crunch of a lubber being crushed underfoot.

But the real stars of Lafitte, and the things that should really get the kids up off their fat, Playstation-addled butts and onto the trail, are the alligators. At Yosemite, you have a chance of seeing a bear, but only a rare visitor gets anywhere close to one; on the other hand, the folks running Lafitte could bet each visitor $10 that they'd come within spitting distance of an eight-foot alligator and make off with a tidy pile of winnings. Spitting distance, that is, with absolutely nothing between them and the alligator. (Actual spitting in such a situation is not recommended.) Add to this the overabundance of snakes, including cottonmouths and rattlesnakes, and you've got Super Mario Cart licked.

Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve bears the name of the pirate who used the bayous of southern Louisiana as a base for his smuggling, slave-trading and other rabble-rousing activities. Lafitte, who alternately supplied Andrew Jackson's forces during the Battle of New Orleans and fought viciously with the Louisiana authorities, would be disgusted by the namby-pamby, white-washed state of our national parks. He would demand a return to true wilderness, where a man could take a walk in the woods and know he had a good chance of a life-or-death struggle with the local fauna before he returned. And perhaps if America's action-addicted children gave it a thought, they would too.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)