National Parks Traveler Podcast

Heading into the National Park System this summer? Going it alone, or have you booked a tour company? What do you think about how the Trump Administration and Congress are treating the National Parks and the National Park Service? Have you reported any park signs to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that disparage Americans, dead or alive?

As you can tell there’s a lot going on in the parks....

Anniversaries and birthdays give us time to reflect on individuals, accomplishments, and moments in history. They often refresh our memories and can serve as motivators to do something.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which was established in 1925, just two years after the first sections of the Appalachian Trail opened.

To discuss the trail, some of its history, and the challenges it face...

There are some in Congress who think we should have a fire sale on public lands. Places across national forests and the Bureau of Land Management that politicians think should be offered for sale, either to try to adopt President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would continue to offer the biggest tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and corporations or simply because they don’t believe there should be public lands.

This legisla...

So much is happening so quickly to the National Park Service. There have been staff reductions, hiring freezes, spending freezes, orders from the Interior Secretary to make sure that visitors find national parks welcoming, no matter what it takes. 

Every week seems to bring something new, and quite frankly dire to the National Park Service. Most recently we’ve heard about the loss of about 60 employees from the agency’s Alaska regi...

Is green a red and blue construct? Put another way, is there a political partisan divide over the environment?

That’s a particularly interesting question, no doubt more so in recent years as the country seems to have drifted farther and farther apart because of our political beliefs. To that point, a reader reached out the other day to say our stories shouldn’t be negative on the Trump Administration bec...

News around public lands these days seems to revolve entirely around the Trump administration. In the case of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, many of the steps the administration is taking with the operational efficiencies of the National Park Service and other land management agencies certainly are keeping PEER busy.
 
But what exactly is PEER, and what is their mission? For as long as the National Parks Travele...

True birders are some of the most determined and persistent hobbyists out there. If you want to call bird watching a hobby. For many, it’s more like a passion. Many look forward to “Big Day” competitions, where individuals and teams strive to see how many different bird species they can spot in a 24-hour period.

Many birders log their sightings and identifications in eBird, a smartphone application created by the Cornell Lab of Orn...

It’s fair to say that the nation’s public lands, those managed by the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land-management agencies are at risk under the Trump administration.

There’s no hyperbole in that statement if you pay attention to what the administration already has done in terms of downsizing those agencies’ workforces, and when you listen to Interior Secretary Dou...

The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term might be the most tumultuous first 100 days of any president. He certainly came in prepared to move his agenda forward, no matter what barriers to it existed.

We don’t usually discuss presidential politics, but President Trump has released a blizzard of executive orders and directives touching all corners of the federal government, including the National Park Service.

What ...

There has been much upheaval in the National Park Service this year, with firings, then rehires, and staff deciding to retire now rather than risk sticking around and being fired. There have been fears that more Park Service personnel are about to be let go through a reduction in force. 

While Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered the Park Service to ensure that parks are properly to support the operating hours and needs of ea...

George Melendez Wright was a brilliant young scientist with the National Park Service back in the 1920s and 1930s. You could say he was ahead of his time, in that he wanted the Park Service to take a holistic role in how wildlife in the parks was managed.

While Wright tragically left the world too young when he was killed in a car crash in 1936, his name lives on today in the George Wright Society, a non...

One of the greatest shows on Earth has been going on now for several months in Hawaii, where the Kīlauea volcano at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park has been erupting since late December. The Kīlauea volcano is the most active volcano on Earth. It’s also a relatively safe volcano in that it spends most of its time simmering and bubbling without any spectacularly explosive eruptions. But lately it has been putting on some incredible ...

There are more stories to be found in the National Park System than one could write in a lifetime. Or several lifetimes.

Sometimes those stories can be hard to spot. How many were aware of the factoid from Great Smoky Mountains National Park that Jennifer Bain dug up, that if you stacked up all of the park’s salamanders against its roughly 1,900 black bears, the salamanders would weigh more?

Talk about national park trivia.

We’re g...

In this week’s podcast we thought we’d take a break from the unsettling news happening in and around our national parks and federal lands regarding park staff reductions and threats of reducing park boundaries to make way for mining.  

Instead, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick catches up with a former scientist who’s now a comedian to hear about his experiences during his artist-in-residency program at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on ...

There is, across the country, some upheaval going on as the Trump administration works to reduce the size of the federal government. Whether you support that effort or oppose it, you can’t deny there’s not upheaval going on.

That upheaval has hit all federal government agencies. At the National Park Service, seasonal ranger job offers were rescinded back in January. Roughly 1,000 probationary employees were fired on Valentine’s Day...

Across the United States there are hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. Indeed, there are more than 500 million acres of federal lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Park Service, just to name the three largest land managers in federal government.

A majority of those lands, the 245 million acres managed by the BLM and the 193 million managed by the Forest Service, ...

It was just over a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, that the Trump administration wiped 1,000 employees off the National Park Service staff without any apparent strategy other than that they were dispensable staff still on probation and so lacking any real protection for being fired without cause.

Those cuts swept across the 433 units of the National Park System, taking custodial workers, scientists, even lawyers. Today we’re joined b...