National Parks Traveler Podcast: Recent Episodes
Kurt Repanshek
National Parks Traveler is the world's top-rated, editorially independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to covering national parks and protected areas on a daily basis.
Traveler offers readers and listeners a unique multimedia blend of news, feature content, debate, and discussion all tied to national parks and protected areas.
For 21 years, the National Parks Traveler has taken you around the National Park System and kept you informed on how the National Park Service and Congress have managed your national parks.
We've gone underground to describe for you the wonders of Wind Cave, Jewel Cave and Mammoth Cave, hiked into cypress domes at Everglades National Park to marvel at the park's flora and fauna, and bucked the rapids of the Colorado and Green Rivers through Canyonlands National Park and Dinosaur National Monument. We've also followed the political and governmental contortions that have impacted the parks, along with the hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and climate change. In short, the Traveler has worked to be your window into all things national parks, serving both as your daily parks newspaper and feature-length magazine.
This is our last episode.
To look back at 21 years of Traveler, Kurt Repanshek invited Associate Editor Rita Beamish and Contributing Editor Kim O'Connell to join him for a conversation.
Across the United States, from Alaska to Puerto Rico, there are about 112 million acres of officially designated wilderness. That amounts to about 5 percent of the country's land mass. It might appear to be even smaller when you consider that more than half of those 112 million acres protected as wilderness are in Alaska.
To say that wilderness is at risk from the human imprint isn't hyperbole. While there are millions of acres of proposed, recommended, and potential wilderness across the country, Congress acts extremely slowly on these matters. Indeed, it was back in 1989 when America's Red Rock Wilderness Act was first proposed in Congress to protect 8 million acres in Utah as official wilderness. The clock continues to tick on that proposal.
Without official designation as wilderness, lands can be impacted by motorized and mechanized activities, from logging and mining and energy development to off-road-vehicle recreation. But the threats to both unofficial and official wilderness might be growing, as the Trump administration has called for a review of wilderness management on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and even the National Park Service.
To explore what's at stake with wilderness in America under these proposals, we have Kevin Proescholdt, the conservation director for Wilderness Watch, a nonprofit advocacy organization, and Bob Krumenaker, chairman of Keep Big Bend Wild, a nonprofit advocating for official wilderness designation in Big Bend National Park and a long-time National Park Service manager joining us today.
Public comment on the Interior secretary's directives is being taken through mid-August. Here are links to the public comment pages:
BLM
- https://www.regulations.gov/document/BLM-2026-0034-0001
- https://www.regulations.gov/docket/BLM-2026-0068
- https://www.regulations.gov/docket/BLM-2026-0069
- https://www.regulations.gov/docket/BLM-2026-0067
NPS
- regulations.gov - NPS 2026-0101
- regulations.gov - NPS 2026-0100
FWS
- Wilderness Administration and Resource Stewardship; Managing Climbing Activities in Wilderness
- https://www.regulations.gov/document/FWS-HQ-NWRS-2026-1618-0001
It was a little more than a year ago when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asked the public to help him identify interpretive materials in the National Park System that disparaged Americans past or living or which contained content that detracts from viewpoints of scenic grandeur.
Well, it appears that the public didn't share his concerns.
Recent Freedom of Information Act requests have turned up nearly 36,000 comments in response to Secretary Burgum's mission "to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing."
The folks at the Center for Western Priorities recently filtered through the nearly 36,000 comments that were received by Interior, and found that just 47 – that's right, only 47 comments – called for a sign to be removed or supported Burgum's request to tidy up history. Our guests today are Kate Groetzinger and Lilly Bock-Brownstein from the Center for Western Priorities, and they'll explain how they filtered those comments and what they found.
Since this past December here at the Traveler we've been bringing you a series of stories on the Endangered Species Act and the threatened and endangered species it's intended to keep from going extinct.
For me, it's been an eye-opening series because of what our editors and writers have learned about threatened and endangered species — from birds to trees and even to grasses — and the work being done to help them recover. It's certainly not an easy task, and one that often takes decades before you can see progress.
In today's podcast, I sit down again with Jake Li, the vice president for conservation policy at Defenders of Wildlife, to get his take on efforts in Congress to rewrite the Endangered Species Act in ways that might not be so beneficial for threatened and endangered species. I think you'll find it to be a very insightful conversation. We recorded this conversation in mid-May, right before Endangered Species Day.
Public lands stewardship has most definitely changed under the second presidential administration of Donald Trump. Land-management agencies such as the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management have lost thousands of employees, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is on a mission to turn the country's public lands into a cash cow of sorts.
As the political tenure in Washington D.C., swings wildly back and forth like a massive pendulum when it comes to our public lands, there is an effort under way to provide a roadmap for public lands stewardship in the United States that stretches far into the future. Ground Shift is a new nonprofit organization working to, as they put it, "develop creative, durable, and transformative ideas to shape the next century of public land and water stewardship in the United States."
To better understand this organization and its goals, our guests today are Lynn Scarlett, who was a deputy Interior secretary during the administration of President George Bush, and Tracy Stone-Manning, who directed the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden.
A fast-track proposal to develop a gold mine near Alaska's Cook Inlet and Lake Clark National Park and Preserve is alarming scientists, environmental groups and local communities because of the devastating effects it is expected to have on the region's critically endangered beluga whales.
Cook Inlet is home to a small and genetically distinct population of beluga whales that has struggled for decades from habitat loss, industrial activity, pollution, and underwater noise. Supporters of the mining project say it will bring jobs, economic growth and profit to Native Alaskans. This week Traveler's Lynn Riddick talks with Cooper Freeman, Alaska Director of the Center for Biological Diversity. His organization along with many others argue that the gold to be extracted isn't worth the cost of threatening a species already vulnerable to extinction and forever desecrating a magnificent landscape.
America's 250th birthday is coming up this summer, festivities will be held all over the country, and history buffs will be delving into the various nooks and crannies of the National Park System to see where they can visit sites of Revolutionary War battles.
Don't overlook South Carolina and its three park sites that preserve Revolutionary War battlefields – Kings Mountain National Military Park, Cowpens National Battlefield, and Ninety-Six National Historic Site.
The state of South Carolina takes so much pride in these three sites that some of its license plates proclaim that the Revolutionary War was won in South Carolina. But was it? Today we're going to pose that question to James Taub, the associate curator at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.
We're living in somewhat tumultuous times in the print media industry. Well-familiar titles are either disappearing, shrinking drastically, or shifting over to the internet. On top of that, the advent of Artificial Intelligence has some readers wondering how much human effort and talent went into the piece they're reading.
Today we're going to be talking about a throw-back, a publication that has come and gone a bit over the past six decades, but which has a hallowed space among publications for its long-form journalism that dives into mountain culture, environmental issues, and outdoor adventure. The Mountain Gazette has published such literary notaries as Hunter S. Thomas, Ed Abbey, John Fayhee, Sadie Stine, Royal Robbins and so many others. And it's back.
Our guest is Mike Rogge, the owner and publisher of Mountain Gazette. He'll help us stroll down memory lane a bit and look at the current state of outdoor journalism.
National parks provide us with so many services, from providing us with inspiration, allowing us to leave our stress behind for a few hours or a few days, offering a recreational outlet, and enabling us to pursue hobbies from photography to other artistic endeavors, and looking for wildlife.
The parks also allow us to go back into history through living history programs and interpretation, provided both by rangers and by organizations that produce interpretive materials. They also serve as a great background for storytellers.
Today our guest is a former ranger who held the informal title of Chief Storyteller. Tom Medema until recently was Associate Director for the National Park Service, with a focus on interpretation in the parks. We'll discuss all things interpretation and inspiration tied to the National Park System.
Across the United States, there are many thousands of collisions between vehicles and wildlife each year, killing people and animals and causing millions of dollars in property damages. Some solutions revolve around creating bridges specifically for wildlife, from elk and mountain lions to even turtles and salamanders.
It's been estimated that collisions with wildlife in the United States kill around 200 people and injure more than 26,000 per year. Building wildlife crossings can reduce those collisions by up to 97 percent.
Back in 2021 the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided $350 million to be doled out as grants over five years on building such crossings. But the funding runs out this year, and the National Parks Conservation Association has been urging Congress to not just renew the program, but see that it provides $200 million a year going forward.
To explain the problem and associated costs with the lack of wildlife crossings today's guests are Bart Melton, senior director of NPCA's wildlife program, and Renee Callahan from ARC Solutions, a nonprofit that works to facilitate new thinking, new methods, new materials and new solutions for wildlife crossing structures.
You might not entirely appreciate the wonders and majesty of national parks unless you venture out after dark and gaze up at what often is referred to as the other half of the national park system. The view can be quite dazzling, with planets, stars, the Milky Way, and for the lucky, a comet or shooting star.
Sadly, not every park offers such dazzling views. Light pollution reaches more than a few national parks, and can really infringe on your nighttime enjoyment of the parks.
Gavin Heffernan is among those park travelers who are troubled by light pollution. He's a California-based photographer with a unique long-form time lapse style. And he's hoping this approach brings a fresh awareness to the wonders of night skies in the national parks and creates advocacy to fight light pollution and the damage it wreaks on natural habitats.
Warming oceans, pollution, more potent hurricanes, anchor drops, dredging and trawling. The Florida Reef struggles with a lot of impacts today. In fact, only about 2 percent of the reef that stretches some 350 miles from Biscayne National Park past Everglades National Park and down to Dry Tortugas National Park is covered with living coral.
For several months now at the National Parks Traveler we've been building an ongoing series of stories and podcasts focused on impacts to the Florida Reef and whether it can be saved. Today our guest is Dr. Erinn Fuller, an associate vice president for research, senior scientist, and coral health and disease program manager at the Mote Aquarium in Florida.
Dr. Fuller is on the forefront of efforts to offset impacts to the Florida Reef and restore its corals. She'll explain the various impacts to the reef and the work being done to offset them.
Capitol Reef National Park in Utah is one of the Mighty Five, as the state likes to say in its tourism promotions, and while it's somewhat off the beaten path, visitors are finding it.
In 2024, visitation to the park was a record 1.4 million, a number that likely increased in 2025 and will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.
Cognizant of the rising tide of visitation, the National Park Service staff at Capitol Reef has been working on a visitor use management plan intended to better manage growing visitation. Our guest today is Sue Fritzke, a former superintendent of the park and a member of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks.
What do you do, where do you go, when you pull into your favorite national park and can't find a place to park or a trail without crowds?
Those are good questions probably going through many people's minds as the national parks become more and more popular with more and more people.
Mike Oswald might have the answers you're looking for, at least for the Western half of the country. Oswald is the writer and publisher behind Your Guide to the National Parks, a thick, fact-filled guidebook to the 63 national parks in the country. This year he's veering outside of the parks with a new book titled, simply, Public Land, 1,000 Western Wonders.
Congaree National Park is an often-overlooked unit of the National Park System. Indeed, only about 250,000 visitors set foot in Congaree each year. Those who do are awestruck by the size of the trees there, as the park contains the highest concentration of champion-sized trees anywhere in North America.
Our guest today is Professor Kimberly Meitzen from Texas State University. Before arriving at Texas State, she studied at the University of South Carolina, where she fell in love with Congaree, its floodplain, and its big trees.
A growing majority of bat species are in serious trouble, largely because of white nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that resembles a white fuzz on infected bats. As the disease has spread across the country, it's decimated bat populations – killing upwards of 99 percent of some populations – and turned up in many national parks. As part of the National Parks Traveler's Threatened and Endangered Species Project, contributing writer Kim O'Connell has been looking into the situation with bat species.
Big Bend National Park lately has drawn a lot of national attention, and not in a good way. Recently the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol announced that it wanted to build some sort of border wall along all or part of the 118 miles of border the national park shares with Mexico. Is that a good idea? Will it adversely impact the park? Can it even be done?
To discuss those and other questions, our guest today is Bob Krumenaker, whose long Park Service career included a stint as Big Bend's superintendent. Bob also is chair of the Keep Big Bend Wild organization that is pushing to see a large portion of the park designated as official wilderness.
To put some perspective on the National Parks Travelers' monthslong coverage of threatened and endangered species, we're going to go back in time a bit today to replay a podcast in which we discussed the ESA — and possible changes to it — with Jake Li, a vice president with Defenders of Wildlife, and Stephanie Adams, director of wildlife at the National Parks Conservation Association.
At Cumberland Island the National Park Service currently is crafting a visitor use management plan that critics say poses a great threat to the national seashore's official and potential wilderness.
To get an understanding of what's at risk, we've invited Jessica Howell-Edwards, the executive director of Wild Cumberland, which advocates for the seashore's wilderness area and ecosystems, to join us.
The Florida Reef stretches from Biscayne National Park south past Everglades National Park and down to Dry Tortugas National Park in Florida. It's roughly 350 miles long, and is the only coral reef in the continental United States.
When it comes to reefs around the world, the Florida Reef is the third largest. But, unfortunately, it's under a lot of pressure. It's dealing with pollution, ocean warming, damage inflicted by anchors, and disease. Perhaps the most serious disease infecting the reef is Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which can be fatal to corals.
Our guest today is Beth Firchau, who works for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Part of her role is to manage the association's safe coral program, and part of her role is AZA's coordinator for the Florida Reef Tract Rescue Program. And part of her work involves a network of aquariums across the United States that are holding samples of corals from the Florida Reef.
Whitebark pines are a Western icon that the National Park Service has designated as a "vital sign" species because they are critical to ecosystem functions. But they are at risk of extinction due to climate change, beetles, and a fatal fungus from Eurasia.
Our guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Pansing, the director of forest and restoration science for American Forests, a nonprofit organization that strives to create healthy and resilient forests.
This program was made possible in part by the Park Foundation.
What is the fate of the critically endangered Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle? This smallest of the sea turtle species glides among the sea grasses and coral reefs of the Gulf of Mexico, and nests predominantly along the shores of Mexico, with a growing number of turtles nesting on Padre Island National Seashore in Texas.
Hopes for this sea turtle's recovery weigh heavily on the national seashore's programs and budgeting, which are also threatened and endangered. Dr. Donna Shaver, one of the world's foremost sea turtle experts, nurtured the seashore's sea turtle science program for the past 22 years. However, for the past five years she's been battling to save the program, and her position, at Padre Island National Seashore.
National Park Service officials would not allow us to discuss the plight of the Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle with Dr. Shaver. Instead, the Traveler's Lynn Riddick talks this week with research scientist Nathan Putman. He's involved in studies of the Kemp's Ridley to understand more about this intriguing species.
During a typical summer day at Yellowstone National Park roughly 3,000 vehicles enter through the North Entrance and head down to Mammoth Hot Springs so their passengers can begin their park adventure.
Up until June 2022 their route took them along the Gardner River. But that all changed on June 13, 2022, when a once-in-500-years rainstorm, falling on top of snow cover, sent waters rampaging down the Yellowstone, Lamar, and Gardner rivers.
Those flood waters took out sections of both the northeast and north entrance roads in the park. While the gaps in the Northeast Entrance Road were patched relatively quickly, the North Entrance Road through Gardiner Canyon remains closed to traffic. Instead, vehicles are temporarily using the Old Gardiner Road, a stagecoach route that was relatively quickly rehabilitated to handle vehicle traffic.
Since the flood, the National Park Service has been looking for a permanent route from Gardiner Montana, to Mammoth Hot Springs that would avoid going all the way through the Gardiner Canyon. Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly joins us today to explain the decision-making that has gone into finding that route.
A dramatic battle is being waged on the flanks of Halealakā National Park to save rare Honeycreeper birds that exist only in Hawaii.
It's believed that the 50-odd known living or extinct species of honeycreepers all evolved from a single colonizing ancestor that arrived on Hawaii, the world's most remote island group, some three to five million years ago.
Threats to the birds began to surface around 500 A.D., when Polynesian colonists began to settle on the Pacific island chain. They began to clear most of the low elevation forests, inadvertently eating away at the birds' habitat. It's also thought that the Polynesians introduced the Pacific Rat to the islands, a predator that ate the birds' eggs. The arrival of Europeans in the late 18th century accelerated the destruction of the birds' forest habitat. Along with loss of habitat, the honeycreepers are falling victim to avian malaria, which is carried by mosquitoes, and which is almost always fatal to the birds. Today only 17 species of honeycreepers survive in the state, some with fewer than 500 birds remaining, and it's believed that many will be pushed to extinction within a decade if nothing is done.
In a bid to slow, if not reverse, the spread of avian malaria, the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project is working to disrupt the reproduction of mosquitoes. Traveler associate editor Rita Beamish and Editor Kurt Repanshek recently sat down with Dr. Hanna Mounce, program director of the project, to learn about its work.
This year, 2025, likely will go down as the most transitional for the National Park Service. We've seen the loss of nearly a quarter of the permanent workforce, efforts to whitewash history in some parks, and the loss of a grand lodge to wildfire.
The past 12 months have been full of news impacting the National Park Service and national parks, not all of it good. It's been a somewhat tumultuous year, leaving many wondering what the new year will bring for the parks and their employees.
To help us look back over the past 12 months, we've invited Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, to join us.
A century of seasons has worn the appearance of the log cabin Roy Fure built in present-day Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, but his care of the small cabin, and later National Park Service restoration efforts, have enabled it to stand the test of time.
Dovetail-notched spruce logs still sit tightly together, the corrugated metal roof Fure replaced his sod roof with in 1930 and painted red could use a new coat of paint, but otherwise looks rainproof, and the windmill he erected to generate electricity still stands tall.
Across the 85+ million-acre National Park System there are tens of thousands of historic structures — 19th-century homesteads, Civil War structures, Civil Rights facilities, presidential homes, artworks and more — but not all receive the same treatment as Fure's cabin.
• At Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve in Oregon, the historic, and once charming, Chateau with 23 rooms has been closed since 2018 due to structural issues and a lack of funding to address them.
• In Kansas, the Park Service last year gained title to the First Baptist Church at Nicodemus National Historic Site, but a lack of funding has left the 118-year-old house of worship boarded up.
• At Gettysburg National Military Park the David Wills house, where President Lincoln spent the night before delivering his address, has been closed since fall 2024 when a water line burst and flooded the structure.
Those are just a very small handful of historic structures in the National Park System that are among thousands competing for scarce rehabilitation dollars.
To discuss the situation across the park system we've invited Pam Bowman, the senior director of government relations at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
After more than 50 years as one of the country's landmark environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act has gone from one of the most popular measures before Congress to one fueling demands that it be revised, if not discarded.
The National Parks Traveler is reviewing the Endangered Species Act's work and its record, spotlighting individual species that it's protected, those that it failed, and those that it recovered.
The monthslong series comes as ESA champions worry that the push to weaken the law could consign countless animals and plants to the growing list of flora and fauna that, like the Passenger pigeon, are now found only in books and online.
The National Park System seems to be the perfect background to explore these questions, as its lands are supposedly the best preserved on the federal landscape.
I recently interviewed two wildlife advocates — Jake Li, a vice president with Defenders of Wildlife who spent time working in the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before joining the advocacy group, and Stephanie Adams, director of wildlife at the National Parks Conservation Association.
Though the interviews were done separately, the questions were largely the same. What follows is a merging of those two conversations.
Haleakalā National Park is deceptively wonderful and rich in biodiversity. But if we're not careful, we could lose some of that biodiversity.
Located on the island of Maui in Hawaii, the first thing you notice about this national park is its towering dormant volcano, Haleakalā, which rises from sea level to more than 10,000 feet.
While many visitors simply want to head to the top of the volcano to peer into its crater or enjoy a colorful sunrise or sunset, if you take a little time to get to know this park you'll be amazed by what doesn't first come into sight. For instance, there are more than 300 plant and animal species endemic to Haleakalā — found nowhere else in the world — and many species that are being threatened or endangered with extinction.
Kurt Repanshek headed to Haleakalā this past week with Special Projects Editor Patrick Cone and Assistant Editor Rita Beamish to learn more about the park and its rare and unique species.
It's Thanksgiving Weekend, usually interpreted as a bountiful time of year when we can all sit back and be thankful. But can many who work for the National Park Service feel thankful in the wake of the staff reductions this year?
This year has been hard on the Park Service, what with the loss of roughly a quarter of the full-time workforce and questions around how the agency has long interpreted history. But the Park Service has long struggled with its operations. Funding and staffing never seem to have met the needs of the Park Service to manage its far-flung collection of more than 400 units. We're going to explore the funding and staffing issue of the agency today with John Garder, the senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association.
Gazing up at mountains from their valleys down below, it's hard, if not impossible, to detect any change on the top of the mountains. But change is ongoing, especially in recent history as the climate continues to warm.
From Tacoma or Seattle in Washington state, the snowy summit of Mount Rainier National Park appears unchanged from how it's always looked. Snowy. But is that truly the case? What would you think if someone told you the top of the summit no longer is 14,410 feet high, that the high point of the park has actually shrunk?
Our guests today are Eric Gilbertson, a mechanical engineer and mountaineer from Seattle University, and Scott Hotaling, a watershed sciences professor from Utah State University, who have measured the thickness of the ice cap on the summit of Mount Rainier. What they have to say may surprise you.
The government shutdown has been record-setting in terms of its length. So, too, has been the time that many employees of the National Park Service have been furloughed without pay.
How has the shutdown affected the parks, and how have the friends groups that support the parks responded? We're going to discuss that today with Chris Lenhertz from the Golden Gate Conservancy, Jacki Harp from Smokies Life, Eric Stiles from Friends of Acadia, and Cassius Cash from the Yosemite Conservancy.
What is a "typical" day at the National Parks Traveler like? When you surf over to the website there's always content there, ready to update you on news from around the National Park System. How is it generated, and who generates it?
Editor Kurt Repanshek and Contributing Editor Kim O'Connell dive into the logistics of running a news operation that's focused on national parks and protected areas.
Though the Revolutionary War didn't officially end until September 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, a key turning point in the war for independence occurred six years earlier in a small corner of today's New York state.
The Battle of Saratoga stretched out from September 19 until October 7, 1777, and marked the first time the British Empire had been forced to surrender. British General John Burgoyne had stretched his forces too thin in marching down from Canada with the intent of capturing Albany and wound up with huge losses in his army of nearly 7,000.
His defeat at the hands of Major General Horatio Gates and General Benedict Arnold greatly raised American hopes to gain independence and convinced France to come to the colonials' aid.
The story of how the British surrender came about is told at Saratoga National Historical Park near today's Stillwater, New York. To help us better understand the battles, we're joined today by Lauren Roberts, the historian at Saratoga County, New York, and Traveler Contributing Editor Kim O'Connell, who recently visited the historical park.
The federal government is shut down, but the national parks – most of them, anyway – are open.
Back during his first term in office President Donald Trump also kept the parks open during the government shutdown that stretched from the end of 2018 into early 2019. That led to some vandalism to the parks and damage to some park resources.
How are things going this shutdown? To explore that question, our guest today is Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president of government affairs with the National Parks Conservation Association.
Kansas is a big place, and not one particularly well-known for national park destinations. But that doesn’t mean you should overlook the Sunflower State.
In the closing days of September, as the country seemed destined for a government shutdown, the Traveler's Kurt Repanshek and Patrick Cone headed into Kansas to visit some of the parks there to better understand their role in the National Park System.
And we were not disappointed. Back in 2022 Kurt made a similar trip, and stopped at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in the Flint Hills of central Kansas. During that stop Ranger Eric Patterson gave Kurt a wonderful tour of the preserve and explained its history.
Eric has moved on, but during Kurt and Patrick's recent visit Heather Brown, the preserve’s chief of interpretation, sat down with them to discuss the preserve in general and the tallgrass prairie specifically.
During their swing through Kansas, Kurt and Patrick also headed to Nicodemus, a well-off-the-beaten path destination in the National Park System, one so far off the beaten path that the state of Kansas does Nicodemus National Historic Site a tremendous disservice by providing very little signage showing you how to get to Nicodemus.
But stay determined and you can find the site. While the Park Service only claims five buildings at Nicodemus, and only two are open, the history of how the townsite was founded in post-Civil War America by more than 300 previously enslaved peoples is an uplifting history of self-determination, grit, and perseverance.
What follows are two conversations they had with rangers – before they were furloughed when the government shut down – at the two sites, LueCreasea Horne Horn at Nicodemus National Historic Site and Heather Brown at Tallgrass prairie.
How do national parks develop their interpretive materials? What influences come into play when a park begins to outline its approach and the direction it takes when crafting educational materials for visitors? Is the National Park Service careful to take a truthful path when presenting history?
Those are topical questions considering the Trump administration’s efforts to rid the National Park System of interpretive materials that disparage Americans.
But political influences on park messaging are not unique to the Trump administration. Robert Pahre, a political science professor at the University of Illinois, has been studying the effect of politics on national park interpretation in the past. He joins us to discuss what he’s found in that research, and to weigh in on what’s going on today in terms of political pressures on the National Park Service.
