National Parks Traveler Podcast

Fall is here. Snow has fallen in the Rockies, the days are getting shorter, and some animals are realizing that winter isn't that far away. With the change of seasons underway, you should mark your calendar for the most unusual competition in the National Park System and get started on your bracket. Not your NCAA basketball tournament bracket, but your fat bear bracket. The week of October 5-11 at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska officially is Fat Bear Week in the park, and the National Parks Traveler's Lynn Riddick caught up with Lian Law, Katmai's visual information specialist, to learn more about it.

One of the most amazing settings in the National Park System are glacial landscapes. From Glacier National Park in Montana and Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state to Alaska, these rivers of ice are captivating to see and, if you're lucky enough, to walk upon or watch as they calve blocks of ice into Pacific waters. But as amazing as these rivers of ice are, they are vanishing under the warmth of climate change. Glacier National Park's glaciers could be gone by mid-century. Many of those in Alaska are almost visibly in retreat. But how serious is the problem, what is the overall state of glacial ice in the Park System? Two researchers, Deborah Kurtz from the National Park Service and Taryn Black, a doctoral student in Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, have tried to answer that question as it applies to Kenai Fjords National Park two hours south of Anchorage, Alaska. We're joined today by Taryn Black.

The Biden administration's desire to preserve at least 30 percent of the country's lands and waters for nature by 2030 has heightened the public's interest in nature, and spurred countless conversations into not only how that goal can be achieved, but about the benefits that it will generate. Professor William Ripple from Oregon State University, Michael Phillips from the Turner Endangered Species Fund, and Elaine Leslie, who was the National Park Service's chief for biological resources, discuss their proposal to expand the territories of wolves and beavers in the American West to "Rewild the West."

It's been said time and again, the National Park Service is not adequately funded. There's just not enough money in the agency's annual budgets to address all the needs across the National Park System. And those needs are many, from maintaining facilities, keeping wastewater treatment plans operating smoothly, managing wildlife, and tending to ever growing throngs of visitors. That's where friends groups and cooperating associations come into play. They provide much-needed financial support through philanthropic donations that might pay for wildlife research, trail maintenance, or campground upkeep. Friends of Acadia is one such group, and its workload has grown through the years. While friends groups once were seen as raising charitable dollars to fund the "margin of excellence" in the parks, today the Park Service is relying more and more on these nonprofit organizations to fund projects addressing the "muscle and bones" of park operations. Today we're going to discuss this evolution with Eric Stiles, who recently took the helm at Friends of Acadia following David MacDonald's departure.

As the inscription on the Roosevelt Arch at the north entrance into Yellowstone National Park reminds us, the national parks are for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. They are wild, scenic, and historic spaces that belong to all of us. But are they in reality exclusive places with reservation systems that aren't providing equitable access to the diverse population wishing to use parks? Our guest this week is Dr. Will Rice from the University of Montana, and he has some thoughts about the functionality of recreation.gov, the main reservation system used for public lands campgrounds and activities. In recently published research, which he shares with the Traveler's Lynn Riddick, he and his team evaluated one aspect of park reservations – camping – to see if the online reservation system offers an advantage to higher socio-economic groups.

Alaska is a big state, and within that big state are 17 units of the National Park System spanning more than 100 million acres. Denali, Glacier Bay, Kenai Fjords, Katmai, Wrangell-St. Elias are just some of those units. But if you want to visit the parks in Alaska, how do you decide which ones to explore? Contributing editor Kim O'Connell recently spent 10 days in Alaska with her family, and is here to discuss her travels in Denali and Kenai Fjords and offer some suggestions on how to decide where to go in Alaska.

On the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, in an opening in the piney forest, stands a fire lookout built in the 1930s. The Shadow Mountain Lookout is the only lookout remaining in the park. During a recent visit to Rocky Mountain, I followed the 5-mile-long trail to the lookout, where I ran into Barbara and John Varian and discussed both the hike and the lookout with them.

Climate change is materializing in various ways across the National Park System. Houses have been falling into the Atlantic at Cape Hatteras National Seashore as a result of sea level rise and shifting of the barrier island, wildfires have been raging through Sequoia, Yosemite, and Lassen Volcanic national parks, just to name three units impacted by fire, and flooding has unexpectedly become a major force at Yellowstone National Park. It's been just about two months since catastrophic floods hit the northern portion of Yellowstone, and the recovery efforts are continuing, and will continue for quite a few years in the case of rebuilding the North and Northeast Entrance roads. Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly discusses the latest on the recovery work.

If you're interested in volcanoes, you need not go further than our national parks to get your fill. Eighty-four units of the National Park System have volcanic resources. These parks run the gamut of having very active volcanic features to those where volcanoes formed the landscape and contribute to the geodiversity of the park. The most active volcano in our park system is Kīlauea in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's also one of the most monitored and researched volcanoes anywhere. This week the Traveler's Lynn Riddick talks to Professor Leif Karlstrom, whose recent research of Kilauea might be music to your ears.

Homestead National Historical Park near Beatrice, Nebraska, isn't that big, just 211 acres, but as the saying goes, it plays much, much bigger. Here you'll find the National Museum on Homesteading, historic buildings including the Palmer-Epard log cabin that despite its small size – just 14 feet by 16 feet – was home to a family of 12, along with agricultural equipment, genealogy research opportunities, an education center, hiking trails through 100 acres of restored tallgrass prairie and a burr oak forest. This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. On a warm, late June day I caught up with Jonathan Fairchild, the park historian, to learn a bit more about Daniel Freeman, the man generally accepted to have been the very first to take advantage of the Homestead Act. Freeman claimed the 160 acres in what at the time was the Nebraska Territory on January 1, 1863, the day The Homestead Act that Congress had passed the year before took effect. Freeman, who was a Union soldier at the time, didn't settle on the land until the end of the Civil War, in 1865, but he lived there until he died in 1908. Those 160 acres are the bulk of the setting for the historical park, though it's much changed from how it appeared during Freeman's life there. The National Park Service acquired the property in the 1930s and restored the farmed acres to tallgrass prairie. In a minute, I'll be back to take you across the landscape with Jonathan.