Climate Change and Parks
National Park Travel
Help power the National Parks Traveler’s coverage of national parks and protected areas.
Some stories simply deserve to be read. Here are, in no particular order, a few who we think deserve this.
Wolf control in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve is a confusing business/Barbara “Bo” Jensen
YUKON-CHARLEY RIVERS NATIONAL PRESERVE — I turn the Jeep north at Tetlin Junction onto Alaska’s Taylor Highway. I’ve been told this area from Tok to Eagle is wolf country. “But you probably won’t see any wolves,” people cautioned. “They’ll be deeper into the preserve.” I’m trying to remain realistic, pragmatic. Even so, I’ve crossed the Tanana River, hoping to find them anyway. I’m heading to Eagle. I want to know what’s happening with the wolves of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.
Read the story.
Flooding and rockslides devastated Yellowstone’s North Gateway in June 2022/NPS, Jacob W. Frank
Water, the universal solvent, is eroding parts of the national park system. It is slowly encroaching on Cape Hatteras National Seashore and has caused significant damage to Yellowstone and Death Valley National Parks, as well as Mojave National Preserve and Vicksburg National Military Park. With climate change, this trend is strengthening.
Read the story.
Tumacácori National Historical Park comprises remarkable examples of adobe architecture that are now threatened by heavy rains/Michael Newberry
In the American Southwest, water is essential but often scarce. Ancient and Indigenous people learned to work with the water that was available, to follow the natural courses and cycles of water as it moved across the landscape. Today, climate change has disrupted those natural patterns, creating drought conditions that have brought the Colorado River and other Western waterways to historically low levels.
Read the story.
Across the national park system, millions of dollars raised through the Great American Outdoors Act were used in parks last year.
Read the story.
Bald eagles in a nest in Channel Islands National Park/NPS file
Annie Little remembers the moment in 2006 when she and her colleagues learned they had effectively recovered the endangered bald eagle in Channel Islands National Park, about 25 miles off the coast of Southern California. They observed the birth of a chick filmed live in its nest — the first time in more than 50 years that a bald eagle naturally hatched in the park — and an explanation for why to celebrate.
Read the story.
Adult Chinook salmon at Redwood Creek, Muir Woods/NPS National Monument, Natale Urquhart
MUIR WOODS NATIONAL MONUMENT – Michael Reichmuth, a fisheries biologist with the National Park Service, was surprised a little over a year ago to see chinook salmon appear in Redwood Creek, a small creek that meanders between towering coastal redwoods, some of the nearly 1,000-year-old Giants at Muir Woods National Monument.
Read the story.
POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE — Winter here was long, soggy and colder than usual as a stormy California freed itself from a brutal, multiyear drought. But springtime at long last emerged, and the king and queen again are sitting on their throne — or, specifically, their nest.
Read the story.
Beechey Island, Nunavut, is home to the graves of Sir John Franklin/Jennifer Bain’s failed Northwest Passage Expedition
BEECHEY ISLAND – It was foggy with a high chance of polar bears the morning we anchored off desolate Beechey Island and held our breath waiting to see if it would make it to shore. Tensions rose over breakfast for those who had sailed from Greenland to Nunavut dreaming of seeing the spot where Sir John Franklin’s failed Northwest Passage expedition spent the winter of 1845-1846, and where 3 of his men are buried.
Read the story.
Hopewell National Cultural Historical Park is slowly hinting at its significance/NPS, Tom Engberg
HOPEWELL NATIONAL CULTURAL HISTORICAL PARK: The first mound I see at Hopewell National Cultural Historical Park is in a small green area next to the parking lot. It’s not tall, it’s about 6 feet tall, and its best shape indicates that it sculpted through humans. hands. It’s maintained, trimmed, and cleared of trees, but what makes me curious is that it’s on the other side of the parking lot from Mound City’s main precinct.
Read the story.
Inside the mythical cave with herbal hot springs at the Cave and Basin National Historic Site in Banff/Jennifer Bain National Park
BANFF NATIONAL PARK — For 10,000 years, people from the Stoney Nakoda and other Indigenous nations climbed down rawhide ladders into a small mountain cave to trade, drum, sing, pray and bathe. They believed the natural hot springs water was a gift from the Creator and Mother Earth and used it for blessings and healing.
Read the story.
