Conservation
Smokey Bear: Overachiever or Climate Change Clairvoyant?
Smokey Bear turned 70 years old this past Saturday, August 9, 2014.
Good Nature Travel Blog
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Videos
Video: Yosemite National Park in Print
Remember printed newsletters—those antiquated publications that used to inform you about all the current happenings and long-ago history from a place or an organization? In the past, many of our national parks had weekly or monthly newsletters. In the case of Yosemite, the publication was titled Nature Notes, and it ran from 1922 to 1961.
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News & More
Are We Now Losing Our Most Iconic Buildings Due to Climate Change?
“Extinction tourism” is a familiar term when it comes to wildlife and natural habitats: it’s described as a desire to see the animals and landscapes that are just managing to hang on before they’re gone.
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Conservation
Climate Change and Wildfire Risk: Will Future Forests Be Treeless?
Last fall, in the midst of burned and charred trees left in the wake of Yosemite National Park’s Rim Fire, I participated in, of all things, a wedding. It was the most beautiful wedding I have ever attended.
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News & More
National Park Shutdown: Move the Barricades or Write to Congress?
It was supposed to be a fall wedding in the heart of Yosemite National Park’s beautiful, famed valley.
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News & More
Yosemite to Cut Trees for Better Views
“These darn trees are getting in the way of my view of nature,” joked one of my guides on a trip to British Columbia a few years back. We had stopped during a hike on a forested esker and were trying to look through the woods to a lake far below.
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Travel Tales
Travel Traditions
Some travel traditions wind up being big and grand, such as when a couple goes on an African safari for a honeymoon and then decides to celebrate each wedding anniversary with the same kind of expedition.
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Conservation
Happy Birthday, Yellowstone National Park!
America’s first national park is 139 years old today! Yellowstone became the first federally protected national park by an Act of Congress signed into law on March 1, 1872.
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News & More
Wanderlust: Where Does It Come From?
At three years old, my son left home. He didn’t leave for good, of course; but from the time he could get around our neighborhood under his own steam, Travis was traveling.
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Travel Tales
Traveling with an Adult Child: Yosemite
A former student who attended the same college I did first got me interested in seeing Yosemite National Park. Naturalist John Muir took his first botany lesson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under a black locust tree on Bascom Hill, although we were enrolled about a 110 years apart.
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News & More
Put a National Park Atop Your Travel List
Filmmaker Ken Burns calls our national parks “America’s Best Idea.” I enthusiastically agree. To preserve our country’s most spectacular landscapes for all Americans, to protect distinctive places to enjoy and treasure for generations to come – that’s a vision that embodies the best of our democratic ideals.