Nearly 700 volunteers, including some from as far away as Japan, descended on the Appalachian Trail in the past year in an unprecedented effort to recover a landscape forever scarred by Hurricane Helene.
The storm in September 2024 shut down 431 miles of the AT. Trees were snapped in half, piled in what looked like a bizarre game of pickup sticks. Landslides and flooding tore away trails and treadway. Bridges and crossovers were gone.
It was — and still is — a disaster of historic proportions. But it’s also a story of resiliency of the land and the people who are stewards of it.
This week the Traveler’s Jan Childs talks with two of the famous trail’s stewards: Joe Morris, project coordinator for Tennessee Eastman Hiking and Canoeing Club, and Franklin Tate, regional director for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which by the way is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.
This past week unspecified interpretive materials related to slavery were either removed or tagged for removal from Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. It also was reported that a troubling photo known as the “Scourged Back” that depicted the scar-riddled back of an enslaved man was taken down from Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia.
The National Park System has been pulled into the current-day battles of wokeism of sorts through the removal of those, and likely other, interpretive materials in the parks that help us better understand enslaved history. Where it will end, or whether it will be reversed, is unknown.
To better understand what’s transpiring and what the impacts are, we’ve invited Alan Spears, the senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, to join us today.
We can’t escape history. We’re born into a world full of it, and we’re making it as we go from day to day. But how are we at preserving history?
There’s been a lot of concern this year that the administration of President Donald Trump is altering, if not entirely trying to erase, history. But can that actually be done? The National Park Service, often called the nation’s storyteller, has been interpreting history for more than a century, and some of that interpretation revolves around sites that have lost their physical structures over the decades.
Today's guest is Monica Rhodes, an internationally-recognized leader, advisor, and influencer who has directed preservation activities in 46 states and completed projects in more than 100 national parks. Today, she advises and partners with cites, universities, and other institutions to revitalize and leverage historic sites and communities to ensure a vibrant future for these places.
We’ve made it past Labor Day. Which means fall colors in some parts of the country aren’t too far off, seasonal wildlife migrations are getting under way, and summertime crowds in the national park system have thinned out.
Fall is a glorious time to be out in the park system. The question right now, though, is how will the park system be functioning come October? That’s a very pertinent question, because the federal government is facing a shutdown on September 30 if Congress can’t come to terms on a budget for fiscal year 2026, which starts October 1.
To consider the possible options, Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president for governmental affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, joins Editor Kurt Repanshek to discuss the situation.
Once upon a time, there were tens of millions of bison on the North American continent. Today, there are somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000. Most are in commercial herds, with a relative few in private herds and on public lands.
Should there be more bison on the continent? There potentially is space for them on places like the 550,000-acre Thunder Basin National Grassland in Wyoming, the nearly 600,000-acre Buffalo Gap National Grassland in South Dakota, and the roughly 440,000-acre Comanche National Grassland in Colorado, just to name three locations.
And a new study out this past week explains why bison are more beneficial for grasslands than traditional livestock, and the benefits increase as herd size does. To understand what’s going on, we’re joined today by Professor William Hamilton from Washington and Lee University in Virginia, one of the study's co-authors.
It’s been said that the night skies are the other half of the National Park System. And it only makes sense, for when you’re in a park and the sun goes down you tend to look into the night sky to spot constellations or, if you’re lucky enough and in the right place, a comet overhead.
Keeping that other half of the park system in mind, today’s podcast will be a somewhat dark one. Our guest is Jeff Pfaller, a fine arts photographer who spent five years capturing night skies over national parks and other public lands.
A book coming out in October by Pfaller showcases synchronous fireflies at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the famous illumination that makes Horsetail Fall in Yosemite National Park look like a cascading stream of lava, a shot of the whirling Milky Way against a colorful stump of petrified wood at Petrified Forest National Park, and many other nighttime images that remind us of that other half of the park system is overhead.
National Parks Traveler readers can obtain a $15 discount on the book's purchase price by using this link to order it.
Vessel-whale collisions are a significant concern in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, where nutrient-rich waters support a seasonal influx of humpback whales and other marine mammals. As one of the most visited marine parks in Alaska, Glacier Bay sees a high volume of vessel traffic, including cruise ships, tour boats, and private craft.
This summer an adult humpback whale was seen with a fresh, one-foot gash behind its dorsal fin which appeared to be from contact with a boat propeller. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick reaches out to biologist Chris Gabriele to discuss this incident and the park’s strategies to reduce whale collisions, including monitoring whale activity, warning systems, and public education.
Is nature nonpartisan? Earlier this year we had an interview with Dr. Caleb Scoville from Tufts University, who received an Andrew Carnegie fellowship to explore whether environmental issues are highly partisan.
It can certainly seem that here in America just about everything is partisan these days, but is nature partisan?
As another of our guests pointed out, those who enjoy going out into nature come in all political flavors. That said, our guest today is Benji Backer, the driver behind the Nature is Nonpartisan campaign to get the American public – all of us – to convince the decision makers in Washington that the environment is too important to be a partisan issue.
El Camino Real de Los Tejas is a network of trails that connected Spanish missions, settlements, and military outposts from Mexico through Texas and into Louisiana. Now a national historic trail, this road played a crucial role in the Spanish colonization of the region in the late 1600s. It served as a vital route for communication, trade, and military movement.
Over time, that trail facilitated cultural exchange and interaction between Spanish settlers, indigenous peoples, and later, Anglo-American pioneers. The 2500 mile route is marked by numerous historical sites, including mission ruins, forts, and early settlements. It provides a tangible link to the colonial past and the diverse communities that shaped Texas and the broader Southwest.
The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick takes a stroll along the trail with expert Steven Gonzales, who shares his knowledge about the significance of the trail and the American historical narrative.
The National Parks Conservation Association is almost as old as the National Park Service. The Service, as you probably know, was established in 1916, and NPCA came along three years later.
Through the 106-year history of NPCA, there has been only one woman who held the title of president and Chief Executive Officer. That woman is Theresa Pierno, who has worked for the park advocacy group for more than two decades, and as NPCA’s CEO and president for the past ten years.
At the end of this year Theresa will step down from the organization, but she won’t stop advocating for the parks. Theresa is our guest today, and will both look back on her tenure with NPCA and the current political climate that is threatening the National Park Service and the national parks.
Grizzly bears. They define charismatic megafauna. Huge animals that draw both human admiration and fear. Once they roamed the entire country, though that was a long time ago. Today there are pockets of grizzly bear populations in the Rocky Mountains from Yellowstone to Glacier National Parks.
Among the questions that revolve around grizzly bears is how many are too many, are they a threat to humans, should they be removed from the landscape, or protected?
To explore those issues our guests today are Erin Edge and Joseph Vaile from Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit wildlife advocacy organization.
Running nearly 2,200 miles along the spine of the Appalachian Range from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail arguably is the world's most famous long-distance trail.
Some think it's also one that can be very crowded in spots. Morgan Sommerville, the director of visitor use management for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, joins us today to discuss the trail in general and whether it's too crowded.
Heading into the National Park System this summer? Going it alone, or have you booked a tour company? What do you think about how the Trump Administration and Congress are treating the National Parks and the National Park Service? Have you reported any park signs to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that disparage Americans, dead or alive?
As you can tell there’s a lot going on in the parks. Some good, some not so good, and some downright bad. It’s a lot to digest, and a lot to discuss. To help us gauge a sense of what’s going on out there, our guest is Leigh Barnes, President of the Americas at Intrepid Travel, an Australian-based tour company that has been leading trips around the world since 1989. Part of their cache is keeping tour groups small, a dozen or so travelers along with the guides.
The company also recently conducted a survey of Americans to get their sense of how politicians are treating the Parks and the Park Service that we’ll discuss with Leigh.
Anniversaries and birthdays give us time to reflect on individuals, accomplishments, and moments in history. They often refresh our memories and can serve as motivators to do something.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which was established in 1925, just two years after the first sections of the Appalachian Trail opened.
To discuss the trail, some of its history, and the challenges it faces today, our guests are Sandi Marra, CEO of the Conservancy, and Brendan Mysliwiec, the Conservancy’s Director of Federal Policy.
There are some in Congress who think we should have a fire sale on public lands. Places across national forests and the Bureau of Land Management that politicians think should be offered for sale, either to try to adopt President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would continue to offer the biggest tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and corporations or simply because they don’t believe there should be public lands.
This legislation, sponsored by U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, could be the most devastating public lands measure to come before Congress. If passed, it could dramatically reshape the West. While Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says many of the lands that could be affected are often "barren land next to highways with existing billboards that have no recreational value," many others disagree.
There’s a hew and cry across the West, that many of these lands are used by hunters and anglers, by birders and backpackers, four-wheelers and by weekend campers.
To get into the weeds of this legislation our guest this week is Mike Carroll, director of the BLM program for The Wilderness Society.
Today our guest is Marissa Ortega-Welch, a San Francisco-based freelance journalist who focuses on environmental issues. Last year she generated a series of podcasts surrounding the topic of official wilderness – the history of official wilderness and the idea of wilderness. It’s an interesting series that you can find by searching for How Wild wherever you download your podcasts.
So much is happening so quickly to the National Park Service. There have been staff reductions, hiring freezes, spending freezes, orders from the Interior Secretary to make sure that visitors find national parks welcoming, no matter what it takes.
Every week seems to bring something new, and quite frankly dire to the National Park Service. Most recently we’ve heard about the loss of about 60 employees from the agency’s Alaska regional office, and there are concerns the Trump administration is going to push through even greater reductions in force for the Park Service.
How are those moves impacting the parks and the Park Service? Our guest today is Kristen Brengel, the Senior Vice President for Governmental Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.
Is green a red and blue construct? Put another way, is there a political partisan divide over the environment?
That’s a particularly interesting question, no doubt more so in recent years as the country seems to have drifted farther and farther apart because of our political beliefs. To that point, a reader reached out the other day to say our stories shouldn’t be negative on the Trump Administration because the national parks are going to need the help of all of us - Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and everything in-between - to survive.
But are environmental issues highly partisan? For the Traveler’s purpose, we’ll define “environmental issues” as those focused on public lands, wildlife, clean air, clean water, and of course the national parks.
To help us try to answer that question, our guest today is Caleb Scoville, a professor at Tufts University who has received an Andrew Carnegie fellowship to explore that question.
News around public lands these days seems to revolve entirely around the Trump administration. In the case of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, many of the steps the administration is taking with the operational efficiencies of the National Park Service and other land management agencies certainly are keeping PEER busy. But what exactly is PEER, and what is their mission? For as long as the National Parks Traveler has been in existence, going back 20 years, stories recounting PEER and its lawsuits against land-management agencies have appeared frequently in our coverage. To explain the nonprofit organization’s role, our guest today is Tim Whitehouse, PEER’s executive director.
True birders are some of the most determined and persistent hobbyists out there. If you want to call bird watching a hobby. For many, it’s more like a passion. Many look forward to “Big Day” competitions, where individuals and teams strive to see how many different bird species they can spot in a 24-hour period.
Many birders log their sightings and identifications in eBird, a smartphone application created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. The good news is that millions of birders use this app. The concerning news is that their bird sightings over a recent 14-year-period point to population declines in 75 percent of North American bird species.
To learn more about this news, we’ve invited Dr. Amanda Rodewald from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Cornell University to join us today.
It’s fair to say that the nation’s public lands, those managed by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land-management agencies are at risk under the Trump administration.
There’s no hyperbole in that statement if you pay attention to what the administration already has done in terms of downsizing those agencies’ workforces, and when you listen to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum say he wants to open more public lands to energy development and mining.
Federal lands in the United States are owned by all Americans, but at various times there have been efforts to wrench those lands away from the government to give to the states or sell off.
Walt Dabney spent his professional career protecting public lands during his decades-long stint with the National Park Service and then as director of the Texas State Parks. Now he is working to educate Americans on their vested interest in those lands and what could be lost if Congress or the White House tries to get rid of them.
The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term might be the most tumultuous first 100 days of any president. He certainly came in prepared to move his agenda forward, no matter what barriers to it existed.
We don’t usually discuss presidential politics, but President Trump has released a blizzard of executive orders and directives touching all corners of the federal government, including the National Park Service.
What we have seen so far is the loss of perhaps 2,500 Park Service employees, and along with them some crucial institutional knowledge. Any day we expect to hear of a further reduction in force of the Park Service.
The president and the Republican Congress have also taken aim at environmental laws and regulations, determined it seems to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, among others, and there’s been talk about selling off federal lands.
And, of course, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has made it clear he wants to see more coal mined and more oil and gas reserves tapped. The administration also is taking aim at agency responses to climate change, and the president has ordered the militarization of federal lands – including national park lands – along the country’s southern border with Mexico.
To get a take on what’s going on and what the impacts might be, we’re joined today by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.
There has been much upheaval in the National Park Service this year, with firings, then rehires, and staff deciding to retire now rather than risk sticking around and being fired. There have been fears that more Park Service personnel are about to be let go through a reduction in force.
While Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered the Park Service to ensure that parks are properly to support the operating hours and needs of each park unit,” that message said nothing about protecting park resources.
Among all this upheaval the question that goes begging is whether the Interior Department is as concerned about protecting natural resources, including wildlife, as it is about seeing that visitors have a good national park experience?
Our guest today is Dr. Michael Soukup, who during his National Park Service career served as the agency’s chief scientist. When he joined the Park Service in 1975 Dr. Soukup, a distinguished coastal ecologist, biologist and researcher, brought a clear vision for natural resource stewardship that would be embraced throughout the NPS and supported by visitors and local citizens. He was directly responsible for launching the Natural Resource Challenge, a $100 million funding initiative that brought the protection of natural resources of the parks to the forefront.
George Melendez Wright was a brilliant young scientist with the National Park Service back in the 1920s and 1930s. You could say he was ahead of his time, in that he wanted the Park Service to take a holistic role in how wildlife in the parks was managed.
While Wright tragically left the world too young when he was killed in a car crash in 1936, his name lives on today in the George Wright Society, a nonprofit organization that is focused on stewardship of parks, protected & conserved areas, cultural sites, and other kinds of place-based conservation.
Our guest today is Dave Harmon, executive director of the society. We’ll be back in a minute with Dave to learn more about the society and the role it plays.
One of the greatest shows on Earth has been going on now for several months in Hawaii, where the Kīlauea volcano at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park has been erupting since late December. The Kīlauea volcano is the most active volcano on Earth. It’s also a relatively safe volcano in that it spends most of its time simmering and bubbling without any spectacularly explosive eruptions. But lately it has been putting on some incredible shows of lava fountains, with one glowing string of magma soaring about 1,000 feet in the air, a truly spectacular sight to see. To understand what’s going on with Kīlauea and what danger it poses, we’re joined today by Matt Patrick, a research geologist with the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
There are more stories to be found in the National Park System than one could write in a lifetime. Or several lifetimes.
Sometimes those stories can be hard to spot. How many were aware of the factoid from Great Smoky Mountains National Park that Jennifer Bain dug up, that if you stacked up all of the park’s salamanders against its roughly 1,900 black bears, the salamanders would weigh more?
Talk about national park trivia.
We’re going to talk about stories in the parks today with Kim O’Connell and Rita Beamish, two long-tenured writers for the Traveler. The ones they’re currently working on are pretty interesting.
In this week’s podcast we thought we’d take a break from the unsettling news happening in and around our national parks and federal lands regarding park staff reductions and threats of reducing park boundaries to make way for mining.
Instead, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick catches up with a former scientist who’s now a comedian to hear about his experiences during his artist-in-residency program at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. Selected for the residency by the National Parks Arts Foundation, Ben Miller spent a month with park staff and scientists to absorb as much as possible about Hawaiian culture, landscapes and history. The end result was a comedy routine designed specifically for Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.
There is, across the country, some upheaval going on as the Trump administration works to reduce the size of the federal government. Whether you support that effort or oppose it, you can’t deny there’s not upheaval going on.
That upheaval has hit all federal government agencies. At the National Park Service, seasonal ranger job offers were rescinded back in January. Roughly 1,000 probationary employees were fired on Valentine’s Day. Another 700-1000 Park Service employees took up the administration’s offer to resign now, but stay on the payroll through the end of the fiscal year. And this week the Park Service and other government agencies are expected to send their plans for a reduction-in-force to the administration.
To discuss these developments, we’ve invited Rick Mossman, president of the Association of National Park Rangers, to join us.
Across the United States there are hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. Indeed, there are more than 500 million acres of federal lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Park Service, just to name the three largest land managers in federal government.
A majority of those lands, the 245 million acres managed by the BLM and the 193 million managed by the Forest Service, are managed for multiple use. Logging, mining, recreation, and even official wilderness. The National Park Service lands, of course, are primarily managed for conservation of natural resources and enjoyment by you, the visitors.
But the Trump administration has an eye on some of those lands for energy development and mining, whether that’s oil and gas production or hard-rock mining. To better understand what’s at stake under that strategy we’re joined today by Dan Hartinger, the senior director of agency policy at the Wilderness Society.
It was just over a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, that the Trump administration wiped 1,000 employees off the National Park Service staff without any apparent strategy other than that they were dispensable staff still on probation and so lacking any real protection for being fired without cause.
Those cuts swept across the 433 units of the National Park System, taking custodial workers, scientists, even lawyers. Today we’re joined by one of the 1,000 who lost their jobs, Angela Moxley, who was just ten days shy of clearing probation when she lost her job at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. Angela was a botanist, one of the many Park Service employees who you’re not likely to encounter in a park, but as you’ll hear, one whose job is just as vital as that of the park interpreter who takes you for a hike.
The Trump administration’s determination to reduce the size of government regardless of the cost is having a hard impact on the National Park Service. Last month the agency was forced to rescind job offers to seasonal workers, saw a hold placed on millions of dollars distributed through the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change, been told to prepare a reduction-in-force list of employees, and ordered to "hire no more than one employee for every four" let go. There was a wee bit of good news late last week, with the decision Friday to allow the Park Service to hire 5,000 seasonal workers. But at the same time, the agency was told to fire 1,000 probationary workers. Discussing these developments and their impact on the parks and the Park Service are Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, and Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
National parks are home to many iconic trees. Bristlecones pines, Whitebark pines, Sequoias, even mangroves. And, of course, redwoods.
These trees hold many stories. The size alone of redwoods and sequoias are enough to hold your attention. But there are backstories, as well. In the case of redwoods along the Northern California coast, the backstory can be heart breaking. There are chapters of logging fever, of course, as well as of political machinations, and stories of loss.
Greg King presents the stories swirling around Redwoods in his book, The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods. One particularly interesting chapter for national park lovers is that Newton B. Drury, the 4th director of the National Park Service, actually worked against the creation of Redwood National Park.
Rising sea levels, stronger storms, eroding shorelines, and sinking terrain are taking a toll on the fragile ecosystems and historic resources at Cape Lookout National Seashore on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey takes a close look at these threats and predicts how they will impact the national seashore over the coming years. Climate change impacts are happening across the country, reaching into most, if not all, units of the National Park System. Sea level rise is particularly concerning because you just can’t up and move a park, and if that park is on an island, well, high water is coming. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with Cape Lookout Superintendent Jeff West and authors of the USGS study about the challenges the National Park Service faces in creating sustainable coastal management practices for Cape Lookout.
Here we are, a week into the second administration of President Donald Trump. It’s certainly a time of change, some of which is expected, and some perhaps not. Do we really need to rename North America’s tallest mountain, Denali in Denali National Park and Preserve?
There is much going on in the federal government, and not all is good. Hiring freezes are underway. There’s much talk about reducing the federal budget, which requires cutting agency funding.
To try to gain some clarity on what’s beginning to go on and what impacts it might have on the National Park System and the National Park Service, we’re joined today by Kristen Brengel, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.
There are sounds that wake you up out of a deep sleep, only to be dismissed as you fall back to sleep. And then there are sounds that rivet you, make you sit bolt upright.
That was the type of sound that woke us while we were deep in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park. Sunrise hadn’t yet come, yet we were wide awake, listening to one of the most mesmerizing sounds you can encounter in the wilds: The melodious rising and falling howl of a wolf.
It was late summer in 2008 when two friends and I were lucky enough to catch that howling. Had it been 20 years earlier, there would have been an audible hole in the park sky because there were no wolves in Yellowstone in 1988.
It was an effort launched early in the 1990s that returned the predators to the park in January 12, 1995 – 30 years ago – when 14 wolves trapped in Canada were brought into Yellowstone to kick off an audacious effort to see healthy wolf packs loping through the park.
How have they done? To find out, our guest today is Eric Clewis, the Northern Rockies senior representative for Defenders of Wildlife.
We’re five days into 2025, and already there’s a lot of news concerning national parks and the National Park Service. Traveler Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek is joined today by Contributing Editor Kim O’Connell to discuss the Traveler’s 4th Annual Threatened and Endangered Park Series and other recent park-related news.
Many of us like to take a walk in our favorite national park, whether it’s a short stroll down one of the boardwalks at Yellowstone National Park, the hike to the top of Old Rag at Shenandoah National Park, or up the Mist Trail at Yosemite National Park, we like to get out and experience parks up close.
As you might imagine, there are walks in the National Park System, and then there are walks. Kevin Fedarko and his photographic sidekick Pete McBride took one of those “other” hikes in Grand Canyon National Park. And it didn’t initially go as planned. While Fedarko raised some serious blisters on his feet that required duct tape to protect, McBride almost needed a medical evacuation from the backcountry.
Still, the hike - or rather hikes - generated a compelling book from Fedarko titled, appropriately enough, “A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon”.
There are across the country more than 430 units of the National Park System. And no doubt, most of us are only familiar with the so-called name brand parks. Places like Shenandoah, Acadia, Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon… But just because you’re not already familiar with a park unit doesn’t mean you should write it off your to-do list.
While I am familiar with the names of most park units due to my day job, I haven’t had the chance to visit them all just yet. Being a lover of water and paddling, when I consider going for a break from the keyboard, I often have a requirement that water is required. And while I haven’t been there yet, I am intrigued by St. Croix National Scenic Riverway in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and its two rivers.
Today I’m going to learn a little bit more about this interesting park and share with you my conversation with Nate Toering, the park’s Director of Communications and Education.
Elephant seals are not your small, cuddly marine mammals. They are behemoths. Males, known as bulls, can reach 5,000 pounds, while females, known as cows, routinely clock in at around 1,000 pounds or so. If you’re a wildlife watcher, now is the time to check elephant seals off your life list. Between December and March, they come en masse to Point Reyes National Seashore in California to give birth and mate again. But they don’t come ashore to simply laze about and soak up the sun when it’s shining. Males are building their harems much like bull elk do, and that can sometimes lead to fights between these ponderous animals. To learn more about elephant seals, how they spend their days, and where you can see them at Point Reyes, we’re joined today by Sarah Codde, a marine ecologist at the national seashore.
Most, if not all of us, have bucket lists. Places we want to visit…but don’t always get the opportunity. This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. One of the destinations on my bucket list is Gates of Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Noatak River that runs through it. A week or two floating the river sounds pretty ideal to me. While it’s debatable whether I’ll cross that off my bucket list remains to be seen, today’s guest has floated the river more than once and backpacked all over Gates of the Arctic. And Jon Waterman returned from those trips with incredible stories of the places he saw, the people he met, and the wildlife that came in range of his eyes. But over the course of several decades Jon also has witnessed the impact of climate change to the region, and it hasn’t been good. It’s the main thread of a story he lays out in his latest book, Into the Thaw.
Change happens…and sometimes it doesn’t. Change certainly is underway in Washington, where the incoming Trump administration is putting its players in position with promises of changing, or maybe upsetting, the status quo. Against that, the National Park Service continues to face long-standing problems with not enough staff or funding, compounded by National Park System damage from hurricanes, tornadoes, sea level rise, wildfires, just about everything under the sun. We’re going to explore those topics today with Phil Francis from the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and John Garder and Chad Lord from the National Parks Conservation Association.
As the calendar runs down on the current session of Congress, there are a number of pieces of legislation that would involve or possibly impact the National Park System if they find their way into an omnibus lands bill that gains passage before the session adjourns. While we haven’t seen exactly what might find their way into an omnibus lands bill, among the candidates are legislation that would turn Chiricahua National Monument into a national park, one that would create a “designated operating partner” to oversee the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, and another that calls for a Benton MacKaye National Scenic Trail feasibility study. There’s also pending legislation that would approve expansion of Big Bend National Park by about 6000 acres, one that would transform Apostle Islands National Lakeshore into Apostle Islands National Park and Preserve, and one that, if passed, would forbid any official wilderness designation to be bestowed on Big Cpress National Preserve. We’re going to take a look at the Big Bend, Apostle Islands, and Big Cypress measures today with Bob Krumenaker, who, during his 40+ years with the National Park Service, was superintendent of both Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Big Bend National Park and served a stint as acting superintendent of Everglades National Park, which adjoins Big Cypress National Preserve.
