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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.
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