Growing pains have slowed down the evolution of the Valles Caldera National Reserve as a National Park/NPS
VALLES CALDERA NATIONAL PRESERVE — Valles Caldera is a mountainous, forested landscape interrupted by expanses of grassland rising to more than 11,000 feet in northern New Mexico. It is also, figuratively speaking, a roughly 90,000-acre blank canvas on which the National Park Service is running to create what it considers a masterpiece.
Read the story.
VALLES CALDERA NATIONAL PRESERVE — It’s not exactly the place where Hell bubbled up, but the vapor wafting from the crusty white soil and the heavy sulphuric odor are reminders that the volcano that created Valles Caldera 1.25 million years ago is not extinct, but rather in a deep, deep sleep.
Read the story.
For years, the Quitobaquito Springs have quenched the thirst of travelers/Eric Jay Toll
ORGAN PIPE CACTUS NATIONAL MONUMENT — It was a well-traveled sandy trail that took us through thick brush. A gentle breeze whispered through the shrubs and trees dotted with mesquite and ironwood. In an instant on the short trail, we seemed to be leaving the Sonora. Desert and settle into a stunted but lush reserve.
Read the story.
GREAT HUMOUS MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK: To succeed at the Walker sisters’ cabin, built around 1855, my partner and I took a short gravel driveway to a small parking lot. We walked the last kilometre, taking the old valley road. The trail followed a song-making stream and climbed silently through a lush forest adorned with wildflowers. The final bend went through an opening in the canopy and reached the center of the former 122-acre farmhouse.
Read the story.
The discovery of an old sign in Grand Teton National Park led Doug Leen to keep the history of park signs from the Works Progress Administration/Rebecca Latson archive.
Doug Leen is persistent.
In the more than 150-year history of America’s national parks, a brief four-year bankruptcy is hardly significant and would have faded into obscurity were it not for Leen’s determination not to let it go away.
Read the story.
Long Lake, in the pristine segment of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, where George Flowers made his life/Ethel LeCount Collection/Courtesy of Jean Replinger, Rusk County Historical Society, Wisconsin
WRANGELL-ST. ELIAS NATIONAL PARK & PRESERVE — Driving down McCarthy Highway into Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, I slow down to see Long Lake. At three miles long, the preserve’s personal lake resembles a tranquil summer camp pond, surrounded by cozy cabins, lush trees, and sun-drenched wildflowers. Nothing in this idyllic scene shows the perilous trials of one man’s odyssey to triumph in the Alaskan Gold Rush.
Read the story.
This memorial obelisk marks Camp Nelson’s Graveyard 1, which is believed to hold hundreds of civilian graves from the Civil War era/NPS
CAMP NELSON NATIONAL MONUMENT — As the Civil War raged in the mid-1860s, a bucolic area of Kentucky stood out as a beacon of freedom for enslaved men and women, even if it proved elusive as the country fought for what was morally right.
“It used to take five hundred miles to get to Canada from Lexington, but now it’s only 18 miles!Camp Nelson is now our Canada,” wrote a black man who escaped slavery and enlisted in the U. S. colored troops at Camp Nelson. , earning the rank of sergeant.
Read the story.
Lodging rates at the Old Faithful Inn were uncapped by the National Park Service/Patrick Cone fil
There are, in the national park system, pop-up lodging rates that are likely to save a large segment of Americans from spending a night or two in some of the system’s most iconic lodges and cabins. Places like the Lake Hotel and the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone, El Tovar in the Grand Canyon, Ahwahnee in Yosemite, Cavallo Point in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Jenny Lake Lodge in Grand Teton, Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier.
Read the story.
Walden Pond/By ptwo from Allahabad, India – 985Uploaded via Ekabhishek, CC BY 2. 0, https://commons. wikimedia. org/w/index. php?curid=16428533
Henry David Thoreau retired at the end of the day to a small hand-built cabin by the lake and spent two years searching nature for lessons it could teach him.
“I wanted to live deliberately, to face only the facts of life, and see if I couldn’t be informed of what she had to teach me, and not, when I died, realize that I hadn’t lived,” he explained in Walden. ; Or life in the woods.
Read the story.
