Roam School Family

From the road, Wind Cave National Park looks like nothing: a prairie full of prairie dogs in the Black Hills of South Dakota, two hours west of the Badlands. Underneath it is one of the longest caves on Earth — more than 167 miles of passages packed under about one square mile — and scientists think they've found a tenth of it, at most. So we went down. It starts at a hole the size of a sheet of p...

We read the report before we drove in. Swarms of earthquakes. The ground rising. Two hundred thousand people told to leave. A column of ash thirty miles high you could see from Denver. Then we parked the van in the middle of it. Here's the spoiler, so nobody in your back seat has to worry: no, Yellowstone is not going to erupt. But it is an active volcano, and there's no mountain anywhere, so this...

For about fifteen years, Yellowstone built bleachers facing a garbage dump so families could watch grizzlies eat trash. The sign said Lunch Counter. For Bears Only. Twelve minutes out the west gate, Big and Little walk into a grizzly pen with a bucket of food and do the one thing you can never do inside the park. This is our Detour to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone — n...

Two nights ago we stayed in a hotel with real beds. At bedtime, both kids asked if they could go sleep in the van. This episode is about why — and about a valley where everything is moving, and knows exactly where it's going. We drive into Jackson Hole and the mountains look pasted on: a mile-high wall that tipped up along a fault ten million years ago, still growing a fingernail's width a decade,...

We drove into Glacier National Park under an orange sky, and the first thing Odin asked was how smoke from fires in Oregon and Washington got all the way to Montana. It took the whole episode to answer him. We start at Lake McDonald, ten miles of lake we can't see across, and pull rocks out of the water that are red, green, and purple — ancient mud that rusted in the sun a billion and a half years...

You can close your eyes. There is no such thing as an earlid. This episode is about the quietest square inch in the United States, and what it has to teach a kid whose ears take in too much. We talk with Matt Mikkelsen of Quiet Parks International about One Square Inch of Silence — the spot 3.2 miles up the Hoh River Trail that Gordon Hempton marked with a small red stone on Earth Day 2005 — and a...

North Cascades has more glaciers than any other national park in the lower 48... and almost nobody goes. This episode is about the strangest, most tangled national park in the country, and the question underneath all of it: when people have already rearranged a wild place, what do we owe it now? We stand in Newhalem and feel Seattle's electricity humming in our teeth and visit three dams on the Sk...

In this episode, we interview Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, who has stood on top of Mount Everest fifteen times and who in 2003 climbed it faster than any human being ever had. He now runs a small restaurant a mile from the park gate because he wanted his kids to have the schooling he never got. Mount Rainier is a volcano wearing a coat of ice. This episode explains what a lahar is and why kids in the valle...

This episode explains how Mount Mazama collapsed into the bluest water in the world, and the native origin story of the lake. Then we tell the story of William Gladstone Steel: a fifteen-year-old kid in Kansas who read about a mysterious blue lake on his sandwich wrapper, spent fifteen years just trying to find it, and then spent seventeen more fighting to protect it — a thousand letters, one book...

Lassen gets a fraction of the visitors Yosemite does, and we think that's because nobody knows what to make of it. This park is a rule breaker and in this episode we catch it bending five rules of science, one at a time. Keep a tally with us. We explain how all four types of volcano on Earth ended up inside a single park. We stand at a lake that looks like it's boiling but is ice cold, and climb a...

There are 64 permits available per day to get to The Wave. During peak season, 300 people compete for them. We won! …and then we realized we had an 8-year-old who had never hiked 6.5 miles in his life, a 90º & sunny weather forecast, no trail and no shade. This episode explains the geology of The Wave: Jurassic sand dunes, 200 million years old, turned to stone but caught mid-motion. We're gui...

Redwood trees have roots only ten feet deep. For a tree that grows as tall as the statue of liberty, that should be a problem…This episode is about why it isn't. We explain how redwoods manufacture the fog that feeds them, what a banana slug actually does for a forest, and what the Yurok people understood about these trees long before anyone else was paying attention. And we tell the story of four...

This episode explains how scientists built a machine so sensitive that your heartbeat standing next to it would ruin the experiment...and why they put it in the middle of the Washington desert. We walk through the control room where gravitational wave detections happen, with a working LIGO scientist as our guide. We explain what it means that space itself can stretch and squeeze, and why the signa...

Joshua Tree isn't just about weird trees and cool rocks. This episode tells you why those "trees" are not actually trees and what a rain shadow actually does to a landscape. We explain why the Oasis of Mara—the place where Serrano and Chemehuevi people had lived peacefully for generations—got claimed by the state of California in 1875 and sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad without their consent...