NEW YORK, June 21, 2000 - Flowers don't only bloom in springtime. In fact, in the high country of such places as New York's Adirondack Park or Denali National Park in Alaska, wildflowers are reaching their peak. For outdoor adventurers seeking more on their hikes and bike rides in the upcoming months, GORP.com, the leading Internet site dedicated to outdoor recreation and adventure travel, has identified ten parks across the country where enthusiasts can also absorb the spectacular and colorful displays of nature's wildflowers.

GORP's Top Ten Parks for High-Summer Wildflowers, located at www.gorp.com, are:

	Adirondack Park, New York - Encounter lavender-colored alpine marsh violet and white alpine bistort, saxifrage, bluebells, mountain sandwort and the rarest of the rare here in the East, the dwarf cinquefoil, a five-petaled yellow blossom. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee - Known to botanists as"Wildflower National Park," the Smokies offer up lush greenery and immense rhododendron thickets, with brilliantly purple Catawbas and delicately light-pink rosebays. Big Bend National Park, Texas - In the midst of desert vastness, find yellow columbines in rocky canyons, maidenhair fern thriving in lush banks at springs, and goldeneye, creosote bush, pink and purple blooms of ceniza, sage, scarlet bouvardia and ocotillo. Badlands National Park, South Dakota - Enjoy some 200 species of wildflowers, such as Missouri milkvetch and hood phlox, penstemon and purple coneflowers that are distributed throughout the waist-high grasslands of the largest, protected mixed-grass prairie in the U.S. Glacier National Park, Montana - Experience grand displays of lupine, glacier lilies, sticky geranium, monkeyflower and hundreds of other species along Logan's Pass, the most accessible gateway to the park's spectacular alpine meadows. Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado - In middle elevations, find arnica, sego lilies, blue columbine and meadowrue in the pine and aspen forests, while the meadows will be full of scarlet paintbrush, blue penstemon, orange sneezeweed, and purple fringed gentians. Zion National Park, Utah - The real surprises are hidden in the cool, shadowed recesses of the park's canyons, such as Zion's Weeping Rock with its vibrant hanging gardens and luxurious growths of moss, maidenhair ferns, watercress, blue columbine orchids, sedges and scarlet monkeyflower. Yosemite National Park, California - Look for corn lilies ringing Sierran lakes and cinquefoils, sky pilots, senecios, and buttercups splashing the rocky slopes and meadows of the High Sierra. Mount Rainier National Park, Washington - Enjoy expanses of blue lupine interspersed with spectacular displays of red indian paintbrush, heather, arnica, larkspur, bluebells, wild sunflower, columbine, alpine dandelion, and Jacob's ladder, just to name a few. Denali National Park in Alaska - Highlighting the Alaskan Interior are goldenrod, deep blue wild larkspur and yellow, daisy-like arnica; hot-pink fireweed along the roadsides; and Alaska's state flower, the tiny blue forget-me-not.

GORP (a.k.a. Great Outdoor Recreation Pages) is the largest and most trafficked Web site dedicated to outdoor recreation and adventure travel. With more than 100,000 pages of content, GORP offers a complete package of authoritative, award-winning content, a large, active community of outdoor enthusiasts and a full-range of e-commerce offerings drawing nearly 13 million page views per month. Started in 1995, GORP offers a full-service adventure travel booking feature, accessible via the Web or telephone, with more than 35,000 departures in addition to a gear store with 180 brands of clothing, footwear and equipment. GORP has been cited by Yahoo!, US News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many others, as the leader in this category and a"Best of the Web" site. To reach GORP's world of outdoor recreation, including an incomparable selection of vacation packages, log on to www.gorp.com.

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