The Parks Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Stand in the middle of Bears Ears at night and you can see a single streetlight 20 miles away. That’s how dark Southern Utah is: so dark that the Milky Way looks like a strange streak of cloud, and there are so many stars you can’t pick out the Big Dipper. In this Our Story episode, host Missy Rentz sits down with Michael Rymer, Communities Program Manager at DarkSky International...

Send us Fan Mail On Memorial Day weekend, two wild mares gave birth right behind the campsites at Assateague State Park. Word spread through the campground, hundreds of people gathered, and a crowd that had been loud all day went completely quiet. That’s Assateague: a barrier island where the horses go wherever they please, including your campsite and the middle of the road. Host Missy Rentz sits...

Send us Fan Mail In 1900, birds were something you shot and pinned to a hat. Then an ornithologist named Frank Chapman suggested people go out on Christmas and count them instead. Today, a family will drive four and a half hours across the desert, three kids in the back seat and every one of them holding binoculars, just to spend a weekend looking up. Recorded live at the Maryland Outdoor Recreati...

Send us Fan Mail Water is the most boring thing in your pack — right up until it's the biggest problem of your day. Alison Hill runs LifeStraw, but her background isn't gear. It's infectious disease. She came to the company to tackle waterborne illness, not to start a retail brand. In this episode: — Why most Americans assume they have safe water, and why that's a misconception...

Send us Fan Mail This is the last episode of the Save Public Lands series — and we are four days from National Public Lands Day. Tania Lown Hecht — VP of Communications and Strategy for Outdoor Alliance — joins me to close out the campaign. As we recorded this, 60 people from the Outdoor Alliance coalition were on Capitol Hill meeting with lawmakers on behalf of the outdoor community. In this epis...

Send us Fan Mail You don't have to be a big company to show up for public lands. Joy Seward — co-founder of RecPak and NOLS expedition guide — joins me for episode four of the Save Public Lands series to talk about how small businesses can get involved in advocacy, why The Conservation Alliance makes it easy, and what it looks like when a brand builds its mission into the business from day on...

Send us Fan Mail It can feel like every week there's a new emergency, a new deadline, a new thing to fight. That's not an accident. Rebecca Gillis — VP of Government Affairs and Advocacy at The Conservation Alliance — joins me to decode what's actually happening to our public lands and why it feels so chaotic. In this episode: — Executive orders: how they drive everything that happe...

Send us Fan Mail Public lands don't belong to one party. They belong to all of us. Cal Callaghan — President and CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers — joins me for episode three of our Save Public Lands series to talk about why this campaign matters, why a million signatures is a low bar, and what it means when people who don't look the same, act the same, or vote the same all show up...

Send us Fan Mail We launched Save Public Lands last week. Now it's time to talk about why this campaign is different. Paul Hendricks — Executive Director of The Conservation Alliance — joins me to make the case for going on offense. After a year and a half of playing defense on public lands, the outdoor community is shifting its posture. One unified message. One million signatures. National P...

Send us Fan Mail The Roadless Rule is back — and we are in the middle of a 30-day public comment period that closes September 21st. Katie Johnson — Campaigns and Engagement Manager for The Conservation Alliance — returns to the podcast to break down what's happening and exactly what you can do about it. This is not a West Coast issue. The Roadless Rule protects 60 million acres of national fo...

Send us Fan Mail It's time to go on offense. Today I'm joined by Fitz Cahall — host of the Dirtbag Diaries podcast — to launch Save Public Lands, a coalition-backed initiative to gather one million signatures and deliver them to Congress and state houses on National Public Lands Day, September 26th, 2026. Three demands: No sell-offs. No backroom deals. No giveaways to foreign mining comp...

Send us Fan Mail Bulldozers just showed up inside Big Bend National Park. 28 environmental regulations waived. A $1.7 billion contract awarded to a subsidiary created specifically to protect its parent company's brand. Bipartisan local opposition from Republican sheriffs, judges, and the Republican congressional nominee for the district. And 1.3% — that's the share of overall US border c...

Send us Fan Mail He grew up in a house with no bathroom in the middle of nowhere, Georgia. His closest caretakers were Black neighbors in a community the segregated South shut out. After being President of the United States, he came back and lived in the same small ranch house he and Rosalynn built in 1961. When he died, he was buried in his front yard. Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Pla...

