National Parks Traveler Podcast

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 writer and publisher behind Your Gui...

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 Texas State, she studied at the Uni...

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 Endangered Species Project, contribu...

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 guest toda...

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 warming, damage inflicted by anchors, ...

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 strives to create healthy and resilie...

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 programs and budgeting, which are also...

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 the Yel...

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 around 500 A.D., when Polynesian coloni...

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 year, leaving many wondering what the...

A century of seasons has worn the appearance of the log cabin Roy Fure built in present-day Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, but his care of the small cabin, and later National Park Service restoration efforts, have enabled it to stand the test of time.

Dovetail-notched spruce logs still sit tightly together, the corrugated metal roof Fure replaced his sod roof with in 1930 and painted red co...

After more than 50 years as one of the country's landmark environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act has gone from one of the most popular measures before Congress to one fueling demands that it be revised, if not discarded.

The National Parks Traveler is reviewing the Endangered Species Act's work and its record, spotlighting individual species that it's protected, those that it failed, and those that it recovered.

The monthsl...

Haleakalā National Park is deceptively wonderful and rich in biodiversity. But if we're not careful, we could lose some of that biodiversity. 

Located on the island of Maui in Hawaii, the first thing you notice about this national park is its towering dormant volcano, Haleakalā, which rises from sea level to more than 10,000 feet.

While many visitors simply want to head to the top of the vo...

It's Thanksgiving Weekend, usually interpreted as a bountiful time of year when we can all sit back and be thankful. But can many who work for the National Park Service feel thankful in the wake of the staff reductions this year? 

This year has been hard on the Park Service, what with the loss of roughly a quarter of the full-time workforce and questions around how the agency has long interpreted history.
  
But the Park Service ha...

Gazing up at mountains from their valleys down below, it's hard, if not impossible, to detect any change on the top of the mountains. But change is ongoing, especially in recent history as the climate continues to warm.

From Tacoma or Seattle in Washington state, the snowy summit of Mount Rainier National Park appears unchanged from how it's always looked. Snowy. But is that truly the case? What would yo...

The government shutdown has been record-setting in terms of its length. So, too, has been the time that many employees of the National Park Service have been furloughed without pay.

How has the shutdown affected the parks, and how have the friends groups that support the parks responded? We're going to discuss that today with Chris Lenhertz from the Golden Gate Conservancy, Jacki Harp from Smokies Life, ...