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?
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.”
News & More
Every year from April 18–26, the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation join together to celebrate National Park Week. It’s a way to invite people to engage with the national parks, but also an opportunity to commemorate the rich history of the National Park Service.
News & More
Let’s step into the Wayback Machine and go to 2015, just six years after producer Ken Burns’ documentary miniseries The National Parks: America’s Best Idea had aired on PBS in 2009. At that time, I wrote to you about the overcrowding in our national parks—in part due to that widely popular TV program.
Travel Tales
A strange, three-sided, metallic monolith was discovered in an undisclosed spot somewhere in Utah’s canyons during a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep on November 18, 2020. The Utah Department of Public Safety workers who found the object determined that the structure was 10 to 12 feet tall and planted firmly in the ground.
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.
Travel Tales
If I asked you to name your favorite National Park Service (NPS) places, you’d probably immediately mention parks such as Grand Canyon National Park, Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Zion National Park and Glacier National Park.
Videos
It was love at first sight when I met Utah’s Zion National Park. With its massive, rock behemoths and soothing-sounding, dripping-water canyons that sprout green ferns seemingly out of solid stone, it is one of the most exquisite and soul-stirring spots in the world.
Nature & Wildlife
The largest wild cat in North America, the mountain lion—also known as a catamount, cougar, panther and puma—has powerful limbs and can leap as high as 15 feet and as far as 40 feet. That makes it an expert at attacking prey from behind. It also tends to make hikers in mountain lion territory wary.
Nature & Wildlife
Once a national monument is designated to conserve a landscape and its cultural history, once a natural habitat is legally protected to save wildlife, or once an oil pipeline is stayed to safeguard a community’s clean water, you can breathe a sigh of relief, right? The battle is won; end of story.
