News & More
March 20th is International Day of Happiness, a special day created by the UN General Assembly to officially recognize the importance of happiness as a fundamental human goal and aspiration in everyone’s lives around the world.
Travel Tales
Before I took my first trip to Glacier National Park, I had pretty high expectations for one of its most famous features, Going-to-the-Sun Road. I would think that a highway with a name like that would carry me from the Earth into the sky—or at the very least, make me feel that way.
News & More
A new study finds that introverts tend to live in mountainous areas and extroverts gravitate to flat regions. Are we genetically predisposed to landscape types?
Conservation
The world’s tigers face considerable threats today: poaching, habitat loss, depletion of their prey and retaliatory kills by humans when the big cats take livestock. But now, a new threat has surfaced: the canine distemper virus (CDV).
Travel Tales
Say the words “American West” and right away you imagine vast, open plains, deep canyons and starting over. What is it about going West that has always meant hope in the American psyche, as if a new beginning could be had just by heading in a certain compass direction?
News & More
A trip to Denali National Park is a journey into wild America at its best. This six-million-acre landscape is bisected by only one, 92-mile ribbon of road. Travel along it, and you’ll see low-elevation, taiga forest morph into high, alpine tundra. It all culminates in North America’s tallest peak: the 20,310-foot Denali.
Videos
Norwegian-born Erik the Red was either a great marketer or just a truthful traveler, depending on which stories you choose to believe. Growing up, you probably learned in school that Erik the Red named the world’s largest noncontinental island “Greenland” (Grunland) to entice his neighbors and friends to settle the new country with him.
Nature Photography
Of all the places I’ve traveled to, Greenland is the most complicated, I think. While there are commonalities with other spots in the world, Greenland always seems to put its own, special twist on things. For example, much like what I found in Yellowstone National Park, Greenland plays with your linear sense of time.
News & More
Americans may finally be getting more concerned about climate change, according to the Pew Research Center. In a brand-new survey about policy priorities that was conducted January 7–11, 2015, the organization found that more of us now view “global warming” as an important consideration for the president and Congress.
Travel Tales
When you first start exploring beyond your home ground, you tend to see everything in relation to where you live: what’s different, what’s similar, what’s unheard of and what’s exactly the same. I suppose it’s our way of getting a grip on new surroundings and beginning to have them make sense.
News & More
From taking a virtual tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to downloading high-definition maps of national parks to checking out our own houses on Google Street View, almost all of us have been a digital navigator or engaged in simulated travel at some point in our lives.
Videos
My dog can count. I’m sure of this fact. After her daily walk, if she doesn’t receive precisely two treats, I will hear about it. If I try to shortchange her by offering only one, she will hound me until the second one is produced.