The vulnerable red-cockaded woodpecker is known to be found in national park units throughout the southeast. Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park in Florida, Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee are just a few of the parks that either are, or once were, home to the woodpecker.
Recently the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved to downlist the red-cockaded woodpecker from being an endangered species to being threatened. While that normally would be welcome news, the decision has been criticized as being premature and ignorant of climate-change threats to the species.
This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick discusses this decision with the southeast program director of Defenders of Wildlife…and the thinking behind that organization’s belief that this decision comes at a questionable time.
Humans like to play, right? We play cards, we play baseball and basketball, we go fishing or take a hike into the mountains. It’s our play time, time to recharge, refocus, relax. Did you know animals like to play, too? And many times, our playgrounds infringe on wildlife habitat. But how does that affect their behavior? Does it affect their behavior? Today’s guest, Dr. Joel Berger, a wildlife biologist based at Colorado State University but who considers the world’s wild places as his playground, joins us today to talk about our human recreation and the impacts it has on wildlife.
Whether this is your first listen of our weekly podcast or number 299, welcome and thank you for listening. We hope you find these episodes interesting and present information or a side to the parks that you previously didn’t know about.
Frankly, that’s the approach that we try to take at the Traveler. Not only to provide newsworthy information, such as National Park Service funding for hurricane impacts, but also to highlight aspects of the National Park System that you may not have been aware of.
For example, take Jennifer Bain’s story from Oregon Cave National Monument and Preserve, and its collection of purely American Monterey furniture, or Barbara Jensen’s article from Cuyahoga Valley National Park and the Ohio and Eerie Canal Towpath there. Or Sharon McDonald’s piece on the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site in California.
Today, we’re joined by contributors Kim O’Connell and Lynn Riddick to talk about the unusual, and at times eclectic content that you’ll find on the Traveler.
The Natchez Trace Parkway is a scenic byway that rolls 440 miles through Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. A unit of the National Park Service, the trace winds its way through lush landscapes, diverse ecosystems and interesting historical sites. Originally the trace was a foot path for Native Americans and later used by early pioneers and traders. Today it’s popular for motorists, cyclists and others seeking adventure, tranquility and a peek into America’s past. Most recently, it was the chosen location for a remarkable initiative by four women interested in promoting living kidney donations. All living kidney donors themselves, these women tackled the parkway’s entire 444 miles, beginning in Nashville, Tennessee, and finishing in Natchez, Mississippi….and did it in only four days. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick visits with these donor athletes to learn about their journey that they call ”4Women 4Kidneys 444Miles 4Days” and also to get a sense of what the Natchez Trace Parkway can offer to everyone.
The National Trail System in the United States spans many thousands of miles of foot trail. The crown jewels of that system, of course, are the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and the Pacific Crest Trail.
While the adventurous might look at those long trails and set their sights on hiking one end from end, not all manage to complete the journey. Many become disillusioned after days spent hiking in the rain, or because they become homesick, or because of the blisters that sprout on their feet.
And some simply vanish. Today we’re joined by New York Times Bestselling author Andrea Lankford to talk about her book, Trail of the Lost, the Relentless Search to Bring home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s an incredible story Andrea has researched and woven together around three young men seemingly determined to go end to end on that trail.
Crime happens, even in national parks, national forests, and other public lands. There are murders, thefts, robberies and all sorts of crime that we’d hope to escape by heading into the kingdom of public lands. It can be hard to accept that national parks are not immune from criminals and crimes. Just this past Fourth of July there was a horrific incident in Yellowstone National Park when a concessions employees armed with an automatic rifle threatened to go on a killing spree. Law enforcement rangers who responded prevented that from happening, killing the man in the process, but it really underscored the reality that parks are not immune from crime. To learn more about “crime off the grid,” we’re joined today by Tara Ross and Nancy Martinz, former law enforcement rangers in Yellowstone who these days work to educate the public about crime on public lands via their podcast, Crime off the Grid.
Who could have predicted that Hurricane Helene would carry her fury from the Gulf of Mexico and the coast of Florida hundreds of miles north into Appalachia? While there were forecasts calling for the hurricane to be downgraded to a tropical storm and drop quite a bit of rain in the region, the extent of damage in western North Carolina has been breathtaking.
Jacqueline Harp had her hands full when she took over as CEO of Smokies Life, a nonprofit organization that works with the National Park Service to develop educational and interpretive materials for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had barely settled into that job when Helene reached North Carolina.
We’ve invited Jacki to join us today both to learn how recovery efforts are going in the national park, and to discuss her new role and ambitions with Smokies Life.
The coastal town of Rodanthe, North Carolina is just a small spot on the map, but it’s a big place in the hearts of the people who live, own property, and vacation there. Located along Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Rodanthe has been in the national spotlight because of a succession of houses that have fallen into the Atlantic Ocean due to beach erosion. There have been ten houses affected in the past four years, and five this year alone.
As the Traveler and other national media outlets have reported, every time a beach house succumbs to the sea, it creates a massive debris field that is carried down the shore for miles, posing serious hazards to people, flora and fauna alike. Residents have described the phenomenon as a slow-motion hurricane.
In addition to the ongoing discussions about other at-risk houses, there is the very real issue of cleanup. The National Park Service brings in contractors who take out debris in truckloads, but that doesn’t mean that local residents are just standing idly by. Recently Traveler correspondent Kim O’Connell had the pleasure of interviewing local Tom Brueckner the day before he was set to join a group of residents to do a big beach cleanup as part of the National Park Service’s newly launched Adopt-A-Beach program.
Concessions are the backbone of the National Park System. True, the National Park Service manages the parks and the wildlife and the visitors, but the concessionaires provide you with a bed, or campsite, to sleep in, restaurants to dine in, and gift shops to browse in.
Xanterra Parks and Resorts is one of the key players in the national park concessions industry. They operate lodges in Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Death Valley, Glacier, Grand Canyon and, until the end of this year, Zion National Park.
A newcomer on the park concessions scene is POWDR Corp., a self-branded adventure company most tied to snow sports. This past January, however, POWDR took over the concessions at Stovepipe Wells Village in Death Valley National Park, and this coming January it’ll be operating concessions at Zion National Park.
To learn more about POWDR and why it’s seeking opportunities in the National Park System, we’ve invited Justin Sibley, the company’s CEO, to discuss the transition. We’ll be back in a minute with Justin.
The National Park System is an incredible reservoir of wildlife, from charismatic animals such as grizzly bears, bison and wolves, to animals such as moose, and pronghorn and sea turtles that, while not usually labeled as charismatic, are indeed just that. Wolves certainly fall under the charismatic megafauna classification. They're majestic and mystifying, and perhaps even lend some romanticism to your backcountry adventures if you are lucky enough to hear a pack howling in chorus after sundown. While it’s well-known that Yellowstone National Park and Isle Royale National Park have wolf populations, you might not know that Voyageurs National Park also has a resident population of the predators. To learn more about the wolves at Voyageurs National Park and their behavior, we’re joined today by Dr. Thomas Gable, the project lead for the Voyageurs Wolf Project.
It was back in 1967 when the Congress chartered the National Park Foundation to serve as the official charity of the National Park Service, and over the decades it has raised millions of dollars for the parks. The Foundation is in the midst of its Campaign for National Parks, a billion-dollar campaign that has already raised $815 million. A big chunk of that total came from a recent $100 million grant that greatly moved the foundation closer to its billion-dollar goal. To discuss the campaign, how the money is raised and where it’s being spent, we’re joined today by Will Shafroth, the president and CEO of the National Park Foundation.
Have you ever been to Mammoth Cave National Park? It’s really not that impressive, is it. Sure, it’s more than 425 miles long, but only about 10 miles are open to the public.
Mammoth Cave is indeed a big, dark hole in the ground. And apparently there are a fair number of visitors to the national park in Kentucky who are not impressed with the cave and its underground artworks created by dripstones, stalactites, and stalagmites. In fact, a recent survey ranked Mammoth Cave as the third-most disappointing destination in America.
Really? To get the park’s response, we’re joined today by Molly Schroer, the park’s management analyst. We’ll be back in a minute with Molly.
From Maine to Florida, coastal units of the National Park System are being impacted in various ways by the changing climate. Some of the impacts affect wildlife, some natural resources, and some the human populations who either live in or come to visit these beautiful areas.
At the National Parks Traveler. We’ve been working on a series of stories looking at these changes that are showing up.
In recent shows we’ve discussed impacts to manatees that live in the waters of Everglades and Biscayne national parks as well as Cumberland Island National Seashore, and how sea level rise is impacting salt marshes that are vital for wildlife and which serve as buffers to hurricanes and tropical storms.
At Acadia National Park in Maine, the impacts are materializing in various ways.
Rainstorms are becoming heavier and more damaging, invasive species such as the Asian shore crab are showing up in the waters of Frenchman Bay, and the number of bird species that winter on Mount Desert Island have decreased.
To take a closer look at these changes, we’re joined by Nick Fisichelli, the president and CEO of the Schoodic Institute, a nonprofit science center based on the national park’s Schoodic Peninsula to discuss some of the impacts that have arrived and the research being done to better understand them.
When you hear the word volcano, where in the world do you think of? Mount Vesuvious in Italy? Mount Fuji in Japan? Maybe Cotopaxi in Ecuador? Do you ever think of Lassen Peak? The National Park System is full of volcanoes. Some active, some dormant, some extinct. They all have fascinating stories to tell. There was a series of eruptions of Lassen Peak in Northern California between 1914 and 1917, with the 1915 eruption largely playing a role in the establishment of Lassen Volcanic National Park.
Today we’re going to be discussing Lassen Peak and its volcanism along with Andy Calvert, the scientist-in-charge of the California Volcano Observatory, and Jessica Ball, the observatory’s volcano hazards and communication specialist.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been four years since Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act and President Trump signed it into law. Under that legislation, the National Park Service has been receiving $1.3 billion a year to pay for tackling the National Park System’s maintenance backlog.
When the Great American Outdoors Act was passed, it was given a five-year life. That means it will have to be reauthorized next year to keep the program going. It’s had wide-ranging impacts, paying for things like roadwork on the Blue Ridge Parkway, new bridges at Yellowstone National Park, improved campgrounds in the park system, and new interpretation.
But will the GAOA get renewed, and what’s the process to get there? To examine the benefits of the legislation, and talk about the steps being taken to reauthorize the legislation, we’re joined today by Eric Stiles, president and CEO of Friends of Acadia, Kristen Brengel, the senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, and Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
Manatees are some of the most unusual looking wildlife creatures that you’ll find in coastal units of the National Park System, places like Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park and Cumberland Island National Seashore. They are huge – the largest on record reportedly tipped the scales at 3500 pounds and was 13 feet long – and rather bulbous looking. But manatees are also an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. There are many threats to manatees along the Southeastern coastline of the United States, from power boaters to shrinking shorelines, and even climate change impacts. To learn more about these interesting mammals and the struggles they face to build their populations, we’re joined today by Tiare Fridlich, a manatee biologist with the Save the Manatee Club.
What is it about grizzly bears that intrigues us, or scares us? They are magnificent apex predators that long have been vilified by some while admired by others. Enter the National Park System and you often will find yourself in a landscape with bears. In the East you’ll find black bears in Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, and Acadia national parks, just to name three destinations with the bruins. Head west and many parks have black bears roaming the countryside, with a few parks also being home to grizzlies. In today’s show we’re going to be talking bears, mainly grizzly bears, with Kevin Grange, a Wyoming writer who has a book coming in September called Grizzly Confidential. It’s an interesting read that opens many windows into bears and their mannerisms and how they interact with humans.
One of the most troublesome aspects of heading out into national parks, national forests, and other federal lands for camping, paddling, or climbing – as well as many other recreational pursuits – is the rising tide of fees to do so.
There are reservation fees, cancellation fees, fees to change the date of your trip, even fees to gain a priority position to pay a fee for a permit.
Are these fees, generated through your use of the recreation.gov website that handles most, if not all, of the transactions, reasonable? It’s a question the Traveler has followed for a good number of years now, and it doesn’t look like a satisfactory answer will be coming soon.
Recently a U.S. senator from California, Alex Padilla, introduced legislation calling for an investigation into the fees these reservations cost the American public. Among the groups hoping that legislation eventually is signed into law is American Whitewater, which advocates for the protection and preservation of whitewater rivers and works to enhance opportunities to enjoy them safely.
Joining us today is Evan Stafford, American Whitewater’s communication’s director, to discuss recreation.gov and explain his organization’s interest in this legislation.
At the end of the show, if you’re interested in seeing Sen. Padilla’s legislation move forward, here’s the link to the Easy Action page Evan mentioned for contacting your senators.
Along 1,600 miles of the Eastern Seaboard, from Maine to Florida, sea level rise, subsidence, and more potent storms are challenging the National Park Service to figure out how best to protect wildlife and their habitats, as well as historic structures, archaeological sites, modern infrastructure, landscapes, and, of course, visitors. In the coming months, the National Parks Traveler will be examining impacts tied to climate change and how the National Park Service is responding to them. We’ll bring you the concerns of residents and communities that are left with the damage from hurricanes and the loss of tax revenues from tourism and trace the strain these events have on the Park Service staff and budget. We’ll also talk to experts about how natural landscapes, such as barrier reefs and salt marshes, and wildlife are being impacted. We’re going to have one of those conversations today with two experts from The Nature Conservancy: Dr. Alison Branco, TNC’s Climate Adaptation Director, and Dr. Nicole Maher, the organization’s Senior Coastal Scientist.
There is never a shortage of stories to follow across the National Park System, whether you’re in the West at Olympic National Park, the Northeast at Acadia National Park, or the Southwest at Grand Canyon National Park. This week, Contributing Editor Kim O’Connell is down in North Carolina to spend a few days at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which has no shortage of news to report on, whether it’s leatherback sea turtles nesting, the restoration of Cape Hatteras Light, or the collapse of houses into the Atlantic Ocean at Rodanthe.
Kim is working on a number of those stories for the Traveler, and we’re going to check in with her today to learn what she’s discovering.
In the remote wilderness of the Brooks Mountain Range in Alaska, where untamed rivers wind through vast expanses of tundra and towering mountains, a peculiar and alarming phenomenon is taking place. Since 2017 at least 75 pristine waterways, which once shimmered with crystalline clarity, have taken on a haunting hue of orange and now contain very concerning toxic metals and minerals.
As speculation gives way to investigation, a team of researchers has been looking at the region's rapidly thawing permafrost—a phenomenon they suspect may hold the key to unraveling this disturbing transformation.
This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with key scientists with the National Park Service and the University of California Davis on their new study that investigates these altered headwater tributaries, including ones in five national parks and a number of other protected areas. Among their findings are impacts to aquatic life, ecosystems, drinking water and the locals who rely on fishing for subsistence.
Have you ever wanted to scratch beneath the surface of a national park and gain a better understanding of the issues the National Park Service is challenged with? Or to see what research is being conducted, or understand what goals are being chased?
The staff at Grand Teton National Park just released their 2024 Grand Glimpse of the Park and the many issues and challenges park staff, and even visitors, face. To dive into that report, we’re joined by Grand Teton National Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins.
As the National Mammal and a symbol closely tied to the National Park Service and the national parks, bison are highly revered in the United States. But that doesn’t mean they’re free of controversy.
Recently the staff at Yellowstone National Park released the Final Environmental Impact Statement on a bison management plan for the park. The preferred alternative in that plan calls for a bison herd ranging in number between "about 3,500 to 6,000 animals after calving." It also calls for a continuation of the transfer of bison to tribal lands via the Bison Conservation Transfer Program, and continuation of both a "tribal treaty harvest" and public hunting outside the park to regulate numbers.
But is that a good plan? We’re going to discuss that today with Erik Molvar, the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project which long has followed how the Park Service has managed bison in Yellowstone.
There is so much rich history across the National Park System, from chapters of the Revolutionary War held in parks in the eastern half of the country to stories from the gold rush that stampeded through Alaska during the late 1890s. This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at The National Parks Traveler. I’ve always been fascinated with history. And when you look at parks in the eastern half of the country, the reservoir is so much deeper than in the western half if only for the reason that more was written down. Michael Aday has a similar passion for history, and has a great job to soak in it. He is, after all, the archivist or librarian at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Recently he came out with a book, Letters from the Smokies, which is built around 300 years of written down history that’s held in the park’s archives.
Recently I read “The Wolverine Way”, by Douglas Chadwick. It’s a book from 2012 that really dives into the lives of wolverines, a small mammal with a cantankerous reputation that the US Fish and Wildlife Service late last year announced would be a threatened species. The book is a fascinating biography, if you will, of wolverines. Chadwick has an engaging writing style and Glacier National Park provides a fascinating backdrop for the story, two things that keep the story flowing. One thing that he mentions that struck me is how important Glacier National Park is for the wolverines survival. He notes that the surrounding national forests offer much the same habitat that wolverines need, but points out that the national forests don’t provide the same protection from hunting and trapping that national parks do. Of course, with wolverines gaining protection under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species, the animals will have the same protections in national forests and other public lands. Still, do we sometimes take for granted the protections that national parks provide for species that are either losing habitat elsewhere, or don’t have the same protections from hunting and development that the parks provide? To continue this discussion, we’re joined by Kent Redford, who runs Archipelago Consulting, through which he helps individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation, and Bart Melton and Ryan Valdez from the National Parks Conservation Association. Bart is a senior director of NPCA’s Wildlife Program, while Ryan is the Association’s Senior Director for Conservation Science and Policy.
Did you know that there are some five and a half million acres of our National Parks that are underwater? There are sunken ships and aircraft. There are remnants of industry and mining. There are coral reefs and underwater caverns. The Submerged Resources Center of the National Park Service is where these water resources are explored and documented. Underwater photography is crucial in the understanding of what lies beneath the surface, and images taken by the SRC Staff are essential not only for mapping and documenting, but to help the parks address issues and solve problems. This week, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick sits down with Bret Seymour, the Submerged Resources Center Deputy Chief and Audio-Visual Production Specialist who has spent some thirty years with the Park Service, photographing the mysteries below the surface.
Summer is almost here. The upcoming Memorial Day weekend is the official kickoff to the summer travel season, and I’m happy to say that the National Parks Traveler will be continuing to bring you news about the parks and how you can enjoy them.
As much as Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek was looking forward to retiring, listener and reader support has enabled the news organization to continue on with its editorially independent coverage of National Parks and protected areas.
Kurt and Lynn will be discussing this good news this week, as well as exploring some of the new content the Traveler will be bringing you in the months ahead, and looking out across the National Park System concerning some recent events.
With the summer vacation season not too far off, no doubt many National Park Service Superintendents are trying to figure out how to manage the crowds and avoid impacts to natural resources in the park system. With Memorial Day weekend just two weeks away, and Congress in its usual battles over how to fund the federal government, we wanted to take a look at how the funding situation looks for the Park Service. To help understand the financial setting across the National Park System, we’ve asked Phil Francis, from the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks to provide some insights.
Smokies Life, which most of you who closely follow Great Smoky Mountains National Park know was previously known as the Great Smoky Mountains Association, produces educational and informational materials for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This week we’re joined by Laurel Rematore, the chief executive officer of Smokies Life, to discuss the name change as well as how her organization lends a big hand to the Park Service staff at Great Smoky.
Have you ever closely inspected the landscape when you’re touring the National Park System, particularly in the West? You never know what you might find.
Back in 2010 a 7-year-old attending a Junior Ranger program at Badlands National Park spied a partially exposed fossil that turned out to be the skull of a 32-million-year-old saber-toothed cat.
If you’ve ever visited Petrified Forest National Park you’ve no doubt marveled over the colorful fossilized tree trunks. There are also fossilized trees on the northern range of Yellowstone National Park, but nowhere near as colorful.
For this week’s episode we’ve invited Vince Santucci, the National Park Service’s senior paleontologist, to discuss the many fossil resources that exist across the National Park System, from coast to coast and north to south.
Wolverines, the largest land-dwelling members of the weasel family, once roamed across the northern tier of the United States, and as far south as New Mexico in the Rockies and southern California in the Sierra Nevada range. But after more than a century of trapping and habitat loss, wolverines in the lower 48 today exist only as small, fragmented populations in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Wyoming, and northeast Oregon. However, there’s soon to be an effort in Colorado to help the carnivores recover in that state. The Colorado legislature has been considering legislation calling for the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Agency to move ahead with a recovery plan for wolverines. The bill is expected to face its final legislative hurdle in the coming weeks. To discuss this initiative, we’re joined today by Megan Mueller, a conservation biologist with Rocky Mountain Wild, a non-profit advocacy organization working to bring them back, and Elaine Leslie, who was Chief of Biological Resources for the National Park Service before retiring.
Spur a discussion about traveling to a national park for a vacation and odds are that it will revolve around getting out into nature, looking for wildlife, perhaps honing your photography skills, or marveling at incredible vistas.
Will the discussion include destinations that portray aspects of the country’s history, or cultural melting pot?
Equating national parks with nature is obvious, but making a similar connection with history and culture might not be so obvious. And maybe that lack of appreciation for America’s culture and history explains why the National Park Service has been struggling with protecting and interpreting those aspects of the parks.
The National Parks Conservation Association has just released a report calling for a Cultural Resource Challenge, one that asks for a hefty investment by Congress in the Park Service’s cultural affairs wing. We explore that report in today’s episode with Alan Spears, NPCA’s senior director for cultural affairs.
Tens of millions of people in the United States will be able to witness a Total Solar Eclipse on Monday as the rare astronomical event cuts a path from Texas to Maine, up to 122 miles wide in some spots. This is a great opportunity to see the exact moment when the moon fully blocks the sun, creating a blazing corona visible to those observing from the center line of totality.
There are a number of national park units within the eclipse path that runs from Texas to Maine that offer good vantage points to view the eclipse. And the parks offer a great Plan B of exploration and education if the day turns out to be cloudy or worse.
This week, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick, who is planning to be in the center line of totality as the eclipse passes through Texas, speaks with renowned astronomer Tyler Nordgren – who is also planning to be in the center line as it passes through New York. Lynn and Tyler will discuss the eclipse as well as some national park eclipse viewing opportunities after this break.
With March madness down to the Sweet 16, and Opening Day of Major League Baseball having arrived, we’re going to take a break this week and dive into our podcast archives for this week’s show. This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. My NCAA bracket was busted the very first day, and while the Yankees won their opening day game against the Houston Astros, I don’t think they’ll go undefeated this year. While I ponder the sports world, we’re going to let Lynn Riddick reprise her interviews with National Park Radio and the National Parks, two bands with great names that we think you’ll like.
One of the most popular public events in the National Park System was the release of sea turtle hatchlings, shuffling off into the Gulf of Mexico at Padre Island National Seashore. I say was, because the number of those public events has been drastically scaled back in recent years.
The programs featuring the release of Kemp’s ridley sea turtle hatchlings at Padre Island offered young and old a crash course in conservation of a species that has narrowly avoided extinction, and remains highly endangered. In 2019, before the COVID 19 pandemic shuttered the public hatchling releases at Padre Island, an estimated 16,000 people viewed the releases. In 2020, online video presentations of the events attracted about 1 million viewers.
Yet despite the strong conservation value of these events, not just in public education but in the tens of thousands of hatched turtles released to the ocean, advocates of the program say the national seashore’s Sea Turtle Science and Recovery program itself is endangered. For after the Park Service recruited Dr. Donna Shaver to build that sea turtle science program, a role that saw her lifted to international prominence, the agency now seems to be squandering her success and hoping she will retire.
What’s been going on at Padre Island since 2021 has drawn the concern of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter, based in Austin, Texas. It recently led a petition drive to raise concerns over the direction of the sea turtle program. Dr. Craig Nazor, the chapter’s conservation chair, recently met with Kate Hammond, the Director of the Park Services Intermountain Region, to question the direction of the program.
Air pollution and climate change impacts can have outsized effects on the National Park System, as well as lesser noticed but just as concerning effects. But are those impacts spread across the entire park system, or clustered around a few?
Back in 2019 the National Parks Conservation Association looked at how air pollution and climate change were impacting parks. They have updated that study with the latest data from the National Park Service, and the current state of affairs remains concerning.
To discuss NPCA’s findings, we’ve asked Ulla Reeves, the interim director of NPCA’s Clean Air Program to join us.
While most visitors to the National Park System view the parks as incredibly beautiful places, or places rich in culture and history, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes within the parks, and with the National Parks Service.
Traveler editor Kurt Repanshek has closely followed the parks and the Park Service for more than 18 years. Over that timespan, he’s seen a lot of changes in the parks, and the agency itself. In today’s show we are going to offer a sort of “State of the Parks” with you. After all, as much as you enjoy the park system, you have a vested interest in their oversight and management.
