National Parks Traveler Podcast

For 21 years, the National Parks Traveler has taken you around the National Park System and kept you informed on how the National Park Service and Congress have managed your national parks. We've gone underground to describe for you the wonders of Wind Cave, Jewel Cave and Mammoth Cave, hiked into cypress domes at Everglades National Park to marvel at the park's flora and fauna, and bucked the rap...

Across the United States, from Alaska to Puerto Rico, there are about 112 million acres of officially designated wilderness. That amounts to about 5 percent of the country's land mass. It might appear to be even smaller when you consider that more than half of those 112 million acres protected as wilderness are in Alaska. To say that wilderness is at risk from the human imprint isn't hyperbole. Wh...

It was a little more than a year ago when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asked  the public to help him identify interpretive materials in the National Park System that disparaged Americans past or living or which contained content that detracts from viewpoints of scenic grandeur. Well, it appears that the public didn't share his concerns. Recent Freedom of Information Act requests have turned up n...

Since this past December here at the Traveler we've been bringing you a series of stories on the Endangered Species Act and the threatened and endangered species it's intended to keep from going extinct. For me, it's been an eye-opening series because of what our editors and writers have learned about threatened and endangered species — from birds to trees and even to grasses — and the work being...

Public lands stewardship has most definitely changed under the second presidential administration of Donald Trump. Land-management agencies such as the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management have lost thousands of employees, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is on a mission to turn the country's public lands into a cash cow of sorts. As the political tenure in W...

A fast-track proposal to develop a gold mine near Alaska's Cook Inlet and Lake Clark National Park and Preserve is alarming scientists, environmental groups and local communities because of the devastating effects it is expected to have on the region's critically endangered beluga whales. Cook Inlet is home to a small and genetically distinct population of beluga whales that has struggled for deca...

America's 250th birthday is coming up this summer, festivities will be held all over the country, and history buffs will be delving into the various nooks and crannies of the National Park System to see where they can visit sites of Revolutionary War battles. Don't overlook South Carolina and its three park sites that preserve Revolutionary War battlefields – Kings Mountain National Military Park,...

We're living in somewhat tumultuous times in the print media industry. Well-familiar titles are either disappearing, shrinking drastically, or shifting over to the internet. On top of that, the advent of Artificial Intelligence has some readers wondering how much human effort and talent went into the piece they're reading. Today we're going to be talking about a throw-back, a publication that has...

National parks provide us with so many services, from providing us with inspiration, allowing us to leave our stress behind for a few hours or a few days, offering a recreational outlet, and enabling us to pursue hobbies from photography to other artistic endeavors, and looking for wildlife.  The parks also allow us to go back into history through living history programs and interpretation, provid...

Across the United States, there are many thousands of collisions between vehicles and wildlife each year, killing people and animals and causing millions of dollars in property damages. Some solutions revolve around creating bridges specifically for wildlife, from elk and mountain lions to even turtles and salamanders. It's been estimated that collisions with wildlife in the United States kill aro...

You might not entirely appreciate the wonders and majesty of national parks unless you venture out after dark and gaze up at what often is referred to as the other half of the national park system. The view can be quite dazzling, with planets, stars, the Milky Way, and for the lucky, a comet or shooting star. Sadly, not every park offers such dazzling views. Light pollution reaches more than a few...

Warming oceans, pollution, more potent hurricanes, anchor drops, dredging and trawling. The Florida Reef struggles with a lot of impacts today. In fact, only about 2 percent of the reef that stretches some 350 miles from Biscayne National Park past Everglades National Park and down to Dry Tortugas National Park is covered with living coral. For several months now at the National Parks Traveler we'...

Capitol Reef National Park in Utah is one of the Mighty Five, as the state likes to say in its tourism promotions, and while it's somewhat off the beaten path, visitors are finding it. In 2024, visitation to the park was a record 1.4 million, a number that likely increased in 2025 and will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. Cognizant of the rising tide of visitation, the National Par...

What do you do, where do you go, when you pull into your favorite national park and can't find a place to park or a trail without crowds? Those are good questions probably going through many people's minds as the national parks become more and more popular with more and more people. Mike Oswald might have the answers you're looking for, at least for the Western half of the country. Oswald is the w...

Congaree National Park is an often-overlooked unit of the National Park System. Indeed, only about 250,000 visitors set foot in Congaree each year. Those who do are awestruck by the size of the trees there, as the park contains the highest concentration of champion-sized trees anywhere in North America.  Our guest today is Professor Kimberly Meitzen from Texas State University. Before arriving at...

A growing majority of bat species are in serious trouble, largely because of white nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that resembles a white fuzz on infected bats.    As the disease has spread across the country, it's decimated bat populations – killing upwards of 99 percent of some populations – and turned up in many national parks.    As part of the National Parks Traveler's Threatened and E...

Big Bend National Park lately has drawn a lot of national attention, and not in a good way. Recently the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol announced that it wanted to build some sort of border wall along all or part of the 118 miles of border the national park shares with Mexico. Is that a good idea? Will it adversely impact the park? Can it even be done? To discuss those and other questions, our gue...

To put some perspective on the National Parks Travelers'  monthslong coverage of threatened and endangered species, we're going to go back in time a bit today to replay a podcast in which we discussed the ESA — and possible changes to it —  with Jake Li, a vice president with Defenders of Wildlife, and Stephanie Adams, director of wildlife at the National Parks Conservation Association.

At Cumberland Island the National Park Service currently is crafting a visitor use management plan that critics say poses a great threat to the national seashore's official and potential wilderness. To get an understanding of what's at risk, we've invited Jessica Howell-Edwards, the executive director of Wild Cumberland, which advocates for the seashore's wilderness area and ecosystems, to join us...

The Florida Reef stretches from Biscayne National Park south past Everglades National Park and down to Dry Tortugas National Park in Florida. It's roughly 350 miles long, and is the only coral reef in the continental United States. When it comes to reefs around the world, the Florida Reef is the third largest. But, unfortunately, it's under a lot of pressure. It's dealing with pollution, ocean war...

Whitebark pines are a Western icon that the National Park Service has designated as a "vital sign" species because they are critical to ecosystem functions. But they are at risk of extinction due to climate change, beetles, and a fatal fungus from Eurasia. Our guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Pansing, the director of forest and restoration science for American Forests, a nonprofit organization that st...

What is the fate of the critically endangered Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle?  This smallest of the sea turtle species glides among the sea grasses and coral reefs of the Gulf of Mexico, and nests predominantly along the shores of Mexico, with a growing number of turtles nesting on Padre Island National Seashore in Texas. Hopes for this sea turtle's recovery weigh heavily on the national seashore's prog...

During a typical summer day at Yellowstone National Park roughly 3,000 vehicles enter through the North Entrance and head down to Mammoth Hot Springs so their passengers can begin their park adventure. Up until June 2022 their route took them along the Gardner River. But that all changed on June 13, 2022, when a once-in-500-years rainstorm, falling on top of snow cover, sent waters rampaging down...

A dramatic battle is being waged on the flanks of Halealakā National Park to save rare Honeycreeper birds that exist only in Hawaii. It's believed that the 50-odd known living or extinct species of honeycreepers all evolved from a single colonizing ancestor that arrived on Hawaii, the world's most remote island group, some three to five million years ago. Threats to the birds began to surface arou...

This year, 2025, likely will go down as the most transitional for the National Park Service. We've seen the loss of nearly a quarter of the permanent workforce, efforts to whitewash history in some parks, and the loss of a grand lodge to wildfire. The past 12 months have been full of news impacting the National Park Service and national parks, not all of it good. It's been a somewhat tumultuous ye...