By LAMAR THAMES

There are more than 300 photos in a collection that will adorn an album that Harry Eagle (yes, that is his real name!) plans to put together.

Sort of a legacy, if you will, of the special journey that Eagle took in September 2009.

Accompanied only by his dog Max (short for Maximilian, the explorer), Eagle traveled more than 8,000 miles in a 20-year-old Dodge truck to see for himself what writer and historian Wallace Stegner called “the best idea we ever had” — our national parks. His agenda included Yellowstone, Yosemite, Redwood Forest and the Grand Canyon, among others, all in about 22 days.

To say that it was memorable would be an understatement.

“Absolutely spectacular,” Eagle said, emphasizing that he would do it again in a heartbeat. But probably not right away. First, he has to finish the album and record his memories for his wife, children and grandchildren.

HOW IT ALL CAME ABOUT

Eagle, 63, and retired for nine years following a lengthy career with AT&T Yellow Pages, became interested in a “walkabout” when a friend suggested they take a trip by themselves.

His friend, a former Navy SEAL who lost part of an arm and hand in combat, had never been to the national parks out West, so that became their destination. The friend eventually backed out and Eagle, with his wife’s blessing, decided to go it alone. Camping is just not her thing, Eagle said.

A lifelong outdoorsman, nourished at an early age when he helped his father and uncle build a cabin on Georges Lake near tiny Florahome, Fla., Eagle drove 36 hours straight, with just a couple of stops for brief naps on the initial leg of the trip.

Following his early training and on camping trips since, he used national park camp sites for lodging and bathed where he could — lakes, streams and, occasionally, hot showers at a camp ground.

The most boring part of the trip, Eagle wrote in a journal, was trying to pick up a Florida Gator football game on the radio while driving through Alabama and Mississippi.

THE KEN BURNS’ EFFECT

Since his return, Eagle has watched the Ken Burns’ national park documentary on PBS “every chance I get. I can look at a place in the film and say, ‘I’ve been there.’ ”

But the documentary and the photos he took can’t duplicate the experience of the sights themselves.

“Everywhere I’ve been has been breathtaking,” he wrote in a partially competed

journal. “And the country in between is so different (from the forest-covered Southeastern U.S.) and beautiful. Craters of the Moon National Monument (in Oregon) looks just like craters on the moon, and they go on forever. Miles and miles of black rock eruptions on both sides of the highway.”

THE ITINERARY

First stop — Yellowstone National Park in northeast Wyoming.

“There is just so much to it,” he said. “I was only there two days, but I could have stayed for a month.” At one point he “felt like I had gotten off the road and was on a goat path, but it was so beautiful.”

Along the way, he witnessed miles and miles of corn and wheat fields. Fat, sweet Iowa corn became a dinner-time staple.

One thing he wasn’t prepared for was temperature swings, sometimes 40 to 50 degrees from day to night and it took a few days to become acclimated to the change, especially when bathing in a lake or stream.

At one point, Eagle said, Max “insisted” on a bath in a lake.”It was cold and deep and looked like rain” but he went in anyway.

At Yellowstone, he bought a golden pass for $10, which allowed him to get into all the national parks for free and camp sites for half price, which fulfilled another lifelong passion — living frugally. He arrived at camp sites early to scour for items departing campers had left behind and usually found firewood and other essentials to keep the costs down.

The journey included backtracking several hundred miles across the border to Canada to see Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, a dip into the Pacific Ocean in far northern California, the giant Sequoias in Redwood, Yosemite and, of course, the Grand Canyon.

“I saw two big elk, one a 5-by-5, and the other a 6-by-6,” in Redwood, where he also gazed upon the immensity of two of the three largest trees in the world — the largest Gen. Sherman and the third largest the Gen. Grant.

“You can’t imagine the size of those trees,” Eagle said. A series of three photos of each of the two largest trees don’t do them justice, he said.

WHAT ABOUT MAX?

Bringing a dog along on such a trip would seem daunting to most of us, but for Eagle, it was a natural.

“People would ask me if I was worried that he would wonder off and I said no,” Eagle related. “Max does what I tell him to.”

Indeed, during our hour-long interview for this article, Max patiently waited in the bed of the much-traveled Dodge pick-up. The dog showed up at Eagle’s house in Florahome a couple of years ago and “just stayed.”

Eagle thinks the dog had been abandoned and possibly abused. It took him several months before Max would agree to go for a ride in the truck. “We think he was afraid that Harry would take him somewhere and drop him off like his other owner did,” Eagle’s wife, Debra, speculated.

Max rode in the bed of the truck for the entire trip. “When he would walk back and forth in the back, I knew he had to go to the bathroom, so we would stop.”

MORE ABOUT HARRY

I don’t know exactly what kind of person I was expecting before I met Harry

Eagle, but he certainly didn’t fit my pre-conceived notion. Personable, loquacious and outgoing, he didn’t match the imagine I had in mind of a person who would travel across the United States with a dog in a beat-up truck.

About the name? He said he introduces himself aptly as “the only hairy Eagle you will ever meet,” referring, of course, to America’s outdoor symbol, the bald eagle.

A Jimmy Buffett lookalike, Eagle grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., attended Englewood High School and spent two years at Lake City Junior College to become a forest ranger, further fueling his enthusiasm for the outdoors. A stint with St. Regis paper company as a logging engineer preceded his tenure with Southern Bell (then BellSouth and later AT&T.) Along the way, he would put half of every raise he ever got into savings, a habit, he said, he wished everyone would adopt.

His wife works at the Saloon on 220, a beauty shop on Fleming Island, which is where my wife met her and how I eventually became intrigued by Harry’s adventure. Kindness seems to be her middle name as she gave my wife several discounted haircuts after I lost my job a year ago.

God, family and the outdoors are his passions and he is planning a camping trip with his grandchildren. He once took seven girls on a 10-day camping trip to the Smokies where he fed them swamp food — fried catfish, alligator and soft shelled turtle, what author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings referred to as “cooter” in her book, “Cross Creek.”

He reads a lot (Rawlings’ “South Moon Under” being a favorite), has competed in the Gate River Run in Jacksonville 10 times, and hunts and fishes.

His father (Rodney Wilson Eagle Sr.) and his son (Forerst Travis Eagle) have a shared legacy of service to their country. All three joined the Marines, each at 30-year intervals from the other.

Harry once considered joining the Army, but his father said, “If you enlist for anything, it will be the Marines.” And that was that.

Harry still lives in a house he built 30 years ago near the cabin he helped his father and uncle build in the 1950s, always staying close to his roots — except when he and Max take off on a walkabout to see America’s grandeur.