With nearly 430 units in the National Park System, of which 63 are National Parks, we all probably could use a little help in planning our adventures into the park system. But do you simply visit a park’s website to plan your trip? Find an online guidebook? Buy a hardcover guidebook? Or simply wing it when you reach your destination?
This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. I must confess, I’ve taken all three approaches, and I’ve even written a guidebook to the parks, and there’s probably a fair amount of guidebook material on the Traveler.
Today we’re reaching out to two writers who make their living writing national park guidebooks. Becky Lomax is the author of “USA National Parks: The Complete Guide to All 63 National Parks” from Moon Travel Guides, as well as her latest titles “Best of Glacier, Banff and Jasper: Make the Most of One to Three Days in the Parks”, which she co-wrote with Andrew Hempstead, and “Glacier National Park: Hiking, Camping, Lakes, and Peaks”.
Michael Oswald is the author of “Your Guide to the National Parks”, “National Park Maps: An Atlas of United States National Parks”, and “The Day Hiker’s Guide to the National Parks”.
Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park is such a unique destination in the National Park System. Located on the Big Island, it’s surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, it has rainforests, and it boasts two active volcanoes in Mauna Loa and Kilauea. A visit to Hawai’i Volcanoes comes with a number of options. Do you simply hope to catch an eruption of Kilauea and head somewhere else in Hawaii, do you explore the backcountry with its more than 160 miles of trails, or you try to soak in the Hawaiian culture? Hopefully you’ll do all of that and more, because the park is so remarkable and offers so much. But it also can be a dangerous place. While the volcanoes are not explosive like Mount Saint Helens was back in 1980, visitors still can get close to Kilauea’s crater, and if they ignore safety, quickly find themselves in trouble or worse. To get a better understanding of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, we’re joined today by Ranger Nainoa Keanaaina, a law enforcement ranger who grew up near the park, worked in its backcountry, and now is closely involved with search-and-rescue activities and other tasks to keep visitors safe and getting the most out of their vacation.
From the Rocky Mountains to the West Coast and up to Alaska, there are thousands of historic structures and archaeological sites on National Park System landscapes. They range in variety from homesteader cabins to pre-historic cave dwellings.
Taking care of these buildings and archaeological sites is a valuable job for the National Park Service, as they speak to the country’s history and its prehistory. But it hasn’t always been easy for the agency’s Vanishing Treasures program, which was created in 1998. At times administrations have proposed funding cuts for the program, and there’s also the issue of too much work for too few staff.
To learn more about this program, its accomplishments, and what it’s working on today, we’re joined by Ian Hough, the National Park Service’s Vanishing Treasures program coordinator.
Stand before a giant sequoia tree in Sequoia or Kings Canyon national parks or nearby Yosemite National Park and you’re overwhelmed by their size, and assume they’re impervious to anything that might be thrown at them. But as we learned from wildfires in 2020 and 2021 in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, that’s not the case.
The Castle Fire in 2020 and then the KNP Complex and Windy fires in 2021 that burned through the two parks destroyed thousands of giant sequoia trees. Estimates put the losses at more than 14,000 mature trees, or roughly 13-19 percent of the world’s giant sequoias.
At the Sequoia Parks Conservancy, just days after the KNP complex fires started in September of 2021 plans were made to being raising funds to help the National Park Service restore and recover areas in the two parks that were burned. Today we’re discussing the ongoing recovery work with Savannah Boiano, the executive director of the Sequoia Parks Conservancy.
Mountain lions are an incredibly charismatic animal on landscapes within, and adjacent to, the National Park System. But they’re seldom seen because of their nocturnal tendencies. There recently was a new report that focused on a comprehensive estimate of mountain lions in California, and the number is much smaller than many had thought it was. To discuss California’s mountain lion population, and efforts to protect that population, our guest today is Dr. Veronica Yovovich, conservation scientist at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.
Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia protects one of the defining battlefields of the Civil War. It was there that the first battle of the war was waged, in 1861, it was the scene of a second battle a year later, and it was where Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson got his Stonewall nickname.
Despite the significance of Manassas, the Prince William County supervisors in December agreed to rezone 2,100 acres adjacent to the battlefield to allow for the world’s largest data processing center to be built there. A lawsuit recently was filed in a bid to stop the development. Among the plaintiffs is the American Battlefield Trust, a non-profit organization that works to protect American battlefields from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. David Duncan, president of that organization, joins us today to explain why the Trust thinks it is wrong to build the data processing center next to Manassas National Battlefield Park.
Mount Rainier National Park is the most recent unit of the National Park System to announce that you’ll need a reservation to enter the most popular areas of the park during the busy summer months. At the same time, Shenandoah National Park has announced that a pilot program it’s been running for two years for access to Old Rag will be permanent going forward.
Reservation systems to get into national parks are controversial. Many folks argue they hinder spontaneity in travel, others like the assurance of knowing they can get into a national park such as Arches, or Rocky Mountain, or Glacier, at a specific time on a specific day. To explore the issue of reservations systems in the parks, we’re joined today by Cassidy Jones, the senior visitation manager for the National Parks Conservation Association who keeps an eye on these programs, how they’re operating, and whether they make a difference.
When Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, it said that species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the US have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untampered by adequate concern and conservation. Other species of fish, wildlife, and plants have been so depleted in numbers that they are in danger of, or threatened with, extinction. These species of fish, wildlife, and plants are of the aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the nation and its people.
2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, better known as the ESA. Where do things stand with the Act and the plants and animals it was to protect? We’re going to explore that today with Andrew Carter and Lindsay Rosa, authors of a new report from Defenders of Wildlife, “The Endangered Species Act: The Next 50 Years and Beyond.”
As a young boy growing up in New Jersey, a year-end holiday treat was setting up our model railroad. It gave me and my two brothers hours of fun and an opportunity to learn a little about the steam age of railroads. Our first railroad featured Lionel O gauge locomotives and cars. Later we moved into HO gauge trains, and many years later I had an N gauge layout.
That boyhood love of model railroads drove me to visit Golden Spike National Historical Park in northern Utah not far from the Great Salt Lake. That’s where, on May 10th, 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed when the Jupiter and No. 119 steam locomotives of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met head-on.
To learn more about those two locomotives, I headed north to Promontory Summit and caught up with Ranger Cole Chisam, who is the engineer who drives the two locomotives at the park. I’ll be back in a minute with Cole.
We’re closing out the year with a look back at some of the top stories around the National Park System, and involving the National Park Service. We opened this look back a week ago, with Kristen Brengel from the National Parks Conservation Association, and Mike Murray from the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, discussing issues involving the National Park Service, and outside impacts affecting the National Park System.
Today, in the second half of this discussion, we’re focusing on natural resource issues in the parks.
The past year has been a trying one for the National Park Service, and for many of the units in the National Park System. For the agency, employee morale continued to be a major issue as housing, pay, and leadership remained sore spots for many who worked for the Service.
On the ground, climate change continued to impact parks, from sea level rise and more potent storms, to wildfires, and hotter and dryer conditions that adversely affected vegetation, wildlife, and facilities.
With time running out on 2023, and 2024 on the horizon, we’re going to be taking a look this week and next at many of the top stories that played out, or are playing out, across the National Park System and the National Park Service. Joining us for the conversation are Mike Murray, Chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, and Kristen Brengel, the Vice President of Government Affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.
Who wouldn’t like to visit a tropical paradise? Virgin Islands National Park in the Caribbean is one such paradise. It resides on the island of St. John, and features beaches sparkling white and lined with palm trees and other tropical vegetation. Those beaches are washed by warm, turquoise waters that provide habitat for sea turtles the size of trunks, colorful fishes like blue tang and parrot fish, and even menacing barracuda. While the national park might seem idyllic from above water, beneath the surface of the Caribbean Sea, the once vibrant coral reefs have been impacted by a bleaching event caused by abnormally high ocean temperatures compounded with disease, that together could have devastating consequences. Snorkel or scuba dive in the national park’s waters, or those that surround Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument, Buck Island Reef National Monument, or Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve, and in many directions you’ll see a seemingly lifeless seascape. To better understand what’s going on, we’re joined today by Jeff Miller, a National Park Service fisheries biologist who, before he retired back in 2021, worked with the South Florida Caribbean Inventory and Monitoring Network on developing a coral and fisheries monitoring program.
When Kurt Repanshek launched the Traveler back in August of 2005, it was primarily to find stories that he could pitch to magazines. But the magazine world took a nosedive, while at the same time readership on the Traveler continued to grow. Today, between 2.5 and 3 million readers and listeners a year turn to the Traveler to learn more about the National Park System, both its wonders and how it’s being managed. Unfortunately, the Traveler hasn’t been financially sustainable, and can’t continue unless we can attract the funding necessary to employ a small staff, upgrade IT resources, and allow us to tackle the growing number of critical stories that fall by the wayside because more and more news organizations are paring back, or totally going out of business. Rebecca Latson, the Traveler’s contributing photographer, and Lynn Riddick, who hosts many of the Traveler’s weekly podcast, discuss their participation in pulling together the Traveler’s editorial content, and how that’s given them greater appreciation of the value of having a news organization whose focus is solely on national parks and the National Park Service.
It’s been six years since an oil company headed out across the marl prairie of Big Cypress National Park with vehicles weighing as much as 30 tons to search for oil reserves. Signs of that work continue to show on the prairie, despite stringent National Park Service requirements for restoring the landscape after the searching was completed.
Located to the north of Everglades National Park, Big Cypress is a “split estate” – the Park Service owns the surface of the more than 720,000-acre landscape, while the mineral rights are privately owned – energy exploration and possible development were allowed in the preserve’s enabling legislation.
But how that exploration is allowed to be performed can be a matter of contention. While the National Park Service sounds mostly satisfied with the restoration work done by Burnett Oil, the National Parks Conservation Association strongly disagrees. The park advocacy group just released a 24-page report, “Speaking Up For The Swamp,” that points to remaining scars from that exploration work on the preserve.
We’ll be back in a minute with Melissa Abdo, NPCA’s Sun Coast regional redirector, to discuss that report.
Utah has five spectacular national parks, and Arches is one of them. It’s a relatively small park. The scenic drive is only 18 miles long, ending at the Devil’s Garden area, but you’ll have incredible views of the reddish rockscape the entire way right from your vehicle.
Of course, it’s always better to get out on the trails and take in as much off-road as your timetable and legs will allow. Two of the park’s most impressive arches – Delicate Arch and Landscape Arch – are well worth the hiking you’ll need to tackle to stand in awe before them.
This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick and her trip companion, Tica Nathan, spent a day and a half in the park and offer up some of their experiences and observations.
Throughout history the barrier islands that today are home to Cape Hatteras National Seashore have been attractive to wildlife. A variety of sea turtle species come ashore to lay their nests, and a variety of shorebirds settle there, too, to lay their eggs.
But the thing with wildlife nesting on the beaches of Cape Hatteras is that one great season can be followed by a poor one. Influencing the outcome can be human disturbances, storms, and predation.
How was 2023 for piping plovers, a threatened species, at Cape Hatteras, and what about the sea turtles? To get the answers to those questions we’ve invited Meaghan Johnson, the seashore’s Chief of Resource Management and Science to join us.
It was just over a month ago when the federal government was staring at the possibility of a shutdown. Well, little seemingly has changed in the ensuing four weeks, other than that the House of Representatives has a new speaker in Mike Johnson from Louisiana, and the full chamber has settled on its budget numbers for fiscal 2024…which started back on October 1. While most national parks likely will close if there is a government shutdown on November 17, what is more pressing for the National Park Service is what budget numbers Congress will settle on for the current fiscal year and whether President Biden will go along with them. Our guests today are John Garder, the senior director for budget & appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, and Mike Murray, a long-time NPS employee and superintendent who now serves as chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. They’re here to discuss the current situation facing the Park Service and Park System.
When a young park ranger was asked by his supervisor to clean out an old barn at Grand Teton National Park in the early 1970s, he discovered a dusty and stained blue, grey, and green poster inviting folks to “Meet the Ranger Naturalist at Jenny Lake Museum. This young ranger, Doug Leen, soon discovered that it was one in a series of posters created by the Works Progress Administration to put artists to work and promote visitation to the national parks during the late 1930s. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick sits down with Doug to discuss his newly released book documenting his life-long journey to find the original WPA posters and protect them.
There are more than 2,000 species currently listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. And while species that gain protection under the act have a great chance to survive, not all do. Just recently the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that 21 species – birds, fish, mussels, plants, and even a bat – were officially declared extinct. We’re going to discuss that news, and the role of the Endangered Species Act in striving to prevent extinction, with Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, and Lindsay Rosa, the vice president of conservation research and innovation at Defenders of Wildlife.
As you walk through the white gypsum sands of White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico, your footprints will likely be quickly erased by shifting winds. So it’s somewhat of a phenomenon of nature that the oldest footprints ever discovered in North America are not only found here — in perfect form, having withstood time and weather — but show that ancient humans lived here much earlier than previously believed. A research team from the U-S Geological Survey earlier this month strengthened their findings released in 2021 that dated these footprints to as much as 23,000 years old. That finding erased previous theories that humans first arrived in North America some 11,000 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with key researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey team about their initial analysis of the footprints as well as their follow-up study that confirmed the age dating…and what it all means to our long-sought understanding of human colonization on this continent.
The Olympic Peninsula of Washington state is a wild and wooly place, even now in the 21st century. That’s no doubt largely because the heart of the peninsula is taken up by Olympic National Park, a more than 900,000-acre jigsaw puzzle of glaciers and peaks, rainforests, rivers, and Pacific coastline. You might view Olympic National Park as three parks in one: The coastal area battered by the Pacific Ocean, the inland rain forests that cloak the Hoh, Quinault, and Sol Duc areas, and the high, craggy landscape embracing nearly 200 glaciers. If you’ve never visited the park, or have only experienced it once for a few days, our guest on today’s show will no doubt make you want to start planning for a trip to Olympic National Park. Tim McNulty is a prolific writer who lives in the shadow of the national park. He has a new book out. Salmon, Cedar, Rock and Rain, that is a perfect introduction on the ecosystem of not just the national park but of the surrounding Olympic Peninsula.
Snow has fallen in the upper reaches of Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, and fall weather in general is making a national park trip in the northern half of the United States not terribly appealing.
October is a season of transition across the National Park System. Cooler, and in some cases colder, weather is sweeping across the northern states, while southern states are not as blazingly hot as they were just a month or two ago. But school is in session throughout the country, so if your vacation plans are tied to school, you’re probably not heading anywhere now for an extended trip.
Which makes it the perfect time to start considering where you might want to go next year. Here in the U.S. you don’t need to limit your choices to the National Park System. Canada is just a short drive, or flight, away. Rebecca Latson, Traveler’s contributing photographer and columnist, just returned from a trip to the Canadian Rockies, and is here to discuss what she found and what you might consider.
For the second time in five years, and the third time in the past decade, the United States government was poised to shut down this weekend because of an impasse in the House of Representatives over how to fund the government. And, as a result, the National Park System was poised to shut down. Indeed, by the time you’re listening to this episode, the parks might already have been closed and visitors already in them being told how soon they must exit.
Different administrations in Washington take different approaches to whether to shut down the parks or keep them open during a government shutdown. Back in 2013 the Obama administration elected to close the parks. Five years ago, the Trump administration decided to keep them open, albeit with skeleton Park Service staffs.
To learn more about the impacts of government shutdowns on the National Park System, both physical and financial, we’re joined today by Bob Krumenaker, a recently retired Park Service veteran whose last position was superintendent of Big Bend National Park, and John Garder, the senior director for budget & appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association.
For the past 240 weeks, the National Parks Traveler has brought you weekly podcasts examining life, news, and exploration of the National Park System. It’s been a long-running series that has never lacked for topics. We hope you’ve found those episodes as informative and interesting as we have. For this week’s show, we’re diving into shows from past years to bring you two we think you’ll find fascinating. One revolves around the question of whether a gun can keep you safe from bears in the backcountry of parks. We discuss that topic with Tom Smith, a professor of wildlife sciences at Brigham Young University and a member of the National Rifle Association. In the second part, we look back at Lynn Riddick’s journey underground at Mammoth Cave National Park.
Grand Teton National Park is an incredible place, rich in wildlife, mountaineering history, pioneer history, and Native American history. And, rightfully so, it’s one of the busiest parks in the National Park System. In 2021 the park saw nearly 4 million visitors, as the public rushed back out into nature after the worst of the Covid pandemic. Last year it counted 2.8 million visitors.
How many visitors are too many? How has that growing visitation impacted the health of the park, the tasks confronting the National Park Service staff in the park, and your experience as you explore Grand Teton?
We’re going to discuss those topics today with Chip Jenkins, the park superintendent.
Bison have been in the news recently. The Interior Department this past week released $5 million to help fund both bison restoration and grasslands rehabilitation. And next month Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan will release their latest documentary, The American Buffalo. The American Buffalo documentary traces the history of how bison nearly went extinct, and how they came back. It will be delivered in a two-part, four-hour series on public television. Earlier this summer I talked to Dayton Duncan about the project, and we’re rerunning that conversation to remind you of the documentary that is set to debut on October 16.
It’s been nearly eight years since a storm of historic proportions pounded Death Valley National Park and did extensive damage in Grapevine Canyon in the northeastern corner of the park where Scotty’s Castle stands. The popular tourist attraction still has not reopened as repair work continues. That storm was described as a once-in-a-thousand years storm. A year ago, rainstorms again pounded Death Valley. In roughly three hours 1.5 inches of rain fell on the park and did considerable damage to roads and water systems and shut down the park. That storm also was described as a once-in-a-thousand-years storm. Another powerful storm hit Death Valley National Park two weeks ago. On August 20, 2.2 inches of rain fell at Furnace Creek, according to the National Weather Service, making it the rainiest day on record in the park. For some perspective, during a full year the park usually sees only 2.15 inches of rain. To discuss these storms and how the National Park Service is responding to them we’re joined today by Abby Wines, the park’s management analyst.
If you were to plan an extended trip through the National Park System, how would you do it? Where would you go first? How would you prepare?
In this week’s podcast, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with Cristian Garza, who recently returned from a four-month jaunt through the parks. He clocked some 300 hours of driving across 17,000 miles of the U.S. and Canada and shares some of his experiences and perspectives with Lynn.
In 1964, passage of The Wilderness Act promised Americans that there would be lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition. It was a promise from Congress that the American people of present and future generations would be able to enjoy the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.”
When President Johnson signed the act into law, he said that “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”
Where do things stand with that promise? Has it lived up to its lofty goal? To seek an answer to that question, and to get a better understanding of management of wilderness areas, and potentially wilderness, in the country, we’ve invited George Nickas and Dana Johnson to join us.
George is executive director of Wilderness Watch, a national organization dedicated to defending the nation’s National Wilderness Preservation System and keeping it wild, and Dana is the organization’s policy director.
The New York Times recently summed up one of the biggest climate change stories of the year so far. The planet’s average sea surface temperature spiked to a record high in April, and the ocean has remained exceptionally warm ever since, the paper reported. In July, widespread marine heatwaves drove temperatures back up to near record highs, with some hot spots nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In late July, water temperatures off the southern tip of Florida surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. What are the impacts of this hot water to Dry Tortugas, Everglades, and Biscayne national parks? We’re going to explore that question with Dr. Steve Davis, the chief science officer for the Everglades Foundation.
Majestic wildlife abounds across the National Park System. You can see wolves, grizzlies and bison in Yellowstone, California condors at Pinnacles and Grand Canyon, moose in Voyageurs, and sea turtles at Cape Hatteras and Padre Island, and elephant seals at Point Reyes National Seashore, just to name some of the possibilities.
Another charismatic species in the park system, but one you’re not likely to see, are panthers. Also known as mountain lions, or cougars, depending on the region of the country. These are big stealthy cats, most often on the move after dark, which is why you’re not likely to spot one.
South Florida is best known as home for the Florida panther. Another reason you might not spot one of these cats is because there are so few of them.
Conservationists at the South Florida Wildlands Association fear the population of the iconic Florida Panther may have dwindled to as few as 100 cats. They don’t know for sure, though, because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not released a species status assessment and population count since 2009. And without current information, the fight for the panther’s existence and efforts to curtail development that threatens it, are more challenging than ever.
In this week’s podcast, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick speaks with the executive director of that organization to hear about their latest efforts to address the assaults on the panther’s habitat and their approach in protecting this incredible, endangered creature.
Why expand the National Park System? That can be a controversial question. There are many folks who would love to see additional units added, and there are just as many who say the National Park Service does not have the staff or funding to adequately maintain the existing park system.
We’ve been exploring that question in recent weeks and months, and an argument can be made that since national parks carry the highest protection of natural resources in the country, we should expand the park system to better protect biodiversity and, if possible, help it grow.
In this week’s show, Lynn Riddick helps me present you with a story that explores the question of expanding the National Park System for the sake of biodiversity. If you prefer reading the story, rather than having it narrated to you, the long-form post is on the Traveler.
At the end of our story about expanding the park system, Lynn returns with a short audio postcard from Big Cypress National Preserve.
This summer has been one of the hottest for the entire world, with temperatures rising above 100 degrees Fahrenheit quite frequently. Here in the United States, there are many places where the heat has gone well above 100 degrees. And at Death Valley National Park, the temperature this past week attracted crowds hoping to see it reach 130 degrees.
In the National Park System, there are places where summertime heat is routine, something the rangers have become accustomed to and know how to cope with, and something not all park visitors know how to deal with.
To get a sense for conditions this past week in two of the hottest places in the park system, we’ve reached out to rangers at Grand Canyon National Park and Death Valley National Park.
There are seemingly endless guides to exploring the national parks: Moon, National Geographic, Lonely Planet, and various other corporate publishers. Indeed, it’s rare these days that you find a writer who takes on the role of both guidebook author and publisher.
Most of these guidebooks take the same approach: a nice overview of the park in question, followed by a breakdown of places to stay, where to eat, things to do, nearby attractions. Mike Oswald is swimming against the current with his park guidebooks.
First he came out with “Your Guide to the National Parks,” a thick, hefty volume that has won awards from the Independent Book Publishers Association. Along with the usual park basics, he fills his chapters with history, maps that point out some of his favorite hikes and don’t-miss attractions, some details on plants and animals, a suggested vacation planner, and of course, full-color photographs of some iconic settings.
Today we’re sitting down with Mike to discuss not only his decision to “go independent against those giants in the guidebook publishing world," but also his latest park-related projects.
When you talk about expanding the National Park System, any expansion should be strategic. Whether it’s to protect a cultural or historical site, or one rich in natural resources. Today, if you want to protect natural resources, it should be done with an eye towards protecting biodiversity.
There is too much at stake today to expand the National Park System just for the sake of adding units. The country is losing too much of nature to development, bird populations have been plummeting, and climate change is challenging many other species.
So where do you look to protect biodiversity from the human footprint? One possible area is the Mobile-Tensaw region of Alabama. To gain an understanding of what’s there to protect, we’ve reached out to Bill Finch, Director of the Paint Rock Research Center in Alabama, and who has been involved in Alabama conservation for more than 30 years.
Once upon a time, there might have been 60 million bison on the North American continent. The herds were so large that they covered prairies like immense horizon-stretching black cloaks, and their annual migrations carved such wide paths into the landscape that some were turned into roads by human travelers.
As vast as bison herds were, the species came extremely close to extinction. By the end of the 19th century, there might have been two dozen bison left in the wilds, and they were deep in the heart of Yellowstone National Park. Today however, there might be 500,000 bison in North America, though most are in commercial herds meant for meat production. Designated the national mammal back in 2016, bison are truly charismatic megafauna. So charismatic, in fact, that Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns, who profiled America’s National Parks back in 2016, are soon to release a documentary on the history of the bison.
A winter heavy in snowfall has slowed the start to the wildfire season across parts of the West, although the return of the El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean could reverse that start and contribute to another smoky summer in the National Park System west of the Continental Divide.
Climate change, coupled with the departure of the La Niña weather pattern over the Pacific Ocean and the arrival of the El Niño pattern, are making it more challenging to predict fire seasons and fire behavior from year to year.
Last year when we talked with James Wallman, a meteorologist in the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, he said fire managers don’t know what the “new normal” in wildfire seasons and behavior is because “everything is still changing."
With a somewhat slow start to the 2023 fire season in the Southwest, and drier weather patterns over the Northwest, what can we expect from this year's fire season across the National Park System? We’ll be back in a minute with Mr. Wallman to see.
There always seem to be calls to expand the National Park System. And those calls always spur a number of questions.
Why does the National Park System need to be expanded? What sites might be considered for expansion? Can we even afford to expand the system? After all, as the Traveler frequently points out, the National Park Service doesn’t have the resources in human capital or financial capital to properly manage the park units it has. There have been a number of stories recently in other news outlets about adding new national parks. But some of those simply point to existing units that are not officially called national parks, and why they should be renamed as national parks.
