National Parks Traveler: Yellowstone's Covid Storm, Drilling For Oil In Big Cypress

While most visitors to the National Park System view the parks as incredibly beautiful places, or places rich in culture and history, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes within the parks, and with the National Parks Service. 

Traveler editor Kurt Repanshek has closely followed the parks and the Park Service for more than 18 years. Over that timespan, he’s seen a lot of changes in the parks, and the agency itself. In today’s show we are going to offer a sort of “State of the Parks” with you. After all, as much as you enjoy the park system, you have a vested interest in their oversight and management. 

With nearly 430 units in the National Park System, of which 63 are National Parks, we all probably could use a little help in planning our adventures into the park system. But do you simply visit a park’s website to plan your trip? Find an online guidebook? Buy a hardcover guidebook? Or simply wing it when you reach your destination?

This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. I must confess, I’ve taken all three approaches, and I’ve even written a guidebook to the parks, and there’s probably a fair amount of guidebook material on the Traveler. 

Today we’re reaching out to two writers who make their living writing national park guidebooks. Becky Lomax is the author of “USA National Parks: The Complete Guide to All 63 National Parks” from Moon Travel Guides, as well as her latest titles “Best of Glacier, Banff and Jasper: Make the Most of One to Three Days in the Parks”, which she co-wrote with Andrew Hempstead, and “Glacier National Park: Hiking, Camping, Lakes, and Peaks”.

Michael Oswald is the author of “Your Guide to the National Parks”, “National Park Maps: An Atlas of United States National Parks”, and “The Day Hiker’s Guide to the National Parks”.

Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park is such a unique destination in the National Park System. Located on the Big Island, it’s surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, it has rainforests, and it boasts two active volcanoes in Mauna Loa and Kilauea.
 
A visit to Hawai’i Volcanoes comes with a number of options. Do you simply hope to catch an eruption of Kilauea and head somewhere else in Hawaii, do you explore the backcountry with its more than 160 miles of trails, or you try to soak in the Hawaiian culture?
 
Hopefully you’ll do all of that and more, because the park is so remarkable and offers so much. But it also can be a dangerous place. While the volcanoes are not explosive like Mount Saint Helens was back in 1980, visitors still can get close to Kilauea’s crater, and if they ignore safety, quickly find themselves in trouble or worse.
 
To get a better understanding of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, we’re joined today by Ranger Nainoa Keanaaina, a law enforcement ranger who grew up near the park, worked in its backcountry, and now is closely involved with search-and-rescue activities and other tasks to keep visitors safe and getting the most out of their vacation.

From the Rocky Mountains to the West Coast and up to Alaska, there are thousands of historic structures and archaeological sites on National Park System landscapes. They range in variety from homesteader cabins to pre-historic cave dwellings.

Taking care of these buildings and archaeological sites is a valuable job for the National Park Service, as they speak to the country’s history and its prehistory. But it hasn’t always been easy for the agency’s Vanishing Treasures program, which was created in 1998. At times administrations have proposed funding cuts for the program, and there’s also the issue of too much work for too few staff.

To learn more about this program, its accomplishments, and what it’s working on today, we’re joined by Ian Hough, the National Park Service’s Vanishing Treasures program coordinator. 

Stand before a giant sequoia tree in Sequoia or Kings Canyon national parks or nearby Yosemite National Park and you’re overwhelmed by their size, and assume they’re impervious to anything that might be thrown at them. But as we learned from wildfires in 2020 and 2021 in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, that’s not the case.

The Castle Fire in 2020 and then the KNP Complex and Windy fires in 2021 that burned through the two parks destroyed thousands of giant sequoia trees. Estimates put the losses at more than 14,000 mature trees, or roughly 13-19 percent of the world’s giant sequoias.

At the Sequoia Parks Conservancy, just days after the KNP complex fires started in September of 2021 plans were made to being raising funds to help the National Park Service restore and recover areas in the two parks that were burned. Today we’re discussing the ongoing recovery work with Savannah Boiano, the executive director of the Sequoia Parks Conservancy.

Mountain lions are an incredibly charismatic animal on landscapes within, and adjacent to, the National Park System. But they’re seldom seen because of their nocturnal tendencies.
 
There recently was a new report that focused on a comprehensive estimate of mountain lions in California, and the number is much smaller than many had thought it was.
 
To discuss California’s mountain lion population, and efforts to protect that population, our guest today is Dr. Veronica Yovovich, conservation scientist at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization. 

Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia protects one of the defining battlefields of the Civil War. It was there that the first battle of the war was waged, in 1861, it was the scene of a second battle a year later, and it was where Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson got his Stonewall nickname.

Despite the significance of Manassas, the Prince William County supervisors in December agreed to rezone 2,100 acres adjacent to the battlefield to allow for the world’s largest data processing center to be built there. A lawsuit recently was filed in a bid to stop the development. Among the plaintiffs is the American Battlefield Trust, a non-profit organization that works to protect American battlefields from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. David Duncan, president of that organization, joins us today to explain why the Trust thinks it is wrong to build the data processing center next to Manassas National Battlefield Park. 

Mount Rainier National Park is the most recent unit of the National Park System to announce that you’ll need a reservation to enter the most popular areas of the park during the busy summer months. At the same time, Shenandoah National Park has announced that a pilot program it’s been running for two years for access to Old Rag will be permanent going forward.

Reservation systems to get into national parks are controversial. Many folks argue they hinder spontaneity in travel, others like the assurance of knowing they can get into a national park such as Arches, or Rocky Mountain, or Glacier, at a specific time on a specific day.
 
To explore the issue of reservations systems in the parks, we’re joined today by Cassidy Jones, the senior visitation manager for the National Parks Conservation Association who keeps an eye on these programs, how they’re operating, and whether they make a difference. 

When Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, it said that species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the US have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untampered by adequate concern and conservation. Other species of fish, wildlife, and plants have been so depleted in numbers that they are in danger of, or threatened with, extinction. These species of fish, wildlife, and plants are of the aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the nation and its people.

2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, better known as the ESA. Where do things stand with the Act and the plants and animals it was to protect? We’re going to explore that today with Andrew Carter and Lindsay Rosa, authors of a new report from Defenders of Wildlife, “The Endangered Species Act: The Next 50 Years and Beyond.”

As a young boy growing up in New Jersey, a year-end holiday treat was setting up our model railroad. It gave me and my two brothers hours of fun and an opportunity to learn a little about the steam age of railroads. Our first railroad featured Lionel O gauge locomotives and cars.  Later we moved into HO gauge trains, and many years later I had an N gauge layout.

That boyhood love of model railroads drove me to visit Golden Spike National Historical Park in northern Utah not far from the Great Salt Lake. That’s where, on May 10th, 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed when the Jupiter and No. 119 steam locomotives of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met head-on.

To learn more about those two locomotives, I headed north to Promontory Summit and caught up with Ranger Cole Chisam, who is the engineer who drives the two locomotives at the park. I’ll be back in a minute with Cole.