Nature & Wildlife
Have you ever seen a greater short-horned lizard scrape its crown of spines along a canyon rim? Smelled the fresh spray of a cascading spring? Heard the love songs of a northern pygmy-owl duet? Or, perhaps, whispers through the breeze—from the Navajo sedge plants growing in seeps and hanging gardens?
Nature & Wildlife
What, you may be asking, is an ungulate? You’ve actually known them all along, but perhaps just didn’t know them by their official moniker. Among the ungulates that are native to North America are bighorn sheep, bison, caribou, Dall sheep, mountain goats, moose and white-tailed deer. What do they all have in common?
Travel Tips
We agree with Wallace Stegner: Our national parks are “America’s Best Idea.” These natural sanctuaries call our name when the concrete jungle becomes too oppressive, when we long to take deep, cleansing breaths in fresh air while marveling at the quiet, unassuming wildlife that was here long before we were.
Conservation
The Colorado River carves its way through a mile-deep chasm in northwestern Arizona. Its erosive action has exposed 40 different sedimentary layers, including rocks that are a mind-bending 1.8 billion years old. This is the Grand Canyon.
Travel Tips
Mountains, seashores, grasslands, wetlands, coral reefs and glaciers. Our national parks protect a multitude of terrains for every taste. And with more than 400 national park units across the country to explore, it can be daunting to choose which one you want to visit the soonest. Luckily, you have help.
Travel Tips
On its finest days, summer feels like it could last forever. But, alas, all good things must come to an end. Or, when it comes to the seasons, sublimely shift into something new. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
Travel Tips
When was the last time you truly saw the stars? Looked for shooting stars and named the constellations? Woke up early enough to see a spectacular sunrise? Depending on where you live, you may have ample opportunity for stargazing, as well as great sunset and sunrise viewing year-round.
U.S. National Parks
Waves that thunder against granite cliffs and break apart on kelp-slick rocks. Bullfrogs that croak among the grasslike rushes that rim ponds and line lakeshores. Woodpeckers that rat-a-tat-tat on tree bark. Great black-backed gulls filling the breeze-clearing air with their deep, hoarse calls. These are the sounds of Maine’s Acadia National Park.
Travel Tips
It’s time to say farewell to 2020; and for many of us, we’re happy to do it—perhaps more so than for any other year we’ve ever experienced. For those smitten with wanderlust, 2020 was definitely the “year of lost travels” and missed opportunities for connecting with other people and cultures around the globe.
U.S. National Parks
For me, Zion National Park is the place where color lives. That’s how I connect to it.
Travel Tales
The world that I look out upon from the window in my home office, here in Wisconsin, is pretty quiet right now. In other times, the interstate just beyond the woods that surrounds my house would be busy with fast-moving cars and semitrucks. But presently, only occasionally does the sound of any traffic reach me.
Conservation
In the environmental world, it’s sometimes characterized as the classic debate: should wild areas be preserved for their intrinsic qualities, or should they be conserved for their resources?