But is that really expanding the park system, or is it answering local chamber of commerce calls to rename the parks for economic benefit? Today we’re going to dive into this topic with Elaine Leslie, who back in 2017 as chief of biological resources for the National Park Service, contributed to the National Park Service System Plan, charged with envisioning the growth of the National Park System.
Also in the conversation is Michael Kellett, who has spent roughly 40 years advocating for national parks, wilderness, national forests, free-flowing rivers and imperiled wildlife. Michael also is the co-founder and executive director of the New England-based conservation group Restore the North Woods. In that role he is director of the group’s new national parks campaign, which is building a grass roots movement for New National Parks across the country.
You likely know that Dry Tortugas National Park houses Fort Jefferson, which served as a Civil War-era prison with a community for soldiers, civilians, and slaves. Were you aware that hidden remnants of a hospital and graveyard have been found nearby — offshore — adding to the puzzle of life and death in the Civil War era? Lynn Riddick dives into that topic with Joshua Marano, a maritime archaeologist for the National Park Service...
It’s summer. Not officially, but close enough. Many schools have already taken the next few months off, others will soon join the summer break.
Summer for many is the peak travel time. Parks are a great destination, whether in summer or just about any other month of the year. To help you come up with some ideas of which parks to visit and why, we’ve invited two members of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks – Maria Burks and Phil Francis – who collectively have spent more than eight decades working in the National Park System to discuss their favorites.
Horses can be found in many corners of the National Park System. You spot them running wild at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, splashing in the surf at Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina and at Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia, and of course as pack animals and tireless steeds that carry both rangers and visitors to the parks. But wild horses are somewhat of a conundrum in the National Park System. They’re a conundrum because they technically are not wild, but rather feral, meaning they descended from domesticated horses. As such, they technically are not native wildlife, and that has become an issue. At Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the National Park Service has raised the question of whether the horses there, as livestock, not native wildlife, should be removed from the park. A recent comment period on that proposal drew more than 7,000 comments, just 45 of which supported removal of the horses. Where the Park Service will come down on horses at Theodore Roosevelt remains to be seen. Across the country, at Cumberland Island National Seashore along the coast of Georgia, there also are feral horses, and their plight has surfaced in the form of a lawsuit that claims that animals not only are damaging the seashore's environment and two federally protected species but are not being humanely managed by the National Park Service and should be removed from the seashore. We’re going to explore that issue today with Hal Wright, who brought the lawsuit, Patty Livingston, president of both the Georgia Equine Rescue League and the Georgia Horse Council, and Jessica Howell-Edwards, executive director of Wild Cumberland, an advocacy group for the seashore.
There are external and internal influences that can impact units of the National Park System. Urban sprawl can strangle parks and their natural resources. Wildfires can sweep across boundaries and into parks. Rivers can flood and wash out trails and roads, as we saw last June at Yellowstone National Park.
Today we’re going to be talking about looming threats to Yellowstone and Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
In the case of Yellowstone, it’s a gold mine proposed to be sunk into a mountain towering over the park’s northern entrance at Mammoth Hot Springs.
At Cape Hatteras, it’s the Atlantic Ocean and the natural dynamics of barrier islands, which were not designed by nature to remain in one place. Instead, they shift as the ocean erodes beaches and moves sand about.
In both of these cases, there are solutions in sight. The question is whether they’ll succeed.
While spring is slowly giving way to summer in many parts of the country, with visitors gaining more and more access to the National Park System, a stand-off in Washington over the country’s debt ceiling very likely would greatly disrupt operations in the parks. It was just a decade ago that a federal budget sequestration, that is a forced cut across all federal agencies budgets as part of the Budget Control Act, led to closed campgrounds, Sunday closures of National Park System units, and 900 permanent positions that went unfilled. For the National Park Service, the sequestration led to a 5% budget cut that also led to a reduction in invasive plant control at the parks, a reduction in maintenance of fences and building repairs, science and research activities, and natural resource monitoring.
In Washington today, House Republicans want to see some pretty stiff budget cuts in return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling. According to the New York Times, one outcome, if the funding cap’s proposal put forth by the Republicans is approved, would be a 51% reduction in the Interior Department’s budget. How devastating might that be to the National Park Service and the National Park System? We’re going to explore that question with Mike Murray, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, and John Garder, senior director of Budget and Appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association.
National parks are not alone in grappling with crowds. Many gateway communities surrounding our national parks are notable for their own amazing offerings -- natural beauty with tranquil spots for solitude and reflection…and nice venues for dining, listening to live music and pursuing year-round outdoor recreational and leisure activities. But when the management of visitation in these areas is unchecked, and the very resources that make these places highly desirable destinations are strained, can anything really be done? The community of Jackson, Wyoming, hopes so. Recognizing that residents, business owners and visitors all share in the responsibility of preserving the area’s unique character and allure, stakeholders throughout Teton County have put together a comprehensive sustainable destination management plan. The goal is to protect the beauty of the area, preserve a healthy environment and, at the same time, enhance visitor experience, business growth and quality of life for residents. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with Crista Valentino of the Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board to find out what’s in the plan and how it will help.
It's easy to take the status of national parks for granted. We read wonderful beckoning stories about them in magazines and newspapers. And we watch gorgeous travelogue pieces about them on television. But how much do we know about the operational status of the national parks? How much do we know about the health of the natural resources, the condition of historic structures, the state of the workforce that operates and manages the national parks?
In short, we know really very little about those things. But at Yellowstone National Park, staff has been preparing "State of the Park" reports for some years. These reports provide some insights into the overall health of the park, if you will. Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly sat down with Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek to discuss this year's report.
Across the National Park System, there are incredible sights that explore American history. There’s a robust mix of cultures reflected in the parks, and breathtaking vistas that, well, will take your breath away.
But there also are seemingly countless needs, from backlogs of maintenance projects, interpretation for history, wildlife and science that needs to be crafted, and unique issues that can range from climate change impacts to helping inner city youth visit a park.
Helping the National Park Service tackle these myriad issues and challenges is the National Park Foundation, which Congress created back in 1967 to be the official charitable organization for the parks. Through the years, this organization has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the parks. Today, with National Parks Week underway, we’re joined by Will Shafroth, the Foundation’s CEO to discuss not only the needs of the park system, but the successes the Foundation is recognizing in tackling some of them.
Travel extensively through the National Park System, and you’ll quickly come to realize that the park’s restaurants try to reflect the local culinary trends, or at least use local ingredients in crafting their menus. For instance, visit national parks in Alaska and you can pretty much count on salmon in the dinner offerings. Travel through the parks in the Rocky Mountains, and elk (and sometimes bison) will appear on the menus. Explore parks in the southwest, and you can almost predict that cacti will show up in some form. You can be amazed at the menus that chefs in the National Park System roll out. Even more amazing is how they feed hundreds of people at meal time, and largely maintain consistency with what they put in front of you. This week we’re going to explain how you can mimic some of these chefs in your own kitchen. Our guest is Linda Ly, author of “The National Parks Cookbook.” We’ll see if we can inspire you with new home menus, from beverages and appetizers, to entrees and desserts.
Over the years there have been more than a few units of the National Park System that have been head-scratchers. Why were they added? What redeeming value did they bring to the park system?
James Ridenour who was director of the National Park Service from 1989 through 1993, was well familiar with these units. As he once put it, “I’m in complete agreement that the National Park Service has units that are unworthy of National Park Service status. That was my motive for coining the term ‘thinning of the blood’.”
Members of Congress trade votes to get their local favorite on the NPS teat, usually to attract tourists. Then they don’t add money to the budget to run these units. So you have two things - you thin the quality of the system, and you thin the ability of the National Park Service to run the system.
We’re going to explore some of these units, at least some of the ones that were pushed out of the National Park System, with none-other than Traveler Professor Emeritus Dr. Robert Janiskee. Bob was the one who quite some years ago started the “Pruning the Parks” series on the Traveler, and we’ve momentarily pried him out of his retirement to discuss some of these parks with us.
When warm weather spreads across the National Park System, many parks offer nightly gatherings around the campfire. The tradition of gathering around a flickering fire goes back thousands of years. Fire, after all, was the giver of light in the darkest of night, and seen as offering safety from what might lurk about in the dark.
For the park visitor, nightly campfire gatherings are not about feeling safe from the darkness, but rather an opportunity to learn about the surrounding park landscape from a well informed park ranger. Back in 1968, a National Park Service training brochure explained that the national park campfire provides an opportunity to weld the visitor's random experiences and impressions into an understanding and appreciation for the park’s real values. Of course, there are a number of definitions and expectations for what constitutes a campfire story.
Today we’re going to explore “Campfire Stories: Tales from America’s National Parks and Trails” with editors of the book Dave and Ilyssa Kyu.
Coastal grey wolves in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska seem to be feasting well these days on an unlikely food source - sea otters. In fact, the shorelines of Glacier Bay offer wolves a cornucopia of otters and other marine menu items, providing this carnivorous predator safe and dependable locations for food and raising offspring.
This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick speaks with park wildlife biologist Tania Lewis, whose research team is evaluation coastal wolf diets. Their goals are to identify different wolf packs and the shoreline areas important to them for feeding and reproduction. With annual visitation to Glacier Bay approaching 550,000, the team’s work will be instrumental in determining whether those areas should be protected from unnecessary human disturbance.
How did America get hooked on skiing? In 1939, Hannes Schneider moved from Austria to North Conway, New Hampshire, to teach skiing. But before the sport really took off, World War II broke out. After the war, a gritty band of soldiers who fought in the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, returned home into the mountains they loved.
Last week, Christian Beckwith, an alpinist and climbing historian, introduced us to the 10th Mountain Division and how it was jump-started by climbers who had honed their skills in the craggy mountains of Grand Teton National Park.
Beckwith, who rolls out this history in his podcast “Ninety-Pound Rucksack”, is back with us today to explain how those soldiers kick-started the ski industry in America, started organizations such as the National Outdoor Leadership School, and played a role in fields of avalanche science and wilderness rescue.
How much do you know about World War II history, Grand Teton National Park, and the evolution of outdoor recreation in the United States? Believe it or not, they’re all intertwined.
Ninety-Pound Rucksack is a podcast about the U.S. Army’s legendary 10th Division, and the dawn of outdoor recreation in America. Hosted by veteran alpinist and climbing historian Christian Beckwith, Ninety-Pound Rucksack examines the stories that made the unit legendary, as well as those that history has forgotten.
The tale of the 10th Mountain Division, a gritty unit of World War II climbers and skiers who trained for more than two years high in the Colorado Rockies to fight the Axis powers in extreme cold and mountainous terrain, is famous for good reason. Not only did its insertion into the war help end Germany’s occupation of Italy, but post-war its surviving members helped found and develop ski areas across America, started organizations such as the National Outdoor Leadership School, and played a role in the fields of avalanche science and wilderness rescue.
Equal parts real-time research, intimate conversation, and revelatory journalism, Ninety-Pound Rucksack explores not only the conventional wisdom about the 10th, but the transformative power of the mountains to forge a collective identity among the mountain troops. And to ignite a passion for the outdoors that reshaped American society in the process.
Big Bend National Park is not simply a park that you pass along the way. Located in West Texas along the US/Mexico border, this 1,252-square-mile park is five hours from the closest commercial airport. In other words, you must make Big Bend your final destination if you’re going to visit. You’re not going to just happen upon it as you drive down the road. But once here, you’re likely to be astounded by the ruggedness, the beauty of the Chisos Mountain Range that falls entirely within the park's borders, and the rich cultural history preserved here.
Aside from the natural beauty of Big Bend, there’s a lot going on here that’s going to affect most visitors. There’s work to design a new lodge, a question of whether the official wilderness designation should be applied to some of the park's landscape, and there are staffing issues and even wildlife issues. The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick traveled to Big Bend to discuss these issues and more with Superintendent Bob Krumenaker.
Bears tend to scare us when we’re outdoors and they’re not behind steel bars. Particularly grizzly bears. They’re big, with sharp claws and powerful jaws, and seem to be in a bad mood whenever we spot them. We hear about people being mauled to death by bears, and even of black bears attacking campers in their sleeping bags.
Are bears really as terrifying as they appear? Or is our fear driven by a lack of understanding of their behavior? Derek Stonorov knows a little bit about bears and their behavior, after all the wildlife biologist has spent the past 50 years observing coastal brown bears in Alaska, in a bid to better understand their social structures and behaviors. He details he findings in his forthcoming book “Watch the Bear."
For more than a decade, Colorado College has sponsored a poll to gauge conservation sentiments of residents in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Nevada. Over the years, the questions have ranged from whether the members of the public view themselves as conservationists, whether land conservation and protection can be paired with a strong economy, and even whether federal lands should be turned over to the states.
The 2023 State of the Rockies poll just came out, and it points to public support for strong conservation policies that protect wildlife and wild lands, and what some might call surprisingly strong support from a largely conservative corner of the country, for a conservation goal of protecting 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030. We’re going to get into the poll results with Brian Kurzel, the National Wildlife Federation’s regional executive director for the Rocky Mountain region.
The US Geological Survey operates five different volcano observatories around the country. These observatories monitor real-time volcanic, hydrothermal, and earthquake activity in Alaska, the Cascade Mountains, California’s Long Valley Caldera, Yellowstone National Park, and the State of Hawaii.
There are virtual partnerships between federal and state agencies, university-based researchers, and scientists. Their work involves monitoring, measuring, and analyzing data, all helping to increase our understanding of these powerful and fascinating geologic forces.
This week Lynn Riddick catches up with Matt Patrick, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. He and his colleagues have seen quite a bit of awe-inspiring volcanic action recently, with eruptions from Mauna Loa and Kīlauea within Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
It is one of the longest units of the National Park System in the country. "It," of course, is the Oregon National Historic Trail, which stretches more than 2,100 miles from Missouri to Oregon. It’s been estimated that between 1840 and 1860 some 300,000-400,000 men, women, and children embarked on the four-month-long trip to head to the West Coast.
A new book, “Exploring The Oregon Trail, America's Historic Road Trip,” can help you explore sections of the trail, or the entire trail if you have the time. It was written by Kay and David Scott, longtime national park travelers and park lodging experts.
It’s a problem that’s been coming for quite some time, and one that really comes as no surprise. The large landscape national parks that are home to many species of wildlife have been turning into biological islands as development hems them in. You can look back to 1993 when the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative launched to begin to see the discussion around opening up these parks through migratory corridors. That initiative, which continues today, envisioned a corridor stretching from Yellowstone National Park to Canada’s Yukon Territory to serve wildlife by protecting core wildlife habitat.
There have been other somewhat similar initiatives. There’s the Wildlands Network, which since 1991 has been, as that organization puts it, striving to reconnect, restore, and re-wild North America. There have been efforts in Congress to pass legislation that would provide funding for such corridors. The Pew Charitable Trust this past October released a report on the need for creating migratory corridors and the challenges standing in their way.
Today we’re going to zoom in on some national parks, their wildlife, and the need to establish habitat connectivity between those parks to prevent animals from being stranded on biological islands. Joining us is Dr. William Newmark, a research curator and conservation biologist in the Natural History Museum of Utah.
There is a wide acceptance that we have drifted too far away from nature, and that we need to pull closer. Many have called for 30 by 30 - conserving 30% of nature by 2030. The 2022 State of the Birds Report pointed out that more than half of bird species normally found in habitats as diverse as forests, deserts and oceans in the United States are in decline. Climate change is a major factor in those declines, but human development also plays a key role by chewing into wildlife habitat and creating biological islands.
How do we reverse declines in wildlife and in wildlife habitat? Can we prevent Yellowstone, Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Rocky Mountain National Parks, and other large Western landscape parks from turning into biological islands? Today we’re going to explore the problems, and possible solutions, with Elaine Leslie, who was the National Park Service’s Chief for Biological Resources before retiring, and Bart Melton, who leads the National Parks Conservation Association’s Wildlife Program.
Exceptionally well-preserved fossils of Columbian Mammoths and other Ice Age animals are found at the Waco Mammoth National Monument in Waco, Texas. In this unit of the National Park System, you can see the only recorded evidence of a nursery herd of Columbian mammoth mothers and their offspring and get a rare glimpse into the behavior and ecology of these immense extinct giants.
This week, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick travels to Waco, to see what else she can unearth about this unique unit of the National Park System that permanently protects the remains of Columbian Mammoths.
National parks offer some of the best birding in the country. From Acadia National Park to Big Bend National Park and over to Haleakalā National Park, you could spend days looking overhead for a species to add to your life list.
But as rich as national parks are in bird life, that’s not to say it’s business as usual in the birding world. At Acadia National Park, dramatic changes have been noted in the wintering bird populations. American Tree Sparrows, once fairly abundant, have been on the decline, while Northern Cardinals and Wild Turkeys, two species that normally aren’t linked to the park, have been on the rise lately.
To better understand what’s going on at Acadia, we’ve reached out to Kyle Lima, a Schoodic Institute data analyst who analyzed bird observations collected as part of the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count.
When unprecedented flooding roars through a national park, shredding major roads that access that park, it rightfully could be pointed to as the top story in the National Park System. And while Yellowstone National Park was that park, not only the flooding, but the lack of human casualties, and rapid recovery rank that story as arguably the top one in the National Park System in 2022. But that wasn’t the only major story that came out of the parks this year.
Today we’re looking back at some of the top stories across the National Park System in 2022. To help us identify them, we’ve asked Kristen Brengel, the National Parks Conservation Association’s Senior Vice President for Government Affairs, and Mike Murray, Chairman of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks to join us.
We’re just about to close the books on 2022 and what a year in the National Park System it has been. We’ve seen catastrophic flooding, drought, and crowds, lots of crowds.
Today though, we’re going to focus on some of the positives about being out and about in the parks. We’ve asked contributing editors Lynn Riddick and Kim O’Connell to join us today to point to their favorite adventures and stories from the parks this past year.
Andrew Revkin, noted journalist, author, and educator, has been reporting on climate change for the better part of 35 years. In a conversation with the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick, he shares stories of his experiences, and how he is adapting his work to foster conversations rather than the traditional form of interrogative storytelling. He regards today’s communication climate as an inseparable part of the Earth system, and vital in our response to real climate issues. He also has some thoughts about our National Parks, and the landscapes we are enjoying at this particular moment in time.
It’s been quite a year in the National Park System when the subject turns to unexpected bills. There was the historic flooding that hit Yellowstone National Park in June, monsoonal flooding that struck Death Valley National Park and Mojave National Preserve later this past summer, and even flooding at Vicksburg National Military Park that caused significant damage.
It’s well known that the National Park Service doesn’t have the financial resources and staffing that it needs on a daily basis to keep the National Park System not just running, but well maintained. As a result, we shouldn’t be too surprised when natural disasters such as flooding, wildfires, and even droughts strike and generate repair bills in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Dollars that the National Park Service doesn’t have just sitting in a bank account, ready to pay for repairs.
Today we’re going to explore the unexpected costs that have descended on the National Park Service, and how to pay for them, with John Garder, the National Parks Conservation Association’s senior director for budget and appropriations.
Across the National Park System, national parks fortunate enough to have friends groups helping them out have been leaning a little bit harder on those non-profit organizations than in the past. In some cases a lot harder as federal funding has not kept up with the increase in park units, or the costs of maintaining and operating those parks.
It seems the National Park Service can never get ahead of the costs of operating the park system. That’s where national park friends organizations come into play. They raise charitable dollars to help cover the costs of programs and initiatives that the parks wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford.
The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation has been doing this kind of work for 25 years. Today we’re going to take a look back at the foundation’s many successes with Jordan Calaway, the foundation’s chief development officer.
National Parks Traveler correspondent Jennifer Bain visits Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southwestern Arizona. Jessica Pope, the park's interpretation, education and community engagement programs manager, gives Bain a tour of Quitobaquito Springs, a lush oasis in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Freeze-dried meals long have been the go-to food source for many backcountry travelers, but only because they didn’t know other options existed for meal time. And not everyone easily stomachs those meals. To explore the possibilities of home-made dehydrated meals, we are joined by Chef Glenn McAllister, who decided that a 315-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail would be a great shakedown trek for experimenting with dehydrated meals. Chef Glenn runs the website BackpackingChef.com, which is the go-to source for how to dehydrate meal ingredients, and what to do with them.
There are places in the National Park System that take your breath away. Places such as Glacier National Park, along the shoreline of Avalanche Lake, or atop Logan Pass staring down valley along with the mountain goats. If you've been here, you'll never forget the experience. Husband-wife duo Laurie Raveis & Dennis Kole capture their experiences in "Glacier" in their upcoming 2023 album "In the Moment."
This year has been a year of firsts for the National Parks Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek. First-time visits to units of the National Park System, that is. This year Repanshek has taken road trips through Nebraska, Kansas, and New Mexico to explore overlooked gems of the park system. To discuss these and other must-see sites with us today are Rebecca Latson, Traveler's contributing photographer, and Kim O’Connell, a Traveler contributing editor.
As winter approaches, the slow season is setting in across the National Park System, which makes it a good time to take measure of some issues that are confronting both the parks and the National Park Service. We’ve invited Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, and Mike Murray, the chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
As hot, arid, and dusty as Death Valley National Park is, it might come as a surprise to learn that it has a very important fishery of sorts. There is a place in the national park where there is a warm spring that is home to a rare and endangered fish - the Devils Hole Pupfish.
Each year the population of pupfish can swing wildly between highs and lows. Recently, researchers completed their biannual count of Devils Hole Pupfish and the numbers are encouraging. Devils Hole is the only natural habitat where this critically endangered fish exists in the wild, and as the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick discovers from a chat with a park aquatic ecologist, the numbers are the highest in two decades.
National Parks Traveler Founder Kurt Repanshek and contributing editors Kim O'Connell and Lynn Riddick discuss the Traveler's role in reporting on national parks and how reader and listener support make that role possible.
Back in 2009, a small herd of bison was relocated from Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota to Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas. The goal was not only to restore an essential foundational species of wildlife that had not grazed on those lands for more than a century, but to also reestablish the unique ecological benefits bison bring to the landscape while preserving the genetic integrity of the species.
In this week’s podcast, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick takes us to Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and chats with Park Superintendent Kristen Hase to see how this special conservation herd has been faring lately.
Terry Karlsen is Parks Canada's only shipwright. And his latest challenge is a big one: Restoring the S.S. Klondike, a vintage steam-powered paddlewheeler. The work is underway at the S.S. Klondike National Historic Site in Whitehorse, Yukon.
If you’ve spent time in the National Park System, you’ve seen a mix of conditions in terms of a park’s infrastructure. Some are in great condition, some not so great. Recently my wife and I had the opportunity to stop by Grand Teton National Park and the Jenny Lake area. The trails that lead around the lake and up onto the flanks of the Tetons are in wonderful condition. But it wasn’t always so.
When the Civilian Conservation Core built the original trails and overlooks, they weren’t expecting millions of feet to pound them each year. Fortunately, the Grand Teton National Park Foundation stepped up to help the National Park Service raise millions of dollars to pay for projects at the Jenny Lake area as a gift for the National Park Service’s centennial. But that’s just one example of how the Foundation has been able to help Grand Teton National Park. This year is the foundation’s 25th anniversary, and we have president Leslie Mattson with us to discuss the work the foundation has accomplished.
A sea kayaking paddle on Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park just might be the perfect way to end summer if you like paddling. It's also a great way to gain another perspective of the park, and the National Park System.
Our climate is changing, and not subtly. And it's having a great and visible impact on the National Park System. We saw flooding and fires at units of the National Park Systems this year, as well as an ongoing historic drought thought to be the worst in 1,200 years.
Are those events the result of human-driven climate change, or simply the vagaries of weather? Today we're going to explore that question, and others tied to the weather we're experiencing, with Stephanie Kodish, the senior director and counsel for the National Parks Conservation Association's Clean Air and Climate programs.
Everglades National Park was somewhat of an anomaly when it was authorized in Congress back in 1934. It marked the first time that federal land was set aside for its abundance of plant and animal species, rather than for its breathtaking scenic views.
Today, Everglades National Park continues to face threats that make it the only US world heritage site officially considered to be under threat from challenges like energy production, surrounding urban growth, and nutrient pollution from agriculture. To dive into some of these issues, we’re joined today by Dr. Chris Wilhelm, a history professor at the College of Coastal Georgia, and author of From Swamp to Wetlands, the Creation of Everglades National Park.
Today we’re going to delve into some of New York’s Revolutionary War history with an audio trip to Saratoga National Historical Park. The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick caught up park ranger and military historian Eric Schnitzer, who explains what happened there and why it’s significant.
Today we’re going to delve into some of New York’s Revolutionary War history with an audio trip to Saratoga National Historical Park. The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick caught up park ranger and military historian Eric Schnitzer, who explains what happened there and why it’s significant.
Fall is here. Snow has fallen in the Rockies, the days are getting shorter, and some animals are realizing that winter isn’t that far away.
