With the summer vacation season not too far off, no doubt many National Park Service Superintendents are trying to figure out how to manage the crowds and avoid impacts to natural resources in the park system.  With Memorial Day weekend just two weeks away, and Congress in its usual battles over how to fund the federal government, we wanted to take a look at how the funding situation looks for the Park Service. To help understand the financial setting across the National Park System, we’ve asked Phil Francis, from the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks to provide some insights.  

Smokies Life, which most of you who closely follow Great Smoky Mountains National Park know was previously known as the Great Smoky Mountains Association, produces educational and informational materials for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This week we’re joined by Laurel Rematore, the chief executive officer of Smokies Life, to discuss the name change as well as how her organization lends a big hand to the Park Service staff at Great Smoky. 

Have you ever closely inspected the landscape when you’re touring the National Park System, particularly in the West? You never know what you might find.

Back in 2010 a 7-year-old attending a Junior Ranger program at  Badlands National Park spied a partially exposed fossil that turned out to be the skull of a 32-million-year-old saber-toothed cat.

If you’ve ever visited Petrified Forest National Park you’ve no doubt marveled over the colorful fossilized tree trunks. There are also fossilized trees on the northern range of Yellowstone National Park, but nowhere near as colorful.

For this week’s episode we’ve invited Vince Santucci, the National Park Service’s senior paleontologist, to discuss the many fossil resources that exist across the National Park System, from coast to coast and north to south.

Wolverines, the largest land-dwelling members of the weasel family, once roamed across the northern tier of the United States, and as far south as New Mexico in the Rockies and southern California in the Sierra Nevada range. But after more than a century of trapping and habitat loss, wolverines in the lower 48 today exist only as small, fragmented populations in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Wyoming, and northeast Oregon.  However, there’s soon to be an effort in Colorado to help the carnivores recover in that state. The Colorado legislature has been considering legislation calling for the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Agency to move ahead with a recovery plan for wolverines. The bill is expected to face its final legislative hurdle in the coming weeks.  To discuss this initiative, we’re joined today by Megan Mueller, a conservation biologist with Rocky Mountain Wild, a non-profit advocacy organization working to bring them back, and Elaine Leslie, who was Chief of Biological Resources for the National Park Service before retiring.

Spur a discussion about traveling to a national park for a vacation and odds are that it will revolve around getting out into nature, looking for wildlife, perhaps honing your photography skills, or marveling at incredible vistas.

Will the discussion include destinations that portray aspects of the country’s history, or cultural melting pot? 

Equating national parks with nature is obvious, but making a similar connection with history and culture might not be so obvious. And maybe that lack of appreciation for America’s culture and history explains why the National Park Service has been struggling with protecting and interpreting those aspects of the parks.

The National Parks Conservation Association has just released a report calling for a Cultural Resource Challenge, one that asks for a hefty investment by Congress in the Park Service’s cultural affairs wing. We explore that report in today’s episode with Alan Spears, NPCA’s senior director for cultural affairs.

Tens of millions of people in the United States will be able to witness a Total Solar Eclipse on Monday as the rare astronomical event cuts a path from Texas to Maine, up to 122 miles wide in some spots.  This is a great opportunity to see the exact moment when the moon fully blocks the sun, creating a blazing corona visible to those observing from the center line of totality. 

There are a number of national park units within the eclipse path that runs from Texas to Maine that offer good vantage points to view the eclipse. And the parks offer a great Plan B of exploration and education if the day turns out to be cloudy or worse. 

This week, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick, who is planning to be in the center line of totality as the eclipse passes through Texas, speaks with renowned astronomer Tyler Nordgren – who is also planning to be in the center line as it passes through New York.  Lynn and Tyler will discuss the eclipse as well as some national park eclipse viewing opportunities after this break.

With March madness down to the Sweet 16, and Opening Day of Major League Baseball having arrived, we’re going to take a break this week and dive into our podcast archives for this week’s show.   This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. My NCAA bracket was busted the very first day, and while the Yankees won their opening day game against the Houston Astros, I don’t think they’ll go undefeated this year.   While I ponder the sports world, we’re going to let Lynn Riddick reprise her interviews with National Park Radio and the National Parks, two bands with great names that we think you’ll like.

One of the most popular public events in the National Park System was the release of sea turtle hatchlings, shuffling off into the Gulf of Mexico at Padre Island National Seashore. I say was, because the number of those public events has been drastically scaled back in recent years. 

The programs featuring the release of Kemp’s ridley sea turtle hatchlings at Padre Island offered young and old a crash course in conservation of a species that has narrowly avoided extinction, and remains highly endangered. In 2019, before the COVID 19 pandemic shuttered the public hatchling releases at Padre Island, an estimated 16,000 people viewed the releases. In 2020, online video presentations of the events attracted about 1 million viewers. 

Yet despite the strong conservation value of these events, not just in public education but in the tens of thousands of hatched turtles released to the ocean, advocates of the program say the national seashore’s Sea Turtle Science and Recovery program itself is endangered. For after the Park Service recruited Dr. Donna Shaver to build that sea turtle science program, a role that saw her lifted to international prominence, the agency now seems to be squandering her success and hoping she will retire. 

What’s been going on at Padre Island since 2021 has drawn the concern of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter, based in Austin, Texas. It recently led a petition drive to raise concerns over the direction of the sea turtle program. Dr. Craig Nazor, the chapter’s conservation chair, recently met with Kate Hammond, the Director of the Park Services Intermountain Region, to question the direction of the program. 

Air pollution and climate change impacts can have outsized effects on the National Park System, as well as lesser noticed but just as concerning effects. But are those impacts spread across the entire park system, or clustered around a few?

Back in 2019 the National Parks Conservation Association looked at how air pollution and climate change were impacting parks. They have updated that study with the latest data from the National Park Service, and the current state of affairs remains concerning.

To discuss NPCA’s findings, we’ve asked Ulla Reeves, the interim director of NPCA’s Clean Air Program to join us. 

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”.