The swift fox has avoided extinction thanks to collaborative efforts and habitat/(c) Greg Lasley, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)
Weighing only 7 pounds and perhaps a foot tall, the swift fox is traditionally synonymous with the shortgrass prairies and prairies of North America that once covered the center of the continent. Spending most of its days in a burrow, the fox would come out in the evening to hunt small prey in the mountainous landscape of buffalo grass, bluegrass, and wheatgrass.
But the species, the smallest of foxes, has all but disappeared from history due to early 20th-century predator eradication systems and habitat loss.
Read the story.
It’s the reptilian equivalent of a war tank. Weighing more than 250 pounds for mature males, alligator turtles have a hard beak that can eliminate unwary hands and a shell with 3 rows of spines reminiscent of the ridge plate line at the most sensitive part of a stegosaurus. These reptiles, the largest freshwater turtles in North America, are reminiscent of the time of the dinosaurs, when they not only needed body protection, but also to be a kind of apex predator.
Read the story.
Boaters will be required to stay at least 400 meters (1312 feet) away from belugas in Saguenay-St. Lawrence. St. Lawrence Marine Park in Quebec/Parks Canada
Saguenay-St. St. Lawrence Marine Park: Dressed head-to-toe in bright weatherproof red clothing, members of our whale watching organization laughed and barked as we hit a wave and salt spray fell on the side of the Zodiac. Then, temporarily, we were put back to work. We were scanning the horizon in Saguenay-St. John’s. St. Lawrence Marine Park, in search of whales.
Located in Quebec, where the Saguenay River meets the St. Lawrence River, the park is one of the places in the world to practice the lords of the sea.
Read the story.
A Piping Plover watches over two chicks exploring the sand in Prince Edward Island National Park/Lily McLaine, Parks Canada
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND NATIONAL PARK — Just a few days old, plover plovers looked like cotton balls on toothpicks as they luckily darted around the previous dune to explore the marram grass in the June sun. However, they were trying their best, so it was hard to get a good look. with binoculars and even harder to take a decent picture.
Read the story.
Twenty-three years ago, in the midst of what at the time would be the biggest electoral clash ever seen, President Bill Clinton and then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush met at the White House to point to a primary environmental measure.
Read the story.
At Mission San Juan, Superintendent Christine Jacobs and Ranger Destiny Gardea stand in front of the locks of an old irrigation ditch used to irrigate fields cultivated through the San Antonio/Jennifer Bain Food Bank.
SAN ANTONIO MISSIONS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK — With a pleasing whoosh, the water from the acequia was released through a sluice gate at Mission San Juan in San Antonio and trickled through a hand-dug irrigation ditch towards a demonstration field teeming with corn, peppers and squash.
Read the story.
Enter a small cave with an icy ledge on the Maligne Canyon Ice Boardwalk in Jasper National Park/Jennifer Bain
JASPER NATIONAL PARK – As promised, Maligne Canyon wraps its icy finger around us with its mesmerizing frozen waterfalls, icicles, and frosty limestone walls.
Darting into an ice cave through an opening in the icicles is a quick and carefully controlled thrill. I chicken out in the face of an optional natural ice slide, but there’s only one way through a narrow gap between rocks and that’s straight down on a “bum slide.”
Read the story.
Somewhere among the many names on the roof of Gothic Avenue is “Mat 1863″/NPS
Mammoth Cave consultant Jerry Bransford has a favorite moment from his cave visits. That’s when the organization walks down Gothic Avenue, a room of historical graffiti written by consultants and tourists on the walls of the cave with smoke or soot. inscription that simply reads “Mat 1863”. He then begins to tell the story of Mateson Bransford, one of the cave’s first consultants and his great-great-grandfather.
Read the story.
Pu’ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site protects this Pu’ukoholā Heiau (Temple on the Hill of the Whale)/Jennifer Bain
Pu’ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site: A lot is left to mind when you practice koholā (humpback whales) from the coast of the island of Hawaii. You’ll see masses of punches in the distance, as well as tail swings and pectoral fins. You might get lucky in an espionage or a dramatic breach, but you’ll need binoculars or a telescope to see what’s going on. Above all, you have to be patient and fill in the visual gaps.
Read the story.
Thanks for posting. Good articles.
The Great American Outdoors Act has been a great asset to the NP system. Bipartisan law is anything we can all adopt.
I understand why the Home Office does more to boast about its success. He looks like a winner.
National Parks Traveler is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization.
National Parks Traveler 2005-2022