With the change of seasons underway, you should mark your calendar for the most unusual competition in the National Park System and get started on your bracket. Not your NCAA basketball tournament bracket, but your fat bear bracket.
The week of October 5-11 at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska officially is Fat Bear Week in the park, and the National Parks Traveler’s Lynn Riddick caught up with Lian Law, Katmai’s visual information specialist, to learn more about it.
Fall is here. Snow has fallen in the Rockies, the days are getting shorter, and some animals are realizing that winter isn’t that far away.
With the change of seasons underway, you should mark your calendar for the most unusual competition in the National Park System and get started on your bracket. Not your NCAA basketball tournament bracket, but your fat bear bracket.
The week of October 5-11 at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska officially is Fat Bear Week in the park, and the National Parks Traveler’s Lynn Riddick caught up with Lian Law, Katmai’s visual information specialist, to learn more about it.
One of the most amazing settings in the National Park System are glacial landscapes. From Glacier National Park in Montana and Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state to Alaska, these rivers of ice are captivating to see and, if you’re lucky enough, to walk upon or watch as they calve blocks of ice into Pacific waters.
But as amazing as these rivers of ice are, they are vanishing under the warmth of climate change. Glacier National Park’s glaciers could be gone by mid-century. Many of those in Alaska are almost visibly in retreat.
But how serious is the problem, what is the overall state of glacial ice in the Park System? Two researchers, Deborah Kurtz from the National Park Service and Taryn Black, a doctoral student in Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, have tried to answer that question as it applies to Kenai Fjords National Park two hours south of Anchorage, Alaska. We're joined today by Taryn Black.
One of the most amazing settings in the National Park System are glacial landscapes. From Glacier National Park in Montana and Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state to Alaska, these rivers of ice are captivating to see and, if you’re lucky enough, to walk upon or watch as they calve blocks of ice into Pacific waters.
But as amazing as these rivers of ice are, they are vanishing under the warmth of climate change. Glacier National Park’s glaciers could be gone by mid-century. Many of those in Alaska are almost visibly in retreat.
But how serious is the problem, what is the overall state of glacial ice in the Park System? Two researchers, Deborah Kurtz from the National Park Service and Taryn Black, a doctoral student in Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, have tried to answer that question as it applies to Kenai Fjords National Park two hours south of Anchorage, Alaska. We're joined today by Taryn Black.
The Biden administration’s desire to preserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters for nature by 2030 has heightened the public’s interest in nature, and spurred countless conversations into not only how that goal can be achieved, but about the benefits that it will generate.
Professor William Ripple from Oregon State University, Michael Phillips from the Turner Endangered Species Fund, and Elaine Leslie, who was the National Park Service’s chief for biological resources, discuss their proposal to expand the territories of wolves and beavers in the American West to “Rewild the West.”
It’s been said time and again, the National Park Service is not adequately funded. There’s just not enough money in the agency’s annual budgets to address all the needs across the National Park System. And those needs are many, from maintaining facilities, keeping wastewater treatment plans operating smoothly, managing wildlife, and tending to ever growing throngs of visitors. That’s where friends groups and cooperating associations come into play. They provide much-needed financial support through philanthropic donations that might pay for wildlife research, trail maintenance, or campground upkeep.
Friends of Acadia is one such group, and its workload has grown through the years. While friends groups once were seen as raising charitable dollars to fund the “margin of excellence” in the parks, today the Park Service is relying more and more on these nonprofit organizations to fund projects addressing the “muscle and bones” of park operations.
Today we’re going to discuss this evolution with Eric Stiles, who recently took the helm at Friends of Acadia following David MacDonald’s departure.
As the inscription on the Roosevelt Arch at the north entrance into Yellowstone National Park reminds us, the national parks are for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. They are wild, scenic, and historic spaces that belong to all of us. But are they in reality exclusive places with reservation systems that aren’t providing equitable access to the diverse population wishing to use parks?
Our guest this week is Dr. Will Rice from the University of Montana, and he has some thoughts about the functionality of recreation.gov, the main reservation system used for public lands campgrounds and activities. In recently published research, which he shares with the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick, he and his team evaluated one aspect of park reservations – camping – to see if the online reservation system offers an advantage to higher socio-economic groups.
Alaska is a big state, and within that big state are 17 units of the National Park System spanning more than 100 million acres. Denali, Glacier Bay, Kenai Fjords, Katmai, Wrangell-St. Elias are just some of those units. But if you want to visit the parks in Alaska, how do you decide which ones to explore? Contributing editor Kim O'Connell recently spent 10 days in Alaska with her family, and is here to discuss her travels in Denali and Kenai Fjords and offer some suggestions on how to decide where to go in Alaska.
On the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, in an opening in the piney forest, stands a fire lookout built in the 1930s.
The Shadow Mountain Lookout is the only lookout remaining in the park. During a recent visit to Rocky Mountain, I followed the 5-mile-long trail to the lookout, where I ran into Barbara and John Varian and discussed both the hike and the lookout with them.
Climate change is materializing in various ways across the National Park System. Houses have been falling into the Atlantic at Cape Hatteras National Seashore as a result of sea level rise and shifting of the barrier island, wildfires have been raging through Sequoia, Yosemite, and Lassen Volcanic national parks, just to name three units impacted by fire, and flooding has unexpectedly become a major force at Yellowstone National Park.
It’s been just about two months since catastrophic floods hit the northern portion of Yellowstone, and the recovery efforts are continuing, and will continue for quite a few years in the case of rebuilding the North and Northeast Entrance roads.
Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly discusses the latest on the recovery work.
If you’re interested in volcanoes, you need not go further than our national parks to get your fill. Eighty-four units of the National Park System have volcanic resources. These parks run the gamut of having very active volcanic features to those where volcanoes formed the landscape and contribute to the geodiversity of the park.
The most active volcano in our park system is Kīlauea in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. It’s also one of the most monitored and researched volcanoes anywhere. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks to Professor Leif Karlstrom, whose recent research of Kilauea might be music to your ears.
Homestead National Historical Park near Beatrice, Nebraska, isn’t that big, just 211 acres, but as the saying goes, it plays much, much bigger. Here you’ll find the National Museum on Homesteading, historic buildings including the Palmer-Epard log cabin that despite its small size – just 14 feet by 16 feet – was home to a family of 12, along with agricultural equipment, genealogy research opportunities, an education center, hiking trails through 100 acres of restored tallgrass prairie and a burr oak forest.
This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. On a warm, late June day I caught up with Jonathan Fairchild, the park historian, to learn a bit more about Daniel Freeman, the man generally accepted to have been the very first to take advantage of the Homestead Act. Freeman claimed the 160 acres in what at the time was the Nebraska Territory on January 1, 1863, the day The Homestead Act that Congress had passed the year before took effect. Freeman, who was a Union soldier at the time, didn’t settle on the land until the end of the Civil War, in 1865, but he lived there until he died in 1908.
Those 160 acres are the bulk of the setting for the historical park, though it’s much changed from how it appeared during Freeman’s life there. The National Park Service acquired the property in the 1930s and restored the farmed acres to tallgrass prairie.
In a minute, I’ll be back to take you across the landscape with Jonathan.
The beauty of the National Park System is that there are more than 400 units that you can choose to visit, and each has a unique perspective showcasing the United States’ history, natural beauty, or cultural richness.
Fort Larned is the best-preserved Civil War-era fort in the National Park System and has more than a few stories held in the stone walls of its barracks, officers’ quarters, commissary, and other buildings.
Though Nancy Hershberger might be dismissed by "traditional" quilters, her patchwork designs capture a setting deserving a spot in an art gallery, or a wall in your home.
True, her quilts won't cover your bed or keep you physically warm on a cold night. But they likely will bring a knowing smile to your face and possibly remind you of a place in time from your wanderings through the National Park System.
There are 423 units in the National Park System, but a surprising number of people focus on about two dozen parks. Last year, when roughly 300 million visited the park system, just 25 units – the Yellowstones, Grand Canyon’s, Zions, Cape Cods, Blue Ridge Parkways – got 50 percent of the traffic. There are so many overlooked units in the National Park System worthy of a visit. They might not be your final destination, but they’re certainly worth becoming a destination on your traveling itinerary. For example, let's walk the tallgrass prairie at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.
The Oregon Trail stretched roughly 2,170 miles from Missouri to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It rambled across prairie, sagebrush desert and mountains. From the 1840s into the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants made the challenging journey, and not all survived. Today more than 120 historic sites, auto tour routes, and markers show us where the Oregon Trail traveled.
One of the choke points, if you will, is in western Nebraska at a place preserved today as Scotts Bluff National Monument. Here the Oregon Trail runs across Mitchell Pass, a low spot squeezed by buff-colored bluffs that tower to the north and the south. Today a state highway runs through the pass, but back in the mid-1800s, it was a narrow wagon trail that Conestoga wagons and covered wagons followed.
Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek recently visited the monument and walked part of the trail with Ranger Eric Grunwald.
There really are few days that aren't great for paddling on Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park, whether you're in a canoe or a sea kayak. During a short getaway in early June my wife and I did just that. Embed the picture that accompanies this post in your mind, then listen as I paddle the lake and describe the setting.
NPT Ep 176 Spot List - Run Time - 41:40
:02 National Parks Traveler introduction
:12 Episode Intro with Lynn Riddick
:34 The Road Scholar - Bill Mize - The Spirit of South Dakota
:44 Eastern National Passport
1:27 Interior Federal Credit Union
1:45 Washington’s National Park Fund
2:18 Wild Tribute
2:39 Great Smoky Mountains Association
3:04 Kurt’s Travels with Lynn Riddick
28:33 Black Woods - Nature’s Symphony - The Sounds of Acadia
28:54 Grand Teton National Park Foundation
29:22 Potrero Group
29:48 Yosemite Conservancy
30:08 Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation
30:27 Everglades Foundation
30:39 Friends of Acadia
31:11 Kurt’s Travels with Lynn Riddick Continues
39:19 The Horsemen - Randy Petersen - The Spirit of South Dakota
39:42 Episode Closing
39:58 Orange Tree Productions
40:29 Splitbeard Productions
40:39 National Parks Traveler footer
The impact of the Covid shutdown in the National Park System is well-known, and we regret that many park-related businesses in the gateway communities may not have made it. The National Parks Traveler circled back to one particular business that we had featured in an article in May 2020 –- Southern Yosemite Mountain Guides. -- to see how it has fared ever since.
Waking up in the middle of the night in the backcountry of a national park can often be an interesting, or even unnerving, experience. What was it that caused you to wakeup? Fourteen years ago, deep in the interior of Yellowstone National Park it was the howling of a wolf that woke me, and when I think about it, it still seems like it was just yesterday. The melodic howl hung in the air, seesawing up and down as the wolf sang his song.
We go into national parks to view spectacular scenery, hike, and see wildlife. But have you ever just stopped to listen?
As much as a national park’s scenery catches you, the sounds you can pick up during your park visits are just as memorable. And, in the case of a howling wolf, bellowing grizzly, or bugling elk, I would suggest that they’re more memorable.
This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. This week, we’re doing away with talking and focusing on listening.
NPT Ep 174 Spot List - Run Time - 35:31
:02 National Parks Traveler introduction
:12 Episode Intro with Kurt Repanshek
1:06 Beyond the Reef - Tim Heintz & Grant Geissman - Seascapes: A Musical Journey
1:16 Interior Federal Credit Union
1:35 Yosemite Conservancy
1:55 Eastern National Passport
2:38 Great Smoky Mountains Association
2:58 Friends of Acadia
3:25 Listening to the Parks - Yellowstone
15:27 Listening to the Parks - Rocky Mountain
21:15 Listening to the Parks - Everglades
24:35 Listening to the Parks - Hawaii
31:23 Episode Closing
32:04 Wonder Lake - Various Artists - The Spirit of Alaska
32:12 Orange Tree Productions
32:44 Wild Tribute
33:08 Grand Teton National Park Foundation
33:36 Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation
33:56 Washington’s National Park Fund
34:28 Everglades Foundation
34:39 Potrero Group
35:05 Splitbeard Productions
35:15 National Parks Traveler footer
The natural and wild environments of our national parks offer the unsurpassed protection and diverse ecosystems that birds need to thrive. And that makes our parks equally great places for you to see birds. This week the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks to birding expert Nicholas Lund of Maine Audubon, who believes that whether you consider yourself a full-fledged birder or just someone who simply likes birds, when it comes to our national parks, there’s always a bird in the air, in a tree or along the water’s edge to see, hear, and learn about.
Memorial Day Weekend is the official kickoff to summer. There’s no doubt that many of us have already been to a unit of the National Park System in 2022, but this weekend is the traditional kickoff to venturing into the park system.
If you don’t know where to go, or what to do, I’ve invited Kim O’Connell, a contributing writer at the Traveler, and Lynn Riddick, our masterful podcaster, to help sort through the options.
National Parks probably have never been entirely immune from political influences, whether they came out of Washington, D.C., or close to a park’s boundaries. But there’s an argument that can be made, one backed up by evidence, that the past 50 years have seen the most attempts to subvert the mission of the National Park Service to preserve and protect natural resources unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
Jon Jarvis, the 18th director of the National Park Service under President Obama, and his brother Destry, who has a long career tied to conservation and the national parks, to discuss their new book, National Parks Forever, 50 Years Of Fighting And A Case For Independence. In it they call for the National Park Service to be broken out of the Interior Department in a bid to reduce political interference on the agency.
A new figure -- $21.8 billion -- has been attached to the National Park System's maintenance backlog. How will Congress react to that figure just a couple years after being told the number was around $13 billion?
National parks inspire a lot of things, from great adventures and beautiful landscape paintings to the names of cars and trucks to even music.
In this week's podcast we invite you to tap your feet to the music as Lynn Riddick shares the stories of two vbands whose monikers and tunes are inspired by the national parks: National Park Radio, and the National Parks.
Everglades National Park very easily can be viewed as the poster child for invasive species. It’s infested with non-native Burmese pythons, Argentine black and white tegus are making inroads, there is invasive vegetation like Melaleuca and Brazilian pepper, and nonnative fish are making their way into the park’s ecosystems.
Kurt Repanshek, editor of the National Parks Traveler, recently had a chance to sit down with Pedro Ramos, superintendent of Everglades National Park, to discuss the battles against these invasive species and look ahead to the park’s 75th birthday this fall.
One trail you must take when you visit Everglades National Park is the Anhinga Trail at Royal Palm. You'll find a short boardwalk that takes you out over the waters of Taylor Slough and quickly discover that the mangroves and other trees that rise above the water are popular with anhingas, one of the park's most popular birds.
Lake Powell long has been the shimmering heart of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah and Arizona, but it’s not the only asset of the NRA that covers 1.25 million acres.
This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. Last year I had the good fortune to visit Glen Canyon NRA twice –- once in May to kayak Lake Powell -- and then in July when I backpacked into the park’s backcountry to not just admire its beauty but watch efforts to reverse the spread of invasive vegetation in the park.
But not all is well with the NRA. A drought said to be the longest in 1,200 years has left Lake Powell at its lowest level since it began filling in 1963. It reached its full impoundment in 1980. But shrinking snowpack levels in the Colorado River drainage in recent years has failed to generate enough runoff into Lake Powell to more than offset the water running through the hydroelectric generating station in the Glen Canyon Dam.
To discuss the state of Lake Powell, and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area as a whole, we’ve invited Glen Canyon Superintendent Bill Shott to join us. We’ll be back in a minute with the superintendent.
A great way to experience Everglades National Park is to go on a "slough slog" into a cypress dome. Ranger Yvette Cano led National Parks Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek on such a wet hike in search of a gator hole.
Lyndon Baines Johnson had a staggering impact on the United States during his time as president. Much of his approach to government was instilled during his early life in Texas. In this, part two of her podcast on the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park, the Traveler's Lynn Riddick visits the president's boyhood home and ranch.
The LBJ Ranch was where he was born, lived, died, and was buried.
Those who have ascended to the presidency of the United States are products of the environments in which they were born, raised, and educated. Their early experiences usually have a significant effect on how they manage their presidency and the subsequent policy and programs developed under their watch.
Lyndon Baines Johnson is a fitting example of that. His presidency was guided in full measure by his upbringing, his personal experiences with poverty and shame and his observation of racism and hate.
The National Parks Traveler’s Lynn Riddick begins a two-part series on the unique Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park, which offers the most complete picture of any American president. Guided by park official Brian Vickers, Lynn takes us through the site’s two distinct districts – the Johnson City District and the LBJ Ranch District –to learn about Johnson’s compelling cradle-to-grave story and the forces that shaped his life.
Some 615,000 visitors a year flock to the hard-packed gray sands of Padre Island National Seashore along the Gulf Coast of Texas. This undeveloped national seashore boasts an abundance of natural wonders in its tidal flats, dunes and grasslands. Ample solitude can be found on it 65-mile stretch of beach, including 60 miles that are only accessible by four-wheel drive.
The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick takes an in-depth look at Padre Island National Seashore and finds that not only is it a popular destination for campers, windsurfers, and anglers, but history buffs might find intrigue in the remnants of early settlements, cattle ranches and military installations found there.
Near the very tip of Everglades National Park, the interior wetlands of Cape Sable have long been viewed as one of the most ecologically productive environments left in Florida. It could become even more so thanks to an upcoming restoration project. Dr. Jerry Lorenz, head of Audubon's Everglades Science Center, explains the project.
Nearly 200 countries have developed various forms of biodiversity strategies, but the United States is not one of them.
What exactly would a "national biodiversity strategy" look like? What would it entail? To explore those, and other, questions about biodiversity we’re joined by Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, and Lindsay Rosa, who directs Defenders’ center for conservation innovation.
From coast to coast, national parks, national forests, and state parks are being crowded, if not overrun at times, by visitors.
One part of the country that has seen record-breaking visitation has been the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, and the Wright Brothers Memorial combined welcomed nearly 4 million visitors last year.
National Parks of Eastern North Carolina Superintendent Dave Hallec discuss that record visitation, and risks to ocean-front homes at Rodanthe.
Across the roughly 85-million-acre National Park System there are, in theory at least, some 70 million acres envisioned as official wilderness. Forty-four million acres have received Congressional blessing as such, while another 26 million acres are in something akin to administrative limbo.
Some of those 26 million acres -- including roughly two-thirds of Big Bend National Park -- have been recommended for official wilderness designation...and seen that recommendation languish. There's an effort to turn roughly two-thirds of Big Bend National Park into Congressionally approved wilderness.
How many are too many? That’s the question to mull in the wake of news from the National Park Service that nearly 300 million visited the National Park System last year.
What is the perfect number for annual visitation to the park system’s 423 units?
To help sort out the pluses and minuses of 300 million visitors a year to the park system, and to offer you some suggestions for escaping the crowds, we’ve asked Becky Lomax, author of USA National Parks, The Complete Guide To All 63 Parks to return to the Traveler to discuss visitation.
Should Yellowstone National Park have more bison, should it have less? Just recently the park embarked on an environmental impact statement to examine that question.
Dr. James Derr, a professor of veterinary genetics at Texas A&M University who has spent more than a quarter century directing worldwide research projects in wildlife and livestock conservation genetics, discusses bison in Yellowstone and elsewhere on public lands.
RVing –- traveling by recreational vehicle –- has exploded along with the coronavirus pandemic. Sales have gone through the roof, inventory has been depleted, and would-be customers often have to wait months before they can hit the road with their new rig.
Many, if not most, of those RV enthusiasts are heading into the National Park System. And why not? Gorgeous scenery, inspiring landscapes, relaxation. But it’s not as simple as it used to be because of that rush to hit the road with your home either being towed along or on the back of your pickup.
Rene Agredano, a full-time RVer since 2007, discusses the challenges of enjoying the parks by RV.
With the great rush to the outdoors that we’ve seen since the Covid pandemic erupted, there have been many calls for more space in the National Park System. While there are places in the West that seem to be logical additions to the parks there, that's not the case in the East. So, if we want more park lands east of the Mississippi, how could we gain them?
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the great hiking destinations in the mid-Atlantic region, if not the entire East Coast. Across its rumpled 522,427 acres there are more than 800 miles of trails. They range from relatively short footpaths to scenic payoffs like Rainbow Falls and Abrahams Falls to the more than 70 miles of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail that crosses the top of the park. Nancy East is well familiar with the park’s trail network, as she and a close friend set out in the fall of 2020 to hike every mile of that network, and then she wrote about it in a new book, Chasing the Smokies Moon. We talk with Nancy to understand what motivated her to embark on such a hike and what that endeavor taught her.
All is not well at Point Reyes National Seashore, as a years-long battle continues over ranching at Point Reyes, how it’s impacting the seashore’s environment, and how the National Park Service is trying to manage it. To sort through some of these issues, we’re joined by Laura Cunningham, California director at Western Watersheds Project.
Last week the National Parks Traveler took you to Big Bend National Park in far west Texas with a discussion with Chief of Interpretation Tom Vandenberg. This week, Traveler's Lynn Riddick provides a first-hand, more personal glimpse into this vast remote park.
Afterwards, Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek shares a short conversation he had with Charles Sams, the new director of the National Park Service.
The National Parks Traveler’s Lynn Riddick begins a two-part series about her recent trip to Big Bend -- a vast wilderness in the Chihuahuan Desert along the Rio Grande. She meets up with the park’s chief of interpretation, who offers an overview of the park’s varied geology and diverse ecology, its human history and what the future may hold for visitors seeking adventure and solitude in the park’s 800,000 acres.
This has been one of the most newsworthy years in recent memory for the National Park Service and the parks.
There’s finally a Senate-confirmed director at the helm, billions of dollars are flowing into the parks for a variety of projects, wildfires chewed through Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Lassen Volcanic national parks, lakes Powell and Mead are shadows of their former selves.
A look back at news in the National Park System in 2021.
As the global human population continues to increase, as sprawl continues to wash over natural areas, the amount of space needed for flora and fauna to thrive and, even, in some cases, survive, is steadily being squeezed by the human footprint.
Kristine Tompkins knows a little about protecting landscapes for nature. She and her late husband, Doug Tompkins, donated more than 2 million acres in Chile and Argentina to those two countries, which in turn were able to create 13 national parks.
When you visit Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, after you’ve gazed into the Kīlauea crater itself if it’s erupting, you should make a point to hike the Kīlauea Iki Trail. Starting from an overlook near Nāhuku (aka the Thurston Lava Tube), the trail goes down through the rainforest and out across a crater floor created back in 1959 by one of the most spectacular eruptions of the 20th century at the national park.
There is no shortage of hiking trails in the National Park System. From coastal walks and boardwalk trails to trails that run the ridges of the Teton Crest Trail in Grand Teton National Park and the wildly popular hike to the top of Old Rag in Shenandoah National Park, the options can be overwhelming even if you had endless time to explore the parks.
It might come as a surprise to those who view Yosemite National Park as an iconic valley and a grove of soaring sequoias, but there are more than 800 miles of hiking trails in that park. And to get a feeling for those trails, we’re joined today by Elizabeth Wenk, the author of the 6th edition of Your Complete Hiking Guide/Yosemite National Park from Wilderness Press.
Camels, lions, and mammoths once roamed the landscape around Las Vegas, Nevada. Such was the case during the latter part of the Pleistocene era, which spanned a period of time between 11,000 years and 2.5 million years ago. The area -- known as the Upper Las Vegas Wash –- is rich with the fossils of these and many more creatures as well as ancient plants and pollens.
This trove of fossils is preserved within Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument. Lynn Riddick talks with Tule Springs Superintendent Derek Carter to learn about the treasures contained in the monument.
Today we’re talking adventures, friendships, and the environment with Rick Ridgeway, who has traveled the world seeking adventure and, along the way, debated and discussed environmental consciousness with his friends, colleagues and peers. Rick, a climber, kayaker, explorer, filmmaker, and thoughtful writer, has a new book out, Life Lived Wild, that chronicles many of the adventures he’s embarked upon the past five decades or so.
It’s been said that the night sky represents the other half of the National Park System. It’s in the national parks where you can experience some of the darkest skies you’ll find anywhere.
Our guest this week knows all about that. Artist, author, astronomer and Night Sky Ambassador Doctor Tyler Nordgren talks with the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick about the cosmic opportunity that the parks offer to teach the public about astronomy.
Feral hogs are just one of several species of invasive mammals that are posing immense challenges for national park managers. Unlike invasive insects or reptiles, invasive mammals are often larger and more “charismatic” animals, difficult for parks to eradicate from a logistical, financial, and emotional perspective.
Enter the National Park System and you won’t come away disappointed when you realize all that awaits you. At Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, it’s impossible not to be awed by the volcanism that created the Hawaiian islands, and which is on full display at the crater atop the Kīlauea volcano.
Jessica Ferracane, the park’s public affairs specialist, gave me a primer on Kīlauea during an early November visit. Her broad knowledge of the park and its two volcanoes and enthusiasm in discussing all things Hawaii Volcanoes National Park quickly came across.