Send us Fan Mail A bridge was six inches too narrow. Not because it was hard to fix — because no one had thought about it. Greg Durso has been paralyzed from the chest down since a sledding accident in 2009. He's an athlete, an adventurer, and the Senior Program Ambassador of the Kelly Brush Foundation. Berne Broudy is a journalist and the co-director and producer of Best Day Ever — a new doc...

Send us Fan Mail A UNESCO World Heritage Site. Over a thousand years of ancestral Pueblo history. Sacred tribal land protected through years of advocacy and 150 days of public comment. And the Department of Interior wants to revoke its last line of protection in 14 days. Maude Dinan, New Mexico Program Manager with the National Parks Conservation Association, joins The Parks Podcast for an urgent...

Send us Fan Mail July 22nd is National Hammock Day — and if you've been following My Hammock Summer, you already know exactly how to celebrate. This episode was originally released as Episode 33. I'm bringing it back because it's better now than it was then — not because anything changed about the conversation, but because everything changed about how I understand it. Anna Rawlins,...

Send us Fan Mail On July 13th, President Trump signed two proclamations rolling back nearly 90% of the protected boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments — three million acres of public land opened to potential drilling, mining, and extraction. The Bears Ears Commission, an intertribal coalition, has been disbanded. Katie Johnson, Campaigns and Engagement Manager a...

Send us Fan Mail Summer vacation too expensive? Too complicated? Too late to plan? Missy and Shannon Jones of KeeKee's Big Adventures are here to debunk all of it. Parks — national, state, and local — are the most affordable, flexible, and genuinely fun summer vacation option out there. You don't need a six-month plan. You don't need a tent. You just need to take the first step. In...

Send us Fan Mail Everything you learn outside follows you home. The resilience to own a mistake in front of your team. The ability to sit with discomfort without shutting down. The capacity to notice something beautiful you've walked past a hundred times. Jesse Tubb, founder of GRIT Adventures and former active duty Army officer, joins The Parks Podcast to talk about what nature actually teac...

Send us Fan Mail The public comment window on the proposed 250-foot Triumphal Arch in Washington DC closes June 15. I sat down with Priya Jain, Chair of the Heritage Conservation Committee for the Society of Architectural Historians, to talk about what this proposal actually involves, why it threatens one of the most historically significant viewsheds in the country, and why your comment matters e...

Send us Fan Mail In 2002, a flood pushed six feet of stormwater and sewage into the living rooms of families in Atlanta's Vine City neighborhood. Sixty families were displaced. The infrastructure had failed them for decades. Twenty years later, that same land is home to one of the most remarkable urban parks in America. Cook Park is a 16-acre green space in the heart of Atlanta that holds 10...

Send us Fan Mail Leave No Trace comes up in almost every episode of The Parks Podcast — but what is it really? Most people think it means pack out your trash and pick up after your dog. It's so much more than that. Jeanelle Soland and Rob Pelton, members of the Subaru Leave No Trace traveling team, join The Parks Podcast to walk through all seven principles, explain the science behind each on...

Send us Fan Mail Grab your hiking boots and get ready to journey through the "People’s Park." In this episode, host Missy Rentz welcomes Cinda Waldbuesser , President and CEO of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) , to explore the legendary Appalachian Trail (AT). Spanning nearly 2,197.9 miles from Georgia to Maine, the AT is the longest hiking-only footpath in the world. Cinda dives...

Send us Fan Mail What started as a simple Instagram account to document outdoor adventures quickly evolved into a nationwide movement. In this episode of The Parks Podcasat , host Missy Rentz sits down with Justin Yoder , the founder and executive director of LGBTQ Outdoors . Justin shares the "happy accident" that led to the creation of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that now spans over 23 state...

Send us Fan Mail "I want them to look back and say, 'This was my school'—not just a park I visit." What if a child’s first classroom wasn’t surrounded by four walls, but by 2,500 acres of wild Maryland landscape? In this episode, host Missy Rentz sits down with Katrina Fauss , Principal Park Naturalist at Black Hill Discovery Center , to explore the transformative power of natu...