The national parks have never been more popular...or more threatened. Now through the end of the year, we are asking for your support for a fundraising campaign to ensure the National Parks Traveler’s ongoing coverage of national parks and protected areas.
For Grand Teton National Park, this year has, to put it bluntly, been crazy busy.
In September the park counted 570,584 visitors, the second-highest tally for that month in park history. Notably, it pushed the park’s year-to-date visitation to 3,493,937, a record for an entire year, and with October, November, and December to go.
Grand Teton Superintendent Chip Jenkins discusses the impacts of that visitation.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee questioned Mr. Sams this past week during his confirmation hearing. He’s an interesting nominee. He’s from outside the National Park Service, and if confirmed he would be the first Native American director of the Park Service.
Discussing his nomination are Phil Francis of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, and Kristen Brengel of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek and Contributing Editor Kim O'Connell discuss news from around the National Park System, from black bear incidents along the Blue Ridge Parkway to a Yellowstone visitor being sentenced to jail for getting too close to a grizzly bear sow and her cubs.
Why visit Cumberland Gap National Historical Park? The gap was the portal to the heart of the country, as Daniel Boone discovered in the 1700s. And it's the one unit of the National Park System where you can take turns standing in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Lynn Riddick gives you a brief preview of the historical park with this audio postcard.
We’re in the middle of a world-wide extinction crisis. Here in the United States, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just announced that nearly two dozen species, from the Ivory-billed woodpecker to two freshwater fish species, are extinct.
How are wildlife in the parks doing? To explore that and other questions surrounding wildlife, we’re joined by Dr. Joel Berger, a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society as well as the Barbara Cox Anthony University Chair in Wildlife Conservation at Colorado State University.
Key to the survival of many threatened and endangered species is the designation of wildlife corridors. The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks to Tori Linder of the Path of the Panther Project about efforts to formalize the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a large and growing mosaic of protected forests and timberlands, swamps, pastures, and orchards that provide the green spaces that animals need to thrive.
Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado year-in and year-out is one of the most popular units of the National Park System. Its rugged peaks attract climbers, its heavily forested backcountry lures hikers and backpackers, and its wildlife attracts photographers and visitors hoping to glimpse elk, or catch their unique bugling, or spot bighorn sheep.
As popular as Rocky Mountain National Park is, it's not too surprising that the heavy visitation brings problems to the park. And in 2020, those problems were exasperated by the East Troublesome and Cameron Peak wildfires. To discuss those issues, and other issues in the park, we've invited Rocky Mountain Superintendent Darla Sidles to join us.
NPT Ep 136 Spot List - Run Time - 48:00
:02 National Parks Traveler introduction
:12 Episode introduction with Kurt Repanshek
1:05 Parks Book Reviews
23:14 The Offering - Bill Mize - The Sounds of the Great Smoky Mountains
23:33 WNPA
23:54 Yosemite Conservancy
24:17 Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation
24:38 Potrero Group
25:06 North Cascades Institute
25:24 Nova Scotia
25:56 Parks Book Reviews Continue
43:22 Bass Harbor - Nature’s Symphony - The Sounds of Acadia
44:07 Episode Closing
44:50 Washington’s National Park Fund
45:26 Interior Federal Credit Union
46:00 Friends of Acadia
46:27 Grand Teton National Park Foundation
46:59 Orange Tree Productions
47:32 Splitbeard Productions
47:42 National Parks Traveler footer
Have you ever visited the "other" side of Yellowstone? Left the Old Faithful and Steamboat geysers behind, fled the conga lines of vehicles mired in bison and bear jams in the Hayden and Lamar valleys, the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on the boardwalks ... and opted, instead, for the wild side, where you and nature can become one...if you are willing? For a few minutes Kurt Repanshek takes you to Yellowstone's other side with a kayak trip on Yellowstone Lake.
The National Park System contains more than parks that preserve incredible landscapes or moments in history. There are many units that honor an individual. Today National Parks Traveler takes a look at a national monument in southwest Missouri dedicated to George Washington Carver.
Born to an enslaved young woman, Carver dedicated his life to agricultural research and science. His work helped struggling farmers in the south better their lives through better farming practices. The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks to Ranger Curtis Gregory about this unique site in the park system, and the inspirational legacy of the 20th century’s most renowned Black scientist.
Acadia National Park in Maine is a tourist magnet, a problem for those seeking a little solitude with the scenery at the park. Traveler Contributing Editor Kim O'Connell found that out first-hand during her family's visit there this summer, but did manage to find some quiet areas.
Climate change is readily apparent this year, generating surprising heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, scores of wildfires across the West, and an ongoing series of tropical storms and hurricanes spinning out of the Atlantic and barreling into the East and Gulf coasts of the United States.
The effects of climate change aren’t absent from Yosemite National Park. To discuss some of those impacts, we reached out to Frank Dean, president and CEO of the Yosemite Conservancy, and Cory Goehring, the conservancy’s lead naturalist.
We also discuss a range of Conservancy projects in Yosemite.
Across the National Park System some 2 million acres have been invaded by non-native vegetation. At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah, crews physically cut down Russian olive trees and use Roundup to prevent regrowth of this invader.
2020 saw the largest fires on record burn in Rocky Mountain National Park, and this year Lassen Volcanic National Park has endured the flames of the Dixie Fire. To gain a better understanding of the wildfire situation in the West, and how climate change is affecting wildfires, we’re joined by Robin Wills, the National Park Service’s chief of fire and aviation for the Pacific West Region.
A lot is happening around the National Park System, from the nomination of a permanent director for the National Park Service and higher user fees in the parks to wildfires and ongoing crowds in some corners of the park system. National Parks Traveler's Kurt Repanshek, Kim O'Connell, and Lynn Riddick discuss those and other issues from around the park system.
The ongoing drought in the West has underscored how precious water is in that arid landscape. Photographer Colleen Miniuk explores the dilemma along the rivers that feed the Colorado watershed in a new book that is both a celebration and warning about water in the West.
How is the restoration of “the river of grass,” the Everglades, coming along? Eric Eikenberg, president of The Everglades Foundation, discusses that topic on National Parks Traveler’s podcast.
Mammoth Cave National Park is a World Heritage Site and International Biosphere Reserve. It was designated a national park in 1926 and fully established and opened in 1941 -- 80 years ago. At 412 miles, the cave itself is nearly twice as long as any other known cave system. Geologists believe there may even be a couple more hundred miles of undiscovered passageways.
The Traveler's Lynn Riddick takes us to Mammoth Cave and taps into insight and anecdotes from park personnel about the historic and geologic wonders that tell the story of this unique geological and biological landscape.
What has been your experience in the National Park System this year? Have you found lots of crowds, or has your experience been more enjoyable because you haven’t encountered scores of other visitors milling about?
Today we're discussing crowding in the parks with Kristen Brengel of the National Parks Conservation Association and Phil Francis of the Coalition to Protect America’s national Parks. We’ll also discuss why the National Park Service still is without a Senate-confirmed director.
One of the newest additions to the National Park System is the World War I Memorial in the District of Columbia. Traveler's Kurt Repanshek and Contributing Editor Kim O'Connell offer this short audio postcard from the site.
Through the efforts of the #SaveLACougars campaign, tens of millions of dollars have been raised so far to build the world’s largest wildlife corridor over the 101 Freeway in Liberty Canyon, west of Los Angeles. Such a bridge would help protect mountain lions roaming the Santa Monica Mountains.
In this, the first segment of a two-part series, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with Beth Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation to dig deep into the life of a mountain lion and find out why fragmented habitats are so destructive to their survival. They’ll also discuss the immense outpouring of support for urban wildlife conservation efforts in general and this corridor project in particular.
To celebrate Independence Day and our hard-fought freedoms, National Parks Traveler’s Lynn Riddick takes on us a visit to Fort McHenry National Monument and Shrine to learn more about its history and the story behind the poem that was inspired by the Battle of Baltimore.
When traveling to a national park, not everything goes as planned. Maybe you’ve been disappointed about the crowds. Or maybe couldn’t find lodging. Or maybe you weren’t able to squeeze in everything you wanted to do. But have you ever found yourself complaining about scenery that you determined to be substandard…or dismissing the exact feature for which the park is known? Today the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick -- with voice talent courtesy of Susan Emerson and Stuart Eldridge -- talks to a graphic designer and illustrator who mines the one-star internet reviews from disgruntled national park goers and turns them into something we can all laugh at.
How can aspiring scientists and researchers get a hand in conducting research in the National Park System? Ryan and Julie Sharp, who both spent time working for the National Park Service, raise funds to help college students hoping to conduct research in the parks. Ryan, a professor at Kansas State University, also discusses understanding visitor behavior in parks.
Climate change is here and greatly impacting our weather and long-term climatic trends. In the Southwest, it’s having a tremendous impact on water resources across the Colorado River watershed.
Warming temperatures associated with climate change are affecting the Colorado River, and those impacts also are showing up in national parks along the river’s path. In this episode, we look at how the ailing river is impacting Grand Canyon National Park.
Go take a hike. Wouldn’t that be a great escape this weekend? Some of my most enjoyable hikes have been along the Appalachian Trail. That path was easy to reach when I was growing up in New Jersey. Now based in Utah, the A.T. is a distant aspiration. Much closer are both the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail.
This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at National Parks Traveler. All three of those trails – the Appalachian Trail, Continental Divide Trail, and Pacific Crest Trail – are officially recognized as National Scenic Trails. In all, there are 11 trails across the United States that carry that designation. Are they all treated equally when it comes to funding, maintenance, and even completion of an uninterrupted path? Not at all, and we’ll dive into those issues and why they are what they are.
The National Park Service could be seen as one of the country’s most science-focused agencies, as it deals with all sorts of "ologies" – biology, paleontology, archaeology, sociology, ecology, cetology, bioecology, and, in light of the popularity of dark night skies, even planetology. But is science properly guiding its mission? Former Park Service scientists Michael Soukup and Gary Machlis discuss those questions.
Kurt Repanshek and Joe Miczulski, whose friendship dates back more than 50 years, take time from their sea kayaking trip on Lake Powell at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area to discuss the recent rush to public lands by Americans yearning to get outdoors during the coronavirus pandemic.
As glorious as Grand Canyon National Park is, the national park faces a number of significant issues. National Parks Traveler Editor Kurt Repanshek, along with Special Projects Editor Patrick Cone and Jess Repanshek, Traveler’s sound recording engineer, headed to the park in late April to get a better sense of some of the issues that park managers are grappling with and which could alter, possibly significantly, how we experience the canyon. The following podcast previews those issues.
Yosemite National Park is one of the jewels in the crown of the National Park System. It has soaring walls of granite, feathery waterfalls, and high country that takes you into a transformative realm of nature.
This week podcast writer/producer and Yosemite first-timer Lynn Riddick -- along with her traveling companion Michele Hogan -- take us on a trip to this national park, which offers more than 800 miles of hiking trails. They share their light-hearted impressions as they hike along three of the more popular of Yosemite’s trails, and the conversations they strike up with some interesting people along the way.
There’s a lot to see in our national parks and historic sites, including some pretty interesting things underwater. Lynn Riddick takes a look at the Submerged Resources Center, the arm of the National Park Service that locates underwater resources – whether sunken ships or planes, old ranches or train tracks, coral reefs or kelp forests -- then documents and interprets them. Always with an eye toward their preservation. And with 3.5 million acres of Park Service land underwater, it’s an immense yet intriguing responsibility.
Searching for the door that opened Westward Expansion? Find yourself at Fort Laramie National Historic Site in eastern Wyoming.
The history to find across the historic site's grounds, its restored buildings, and in the surrounding countryside, is deeper than first glance might indicate. It's not just a military relic. Fort Laramie truly was an iconic milepost in the nation's history.
Fort Laramie National Historic Site is a rare, overlooked outpost in the National Park System. It's not the only 19th century fort in the system, but it is richly steeped in Western history, from the fur trappers and the cavalry to the Oregon Trail and the Pony Express. During a recent visit, Kurt Repanshek and Fort Laramie Ranger Clayton Hanson walked the grounds. In this week's episode, they started at the approximate site of original Fort William and headed over to the sutler's store.
It’s a sound you instantly recognize, and one you hope isn’t coming to your location. It’s the wailing siren of an ambulance responding to an emergency. In the National Park System during the height of summer, the sound can be very familiar. Kevin Grange, a seasonal paramedic in the parks, discusses his job. It’s a conversation that will leave you with a better understanding and appreciation for the vital role these individuals serve in seeing that national park visitors who are injured or come down with a debilitating illness receive prompt care and are able, if possible, to resume their vacation.
How is life on Cape Hatteras National Seashore these days? We sat down with Superintendent Dave Hallac for a wide-ranging conversation about the national seashore, touching on topics ranging from beach access to wildlife and even pirates.
At Capitol Reef National Park, you’ll find 100 acres of orchards and pastures, most of which were established more than 100 years ago by Mormon settlers and where present-day park visitors are still invited to pick and eat the fruit.
Over the years, about 1,000 trees have been lost to poor soils, disease, and old age. The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick reached out to two park officials to get some historic perspective on the orchards…and the details of the substantial rehabilitation project.
Just off the coast of Maine lies anchored the oldest national park east of the Mississippi, a park with an artistic flair and blue blood in its founding. Though Acadia National Park is small, coming in around 35,000 acres, it plays much bigger, as they might say in golf. You can explore more than 40 miles of bucolic carriage roads, hike to the top of Cadillac Mountain, search tide pools for marine life at low tide, or kayak the waters surrounding Mount Desert Island.
Kurt Repanshek sits down with Acadia Superintendent Kevin Schneider to talk about his park, the challenges it faces, and how they’re preparing for your visit this summer.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an ideal place to see bear, elk and other mammals, large and small. But too often the place these wild animals are seen most is dead along the side of Interstate 40 in the Pigeon River Gorge, victims of a fragmented habitat combined with an increasing number of motor vehicles.
A collaborative effort to study wildlife mortality from motor vehicle collisions and find solutions for wildlife to safely cross this winding highway along the Pigeon River outside the national park is fully underway with nearly 100 stakeholders in North Carolina and Tennessee.
The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick reached out to Jeff Hunter, facilitator of the project, to learn how it will come to fruition and the greater benefits to us all when we create safe places for animals to cross roadways
Contributing editor Kim O’Connell joins me to discuss some of the stories from across the country that we’re working on at the Traveler and will be rolling out on the Traveler in the weeks and months ahead. And Lynn Riddick has a short story about a unique fundraiser that’s giving Wind Cave National Park new tools to manage and learn about the genetically pure bison herd there.
Coral is a foundation species, one that creates the habitats that support biodiversity and provides essential shoreline protection. The waters of Dry Tortugas National Park are home to some 30 species of coral. One type –- Elkhorn Coral -- rises above the rest, literally and figuratively, for its importance in the region. It also happens to be the most threatened.
A team from the U.S. Geological Survey looked into whether Elkhorn Coral grown in nursery conditions could be transplanted in Dry Tortugas National Park and other areas of the Florida Keys.
This week we our conversation with Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly on the state of his park. We discuss efforts to greatly reduce the number of invasive lake trout in Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone’s infrastructure needs, and some of the conservation projects park staff is working on. And we also voice Traveler’s position that the National Park Service needs to conduct an environmental impact statement, not a less rigorous environmental assessment, on plans to drill for oil in Big Cypress National Preserve.
As Covid-19 swept across the country last year, it created challenges for the National Park Service. Once parks opened, people flocked to them. But many parks were short of staff. Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly discusses the challenges his staff faced with Covid. Plus, Alison Kelly from the Natural Resources Defense Council brings us up to speed on a proposal to drill for oil in Big Cypress National Preserve.
What’s the state of national park philanthropy? The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic a year ago impacted nonprofit organizations that work to support national parks. Many organizations that rely on retail sales for revenues had to close their outlets and layoff staff. How are things today?
The country’s largest tribal national park has been authorized and is now in the early stages of development. The Ioway Tribal National park will sit on 564 acres along the Missouri River on the border of Nebraska and Kansas. The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick spoke with a tribe member who is on the front lines in the development of the park. He shared his thoughts about the park, how it will help the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska… and the history it will honor.
What drove the name change for New River Gorge National River and how does the expansion of Saguaro National Park benefit the park? We discuss those issues this week with Joy Oakes and Kevin Dahl from the National Parks Conservation Association.
This week we’re talking search and rescue in the National Park System. Each year, there are thousands of search-and-rescue incidents logged across the park system.
The Intermountain Region of the National Park Service is the largest in the agency, and is home to many of the most beautiful, and dangerous, national parks. Yellowstone has boiling waters and grizzly bears, Grand Canyon has that deep canyon, and Rocky Mountain has alluring, and rugged, backcountry.
We’re joined by search and rescue experts at Rocky Mountain National Park
In this week’s show, our 100th podcast, we take a look at endangered and threatened species that call the National Park System home and the legal battles that swing to and fro over gaining them Endangered Species Act protections. Joining me for this discussion is Noah Greenwald, the endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
2021 marks 100 years since forester and planner Benton MacKaye conceived a trail connecting farmlands, mountain ranges, camps and towns along the Appalachian Mountain range. Sixteen years later, the Appalachian Trail was completed. Each year an estimated 3 million people take to the trail. In honor of this anniversary, Lynn Riddick met up with one A.T. enthusiast who has experienced the colossal physical and mental challenges of tackling the entire trail…and its immense rewards.
In this, our last episode for 2020, we look back on the past 12 months in the parks with Phil Francis of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and Kristen Brengel from the National Parks Conservation Association. And we also take a peek at the task ahead for the Biden administration in the realm of parks and public lands.
Year after year, a little more of the visual history of Cape Lookout National Seashore on the Outer Banks of North Carolina is lost. Hurricanes and nor’easters take their toll on the structures in two small villages there, slowly erasing the reminders of what was once a thriving shipping and fishing hub.
The Traveler’s Lynn Riddick spoke with Cape Lookout National Seashore superintendent Jeff West to learn about the efforts to save whatever historic structures they can.
This week’s show is going to the birds. Counting, birds, that is, what with the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count officially kicking off Monday and running through January 5. We sat down with Geoff LeBaron, who long has overseen the annual count for the National Audubon Society, to discuss the program.
If you’re a truly devoted national parks traveler, you don’t let political boundaries get in your way when you consider which national park to visit. With that in mind, we’re going to look north to Canada and the incredible parks overseen by Parks Canada. There are some great destinations there, whether you’re a young family traveling with kids, wildlife watchers looking for bison or birds, or more experienced travelers looking for a wild backcountry experience.
Frederick Swanson is a Salt Lake City writer who long has studied public lands issues in Utah, and his latest book delves into the history of the state's national parks and monuments. In our show he discusses the motivation that spurred "Wonders of Sand and Stone, A History of Utah’s National Parks and Monuments."
Gulf Islands National Seashore is developing a Commercial Services Strategy for Crab Island due to the raucous partying that goes on there. Lynn Riddick discusses the matter with Gulf Islands Superintendent Dan Brown.
Estee Rivera, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Conservancy, discusses the damage wildfires inflicted on Rocky Mountain National Park and the role the conservancy is taking in helping park staff rehabilitate areas impacted by the fires and interpret the intense fire season. And Kurt Repanshek visits with Kim Heacox, a former park ranger turned writer and photographer at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska.
Dr. Bryan Watts, an authority on bald eagles, discusses his research that indicates that bald eagles that utilize national park lands around the Chesapeake Bay may have a slight advantage over those that use the bay’s other estuarine systems.
How might the 2020 presidential election impact the National Park Service? Former Park Service Director Jon Jarvis, Kristen Brengel from the National Parks Conservation Association, and Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, discuss that question.
National Parks Traveler’s Lynn Riddick connects with Dr. Tracy Romano of Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut to discuss the plight of beluga whales in Cook Inlet in Alaska and the threats they face, including the threats posed by the proposed Pebble Mine project.
This week we look at a nonprofit organization whose sole existence is to acquire, from willing sellers, private lands surrounded by official, or proposed, wilderness in national parks, national forests, and other publicly owned lands. Once those lands are acquired and transferred to federal land managers, The Wilderness Land Trust will put itself out of business. But that’s not going to happen overnight, as the Trust’s executive director, Brad Borst, explains during our conversation.
In this week’s show, we look at one of the hottest places on Earth, Death Valley National Park in southeastern California and western Nevada. And this summer was especially hot. The park broke records in a number of categories as it experienced some of the hottest days ever recorded on Earth.
August was particularly brutal, with record temperatures reached 12 times for both the daily high and the daily low. To take a closer look at these numbers and why they don’t seem to be a deterrent to visitors, Traveler’s Lynn Riddick spoke with Death Valley Superintendent Mike Reynolds.
Life in the National Park System doesn’t pause for presidential elections. Indeed, there have been many issues across the parks to pay attention to and discuss. To help us with that task, we’ve invited Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, and Sheridan Steele, a Park Service veteran who sits on the executive council of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
In this week’s show, we look at a national park site that celebrates distinctly American music -- the Blue Ridge Music Center near Galax, Virginia. Traveler’s Lynn Riddick visits with Richard Emmett, director of the center, to find out what’s happening in the interpretation, presentation, and promotion of traditional American mountain music. We’ll kick it off with a clip from the Chatham Rabbits, who recently performed at the center.
In this week’s show, we welcome you to fall with a conversation with lodging experts David and Kay Scott on where best to relax and enjoy the fall foliage in the National Park System. And Lynn Riddick catches up with Seth Benz, the bird ecology director at the Schoodic Institute, to discuss fall migrations at Acadia National Park.
We’re going to dream a little bit about places in the National Park System we’d like to visit with hopes we can help you discover a new park destination. To launch this audio bucket list, we’re looking towards Arizona and Parashant National Monument, which despite its more than 1 million acres seems to fly below most park visitors’ radar.
Following that, we’re going to continue to ponder the topic of species extinction, and whether national parks can help slow the sixth mass extinction.
This week we take a look at the outdoor recreation industry and how it has been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
We also take a look at the upcoming fundraiser for Outdoor Afro. Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson will host the fundraiser for the organization that inspires and facilitates the connection of Black Americans to natural spaces everywhere.
In this week’s show, we question whether national parks can serve as a barrier to slow the sixth mass extinction.
But first, what can turn a five-day trip to Yosemite National Park into a one-day trip to Assateague Island National Seashore? Covid can. In this lighthearted and informative story of their trip to the beach, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick and her friend Michele Hogan demonstrate that it’s all about flexibility when trying to find some outdoor space in the age of a global pandemic.
In this week’s show, we’re focusing on the current coronavirus pandemic as well as the 1918 flu pandemic and how those diseases impacted national park visitation. After discussing those two pandemics with Professor Terence Young from California Polytechnic State University, we visit with contributing writer Rita Beamish, who tried to escape the current pandemic by taking to the John Muir Trail for nine days. She found that many other hikers were being careful by keeping their distance and wearing face masks when necessary, while others were more cavalier.
National parks offer a variety of treasures: spectacular views, scenic trails and waterways and vast ecosystems of plants and wildlife. And what would these things be without accompanying soundscapes -- wind howling through a canyon on a scorching afternoon… or the “wall-of-sound” created by insects as soon as the sun sets… or birds singing so loudly outside your tent, they wake you up before you really wanted to wake up.
For natural sound, too, is a treasure, and like many other aspects of the national parks affected by too much human activity.
An early detection of a wildland fire in Denali National Park in June brings to light how enhanced satellite technology is catching smaller fires sooner, providing better detail and more accurate fire predictions and assessments. As a result, fire managers are better able to determine needed actions and resources to meet the unique conditions of Alaska’s landscape.
National ParksTraveler’s Lynn Riddick spoke with Alaska fire analyst Robert “Zeke” Ziel about this satellite technology, and Larry Weddle, National Park Service fire management officer for the Alaska Western Area and Denali National Park and Preserve, on how the season peaked without much drama this year.
We look back at the top news stories from the National Park System in July. There was the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act by Congress, the ongoing issue of the coronavirus pandemic and how parks have been dealing with it, and news that the renowned Sea Turtle Science and Recovery Program at Padre Island National Seashore is to be greatly scaled back.
Joining host Kurt Repanshek to discuss some of the news impacting national parks in July is Mike Murray, a member of the executive council of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
Residential environmental learning centers are nonprofit facilities that connect people to nature. But they are tasked with serving a greater good -- to foster the development of better global citizens. Lynn Riddick speaks with Catey McClary of the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont to better understand this organization whose roots in outdoor learning go back some 50 years.
Nature is an incredibly powerful and successful teacher. Of course, students need teachers to deliver the lessons. That’s where Residential Environmental Learning Centers come into play in national parks.
Organizations like NatureBridge, the Cuyahoga Valley Institute, the Yellowstone Institute, The Great Smoky Mountains Institute. And the North Cascades Institute. These nonprofit organizations use national parks as their classrooms.
Lynn Riddick talks with Saul Weisberg to understand how the North Cascades Institute teaches children well.
Have you ever stopped to listen during your national park vacation? What do you hear? We share some of the sounds in this week's episode with hopes they inspire you to let your ears play a greater role in your enjoyment during your national park visit.
The survival of Residential Environmental Learning Centers in national parks is in jeopardy. As the president of one such center says, “the impact of coronavirus is an 'extinction-level event.'” Listen to how they are working to keep their doors open.
June has been an especially newsworthy month across the National Park System. The U.S. Senate passed what has been called the most important public lands bill in decades, and more national parks have reopened areas to the public. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is proposing a large oil and gas lease auction for lands near Arches, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef national parks, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a natural gas pipeline could be tunneled beneath the Appalachian Trail. Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, discusses the news events.
We take a look at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s move to offer more than 110,000 acres in Utah for oil and gas development. How might that proposal impact Arches, Capitol Reef, and Canyonlands national parks?
Erika Pollard from the National Parks Conservation Association joins us to explain some of the issues in play. After listing to our conversation, take a look at this story that looks at the issue in more detail.
Finally, we leave you with a rationale for instituting a reservation system for visiting some units of the National Park System.
There's always a lot of shaking, rattling, and occasional rolling going on in Yellowstone National Park. Keeping track of it is the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, one of five such observatories under the purview of the U.S. Geological Survey. It keeps real-time tabs on volcanic, hydrothermal, and earthquake activity in the Yellowstone Plateau volcanic field.
Lynn Riddick speaks with the scientist-in-charge of the observatory, Michael Poland, Ph.D. From his home in Vancouver, Washington, Poland gives us a glimpse into the latest monitoring systems in Yellowstone National Park and the park’s recent geologic activity.
In this week’s show, we’re going to delve into landscape photography in the National Park System. “Good photography is about creating a feeling of things, rather than a picture of things.” That’s the philosophy of our guest, Clyde Butcher, acclaimed photographer and environmentalist. You might be familiar with his iconic black and white large format landscape photos that often are part of larger efforts to protect fragile ecosystems that he knows so well. And as Lynn Riddick found out in her conversation with Butcher from his home in Venice, Florida, he doesn’t mind wading chest-deep through a cypress swamp or facing off against a hoofed animal to show why a place is worth protecting.
We sit down with Becky Lomax, author of Moon’s USA National Parks, to discuss news stories that arose from the National Park System during May. And we bring you an interesting story about efforts to recover populations of endangered black-footed ferrets in the West. Two places where they’re working on that are Wind Cave and Badlands national parks in South Dakota.
We're joined this week by Costa Dillon, a National Park Service veteran who ended his long career as superintendent of Indiana Dunes National Park, to discuss a novel management decision in Thailand to close that country’s national parks every year for two months to give wildlife a break from humans. Would such a move be good for America’s national parks? Lynn Riddick returns this week with a story about a roughly 1,200-mile extension to the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail that runs from St. Louis to Pittsburgh.
In this week’s program, we talk with Toby O’Rourke, the president and CEO of Kampgrounds of America, about a study KOA commissioned to gauge Americans’ interests in returning to campgrounds on and near public lands as the fight with the coronavirus pandemic continues. The findings are quite interesting and point to renewed interest in camping as a recreational pursuit. After that conversation, we tempt you to explore the dark side of the National Park System. No, not the night skies overhead, but rather the subterranean world of Jewel Cave National Monument and Wind Cave National Park, two parks in South Dakota separated by fewer than 20 miles as the crow flies.
This week we talk with Robert Young, director of Western Carolina University’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines about a project to more accurately determine the cost sea level rise could inflict on coastal units of the National Park System. We also take a look ahead to summer in the National Park System, the watery side of the system specifically, with a look at some of the prime sea kayaking destinations awaiting paddlers in the National Park System.
Who makes those colorful interpretive panels found in the National Park System? One person is Steve Patricia. He’s an independent artist and content specialist who provides illustrations and diagrams for waysides, exhibits, and murals at national parks, monuments, and historic sites all over the country. From his home in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania, he shares some insights with Lynn Riddick.
This week we pick up with the musings of Doug Leen. As a young park ranger in the 1970s, Leen stumbled upon a poster promoting a meet-the-ranger event at the Grand Teton National Park. It turned out to be one of 14 long-forgotten silk-screened posters made under the Works Progress Administration to promote tourism to the national parks.
In the 50 years since that discovery, Leen has been searching high and low for the rest of the missing posters. His efforts have yielded noteworthy success, stirring up widespread interest in the posters and evolving into a thriving printing business of his own.
As Lynn Riddick continues her talk with Doug, he discusses his business, Ranger Doug’s Enterprises, and how the popularity of the posters has generated millions of dollars in revenue for the national parks.
We also check in with Earl Brechlin, the communications director for Friends of Acadia, to get the latest on how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting that friends group and how it is responding.
Lynn Riddick sits down with Doug Leen, the force behind Ranger Doug Enterprises, to discuss his decades long search for original Works Progress Administration posters that depicted national parks across the West. And we leave you with some thoughts on what we all should be thinking about for National Park Week.
What will the 21st century national park campground look like? What amenities are you interested in finding when you pull into a campground? Derrick Crandall, counseler for the National Park Hospitality Association, joins us to discuss two studies that examine the campgrounds, the issues they face, and the demands today’s campers want.
Join us for a trip, at least an audio trip of sorts, to the heart of Yellowstone National Park and its wild kingdom. A place where wolves, grizzlies, and elk roam free and sandhill cranes catch your attention with their curious chortling. And Dan Puskar, the president and CEO of the Public Lands Alliance, discusses how its membership works to provide educational and interpretive materials for the parks, and how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted those groups.
National Parks Conservation Association President and CEO Theresa Pierno discusses the impact coronavirus is having on the National Park System, and we have a conversation with author Richard Louv on his latest book, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Transform our Lives, and Save Theirs. And Lynn Riddick concludes her four-part series on San Antonio Missions National Historical Park with a visit to Mission San Juan.
The impact of coronavirus on the National Park System truly is unprecedented. Unlike the impacts partial or full government shutdowns have on the parks, government funding won’t solve those created by the growing spread of coronavirus overnight. To take a look at how coronavirus is affecting the parks and the National Park Service, for this week’s show we’ve gathered three park experts, including former National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis, who combined have more than a century of experience with the national parks and public lands.
And Lynn Riddick continues her tour of San Antonio Missions National Historical Park with a visit to Mission Espada.
National Parks Traveler continues its tour through San Antonio Missions National Historical Park as Lynn Riddick visits Mission Concepción, and David and Kay Scott discuss the high-end national park lodges you would stay in if money were not an object.
This week we feature Lynn Riddick's segment on Mission San Jose, the first of a four-part series on San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas. We also talk with Mitch Tobin, Director of The Water Desk at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, to understand why his organization is underwriting journalism revolving around the Colorado River.
This week we have a wide-ranging discussion about visiting the parks with Jason Epperson from the America’s National Parks podcast and David and Kay Scott, authors of The Complete Guide To the National Park Lodges. We preview upcoming podcasts on the missions of San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, and recap our series on the Colorado River and its impacts on Canyonlands National Park and Glen National Recreation Area.
In recent years there has been a movement of sorts to rebrand units of the National Park System as “national parks,” a movement motivated in large part by the economic boost such a redesignation is hoped to have. In New Mexico there’s a group that’s opposed to turning Bandelier National Monument into Bandelier National Park. We discuss that issue with Tom Ribe, executive director of Caldera Action, a nonprofit advocacy group in New Mexico.
And we continue our series on how the health of the Colorado River impacts Canyonlands National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah. To get a better understanding of the river economics in play, we talk with Megan Lawson, an economist with Headwaters Economics.
This week’s show kicks off our coverage of the Colorado River and how its health, or lack of health, impacts Canyonlands National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah. We also take a peek at Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota and what awaits intrepid park travelers who put it on their to-do list.
Candy Harrington, a journalist who traveled the National Park System to see how accessible lodges and trails in the parks really are, discusses her new book on accessibility in the parks. And Cory MacNulty and Erika Pollard from the National Parks Conservation Association’s Southwest Regional Office discuss the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s plans for managing the greatly reduced in size Bears Ears and Grand Staircase monuments.
Emily Hoff and Maygen Keller discuss their upcoming book, Scenic Science of the National Parks, an Explorers Guide to Wildlife, Geology, and Botany. The book, scheduled to arrive March 31, is a wonderfully new guidebook to help you get the most out of your national park adventures.
Tanya Shenk, National Park Service scientist, explains a draft framework for bison stewardship in the Midwest Region of the park system. It’s a region where you can find bison at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas, Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.
This week’s show, our 50th, looks at a Jurassic Period carnivore dubbed "AJ," a new species of allosaurus, found in Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, and takes a short Revolutionary War history tour of Saratoga National Historical Park in New York State.
John Freemuth, who holds the Cecil D. Andrus Endowed Chair for Environment and Public Lands at Boise State University, and Nada Culver, the vice president for public lands and senior policy counsel at the National Audubon Society, discuss efforts in Washington to tweak the National Environmental Policy Act as well as the Endangered Species Act.
Former National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis discusses the Institute for People, Parks, and Biodiversity that he launched at the University of California-Berkeley and how it's trying to guide climate change work in the National Park System.
We also visit with Tumacácori National Historical Park Chief of Interpretation Anita Badertscher to learn about her park and what awaits visitors there.
Michael Kellett, the executive director of RESTORE: The North Woods, discusses a campaign to see the size of the National Park System roughly tripled to more than 182 million acres. And Traveler contributing editor Erika Zambello and Becky Lomax, author of Moon’s USA National Parks, the Complete Guide to All 59 Parks, join Kurt Repanshek to discuss their favorite winter national park destinations.
The past year brought many news-making events to the National Park System. It started, of course, with the partial government shutdown that created more than a few problems for the park system, the continued lack of a Senate confirmed director of the National Park Service, hurricanes inflicting damage on coastal parks, and construction of a border wall in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument that possibly destroyed some archaeological sites there. To help us look back on 2019 and the national parks, we’re joined by Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the National Parks Conservation Association.
With many national parks across the country in trouble from such myriad threats as climate change, overcrowding, energy exploration, invasive species, and poor air quality, National Parks Traveler’s new “Threatened and Endangered Parks” lists identify parks that are struggling to retain the very essence that led to their inclusion in the National Park System in the first place. In this week's show, Phil Francis of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks and Mark Wenzler from the National Parks Conservation Association discuss the threats facing the parks.
How big of a problem are invasive animal species in the National Park System? This week we examine the topic of invasive animal species – think Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park, wild hogs in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and even feral cats at Cape Hatteras National Seashore – and how the National Park Service is trying to tackle the problem. Traveler's staff looks at some of the most photogenic destinations in the National Park System. And we include some surprise locations.
Kyle Joly, a National Park Service wildlife biologist who long has studied terrestrial migrations in national park units in Alaska, discusses the world's longest land migrations in this week's show. Caribou and reindeer are at the top of the list of long-distance travelers, but what about wolves? Contributing writer Kim O’Connell, fresh back from a visit to New Orleans, gives us a preview of her time at Jean LaFitte National Historical Park and Preserve. 1
How are Yellowstone National Park's grizzly bears faring? Kerry Gunther, the park's bear expert, joins the Traveler this week to discuss the current state of grizzlies in the park and whether their population is growing or dropping. Erika Zambello takes listeners on a short audio trip to Fort Matanzas National Monument in Florida.
John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association, discusses congressional action on legislation to address the roughly $12 billion in backlogged maintenance needs across the National Park System. Becky Lomax, author of Moon USA National Parks, discusses what she's seeing in the parks in terms of that maintenance backlog, and we share thoughts about efforts to build a commercial spaceport just west of Cumberland Island National Seashore.
While there's concern that one day Joshua trees might no longer grow in Joshua Tree National Park, or that Glacier National Park might lose its rivers of ice, what about Saguaro National Park and its iconic cacti? Kurt Repanshek travels to Saguaro National Park to discuss the decadal survey of saguaros with park biologist Don Swann. Erika Zambello heads to coastal Georgia for an off-season visit to Cumberland Island National Seashore.
This week Doug Smith, who heads Yellowstone National Park’s Wolf Project, discusses how successful the park’s wolf recovery program has been. We also visit with the executive director of the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation to discuss the five national park units the foundation works with, and end with a look at fall and winter migrations across the National Park System.
Erika Zambello and Dr. Alex Deghan, the CEO and co-founder of Conservation X Labs, an organization working to end human-induced extinction, discuss the first national parks in Afghanistan and the challenges to preserve them in a war zone. We also outline a Senate resolution to protect a much larger slice of nature in the United States than is currently being done, and highlight a winter’s visit to Virgin Islands National Park.
Two professors, one from Harvard, the other from Colorado State University, studied the National Park Service's fiscal condition, and came up with some suggestions for improving it. Professor Linda Bilmes discusses those opportunities with Traveler. We also look at possible impacts to Cumberland Island National Seashore from a proposed spaceport, and end this week's podcast with thoughts of visiting Death Valley National Park this winter.
Filmmakers Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone discuss their documentary, The Elephant Queen, which follows the matriarch of an elephant herd as she leads them from the “kingdom,” a lush landscape during the rainy season, to “the refuge,” where a reliable water hole slakes their thirst, came together. National Parks Traveler is honored by the Western National Parks Association, and we close with a look at a winter visit to Bryce Canyon National Park.
How did the infusion of Texas puma genes into the small population of Florida panthers in Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve benefit the panthers? Alexander Ochoa, a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University, explains in this week's show. We also look at Big Bend National Park as a winter destination, and question a proposal to let for-profit businesses take over more national park campgrounds.
Erika Zambello talks with Houston Cypress of the “Love the Everglades Movement” about priorities for the tribes that have connections to the Everglades and using art to connect people to the River of Grass and Big Cypress. Professor John Freemuth, who holds the Cecil D. Andrus Endowed Chair for Environment and Public Lands at Boise State University, discusses some of the seemingly unprecedented actions and decisions being taken by the Interior Department and National Park Service.
Laurie Ward, executive director of Washington’s National Park Fund, discusses how her organization manages to support not just one, but three national parks. Ken Brower, son of the late David Brower, offers his take on whether ranching should be allowed at Point Reyes National Seashore, and we point out where in the National Park System you can find wildlife this fall.
Hurricane Dorian literally sliced up Cape Lookout National Seashore, creating more than 50 breaches in the park's barrier islands. At Western Carolina University, Professor Rob Young says the hurricane's damage was astonishing. How that damage will impact recreation on the seashore remains to be seen. Traveler also discusses this summer's uproar over glacial predictions at Glacier National Park, and invites a winter visit to Voyageurs National Park.
How is climate change affecting fall colors? Stephanie Spera, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Richmond and a 2019 Second Century Stewardship fellow at the Schoodic Institute at Acadia, is using citizen science to help answer that question. Erika Zambello wonders how Hurricane Dorian affected the Abaco parrot (aka the Bahama parrot) and its habitat, and we get a quick update on legislation to cut deeply into the roughly $12 billion maintenance backlog across the National Park System.
"Hiker Trash," a new book that examines hiker life along the Appalachian Trail through the sketches of a graphic artist, is the topic of our interview with author Sarah Kaizar. We also look at the fisheries of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and comment on the long-running vacancy of a permanent director of the National Park Service.
How will climate change impact plants and animals at Acadia National Park? This week we talk with Dr. Jennifer Smetzer, who has been mapping areas of the park that could serve as refugia for many native species. We also take some time to look at some great park destinations for fall.
Lauren and Steven Keys wanted to see national parks, so they took seven months off from the daily routine and headed out on a 34,000-mile journey that took them through the National Park System. We ask them how they did this, what they saw, and how they afforded it. We also take a look at visiting Joshua Tree National Park, and raise a question of why the National Park Service continues to pursue capital projects when it struggles under a roughly $12 billion maintenance backlog.
As with many units of the National Park System, there are many needs along the Blue Ridge Parkway, a 469-mile-long ribbon of bucolic landscape linking Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. And without the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, many of those needs would go wanting and fall into neglect. To understand those needs, we reached out to Carolyn Ward, CEO of the foundation.
Erika Zambello also spends a little time this week discussing Acadia National Park's falcons, and we conclude this episode with a look at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado.
Dr. Erin Devlin, a professor of American history from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, discusses her research into sites in national parks in Virginia that were associated with segregation during the first half of the 20th century. Host Kurt Repanshek takes a look at Everglades National Park and why it's a great park destination during the winter months.
eBikes are among the topics making the rounds in the National Park System, as the debate over where these motorized bikes should be allowed to travel. Those cycles, and topics ranging from the lack of a permanent director of the National Park Service are among the topics Traveler discusses this week with Kristen Brengel, vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, and Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks. We also take a look at mealtime in the parks, with a focus on Dutch oven cooking
How are California condors doing in Zion National Park, and what about snail kites at Everglades National Park? We take a look at those two bird species in this week's show. And we visit the Schoodic Peninsula of Acadia National Park to catch up on some research into rockweed, a type of seaweed that coats the rocky coastline there.
In this week's episode, we talk with Gemina Garland-Lewis, a photographer, EcoHealth researcher, and National Geographic Explorer, about her work in the parks, and how that has changed the way she experiences parks themselves.
Next, we visit Schoodic Peninsula in Acadia National Park, a quieter part of the National Park System. Finally, we end with Walnut Canyon and Montezuma Castle national monuments, which are easy day trips from Flagstaff, Arizona, that open windows into past cultures.
The Capitol Reef Reader is not your typical national park guidebook. No trail, dining, or lodging information. Rather, The Capitol Reef Reader offers an incredible wealth of information in the essays Stephen Trimble has pulled together for this collection. Essays by the likes of Clarence Dutton who traveled the Southwest with Major John Wesley Powell, Ed Abbey, and that literary conservation giant, Wallace Stegner.
We talk with Trimble this week about how he pulled together the wonderful essays in this anthology on Capitol Reef National Park. Erika Zambello makes a short stop at the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D.C., and we end the show with a look at two wonderful monuments in Arizona, Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano.
Tom Smith, a professor of wildlife sciences at Brigham Young University and a member of the National Rifle Association, discusses how effective guns in backcountry locations are in defending against bear attacks. What he says might surprise you. This episode also looks at the Volcanic Legacy Highway that ties Lassen Volcanic National Park and Crater Lake National Park together.
Burmese pythons long have presented a significant problem for native wildlife in Everglades National Park. Erika Zambello talks to a contractor hired to study and remove these invasive snakes. We also take a look at Acadia, Shenandoah, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Blue Ridge Parkway, and review Ramble On: A History of Hiking.
Using national park settings as a backdrop for these programs can serve double duty – the resources are the perfect educational tool, and the settings can really connect youth to nature.
These settings seem to resonate with students', teachers', and adults' innate thirst for nature. Saul Weisberg, who helped found the North Cascades Institute in 1986, has seen students from every walk of life positively affected by their experiences in North Cascades National Park and other public lands that the Institute uses as outdoor classrooms. Saul joins us today to talk about the benefits of these outdoor programs.
Erika Zambello also checks in with Friends of Katahdin Woods and Waters and their work in the national monument.
Kim Titchener, the founder of bearsafety.com, discusses how humans can stay safe in bear habitat, while Erika Zambello visits Washington, D.C., and tracks down some of Thomas Moran's famed paintings of national parks. Host Kurt Repanshek suggests that the National Park Service be pulled out of the Interior Department and set up as a freestanding agency.
Independent filmmaker Tom Huang discusses his new project, Find Me, a movie that uses national parks as a backdrop for a story about personal reflection and rejuvenation in nature. It also touches on the issue of cultural diversity in park visitors. With the official start to summer on June 21, we also offer some tips for staying safe in parks, and look at the gateway town of Estes Park, Colorado.
Are you familiar with Sooty terns? It’s an interesting seabird species with mysterious travels. In this week's National Parks Traveler podcast episode, Erika Zambello speaks with Dr. Ryan Huang about a decades-long research study on Sooty Terns in the Dry Tortugas. After they nest in the spring, where do they go? What do they eat? What will they face in the future?
We also spend a little time with Becky Lomax, author of Moon USA National Parks, The Complete Guide to All 59 Parks, and take a look at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park in Alabama.
Jacob W. Frank is one of the photographers who frames Yellowstone National Park's wildlife, geysers, lakes and forests for you to enjoy. How did he get his job with the National Park Service, and how many parks has he captured with his cameras? He discusses his job with host Kurt Repanshek. You'll also find an overview of visiting South Dakota's national parks, monuments, and memorials in this episode.
Phil Francis, chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, and Kristen Brengel, vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, join host Kurt Repanshek for this special roundtable discussion about current events in the National Park System.
What is the state of wildlife in the National Park System? Defenders of Wildlife President Jamie Rappaport Clark discusses the health of wildlife in the national parks. Steve Markle of O.A.R.S. provides a forecast for the upcoming white-water season in Utah and California on the Green, Colorado, Merced, and Tuolumne rivers, and Erika Zambello tours Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site and Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site.
Who is "thenationalparksgirl.com"? In this week's Traveler podcast, Erika Zambello tracks down Sonja Saxe to discuss her national park explorations. Erika and her husband visit Gulf Islands National Seashore to catch dinner. We conclude with a question of whether Dinosaur National Monument should be renamed "Dinosaur National Park"?
Grand Teton National Park Foundation CEO Leslie Mattson discusses how her organization is able to help raise the visitor experience at Grand Teton National Park. Kurt Repanshek reviews two books focused on the Civil War, and Erika Zambello explores Russell Cave National Monument in Alabama.
Andrew Herrington, a search-and-rescue expert at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, outlines how to stay safe on your hikes into the backcountry, while artist Molly Hashimoto explains how she comes away from her park visits with beautiful bird sketches, drawings, and paintings. Finally, we take a short hike into the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District at Cape Cod National Seashore.
Dr. Rolf Peterson, a long-time wolf biologist at Michigan Tech University, discusses Isle Royale National Park's wolf recovery program in this week's episode, while host Kurt Repanshek reviews a book on butterflies you might encounter in national parks and another on marine life photography, and ends the program with a look at the many national parks with caves you can explore.
Dan Wenk, who spent four decades working for the National Park Service, shares his views on the current state of the agency and the National Park System. Host Kurt Repanshek discusses efforts to plan a restoration of the Tidal Basin at the National Mall and Memorial Parks with Katherine Malone-France of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Erika Zambello wraps up the show with a visit to Little River Canyon National Preserve in Alabama.
Utah State University wildlife researcher Dr. Dan MacNulty discusses wolves, bears, elk and other prey and predators in Yellowstone National Park in this week's episode, while Erika Zambello talks birding in Katadhin Woods and Waters National Monument with Doug Hitchcox of Maine Audubon. Host Kurt Repanshek wraps up the episode with a look at where you can find some incredible spring and summer wildflower blooms in the National Park System.
Kevin Poe, the original "Dark Ranger" of the National Park Service, talks dark night skies in the National Park System in this week's episode. Traveler contributing writer Kim O'Connell discusses what she's learned while researching a story on the state of Venezuela's national parks during the current social and political turmoil in that country, and host Kurt Repanshek concludes with a look at some of the "devilish" places in the park system.
John Freemuth, the executive director of the Cecil D. Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University discusses the current political landscape and how it's impacting national parks and public lands.
This week, Traveler Contributing Editor Erika Zambello discusses the lionfish invasion in national park marine waters, while Contributing Photographer Rebecca Latson talks about a winter visit to Olympic National Park. Host Kurt Repanshek wraps up the show with a look ahead at harvesttime in the National Park System and where you can find tasty apples and juicy peaches.
There are thousands of miles of hiking trails in the National Park System. Traveler host Kurt Repanshek discusses some of the best with Michael Lanza, who keeps track of his adventures via his blog, The Big Outside. He’s also the author of Before They’re Gone, a Family’s Year-long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks.
Also in this week's show, Kurt discusses the status of endangered Florida panthers with Elizabeth Fleming from Defenders of Wildlife.
The show concludes with an interesting segment from the backcountry of Shenandoah National Park.
In this week's edition of National Parks Traveler, host Kurt Repanshek discusses lodging in the National Park System with David and Kay Scott, authors of The Complete Guide to the National Park Lodges, updates congressional efforts to whittle away the park system's nearly $12 billion maintenance backlog, and reviews a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.
In this inaugural National Parks Traveler podcast, host Kurt Repanshek talks with Friends of Acadia Communications Director Earl Brechlin about when best to visit the park, where to go, and what issues the park staff is facing.
Traveler contributor Rita Beamish provides a preview of her story on the recovery Santa Monica Mountains NRA is going through following last fall's Woolsey fire.