Forests littered with trees that once soared high but now are stacked in disarray like gigantic Pick Up Stix. Rising seas eroding shorelines and squeezing wildlife. A venerable footpath facing many threats. Prices threatening to make a mockery out of the contention that a national park vacation is for all Americans.

Here, on the doorstep of 2025, the National Park Service and its system of park units face many challenges, from the ever-present maintenance needs to political uncertainties that threaten to challenge the National Park Service Organic Act's mandate that the parks are to be left "unimpaired" for the enjoyment of future generations.

In National Parks Traveler's 4th Annual Threatened and Endangered Parks series we'll take a look at some key issues that not only threaten the health of the parks, but which also weigh on the public that owns the parks but can't always afford to fully enjoy them or find a place to stay.

There are many threats that could dominate this series of stories year after year after year: oil exploration at Big Cypress National Preserve, invasive species at Everglades National Park, rougher seas chewing away at Cape Hatteras National Seashore's supporting barrier island, funding woes, vanishing permafrost at Denali National Park and Preserve, commercial overflights, crowds.

But it's a mix of on-the-ground realities and political agendas that today present challenges that put the parks, and even their overseeing agency, at great harm.

"I would say, based on the damage they inflicted the last time, the incoming administration threatens the ecological integrity of national parks and the scientific integrity of the National Park Service," Dr. Patrick Gonzalez, who worked for the Park Service as a climate change scientist during the first Trump administration before moving into the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for the Biden administration, says when asked how a second Trump administration might impact the parks and the Park Service.

How true that outlook proves to be remains to be seen, but already Alaska's governor has asked the incoming administration to allow mining on park lands, give his Fish and Game Department primacy over the wildlife that roam places like Yukon-Charley National Rivers National Preserve, and shelve talk of designating additional wilderness in the state, or even protecting the wilderness values of Alaskan park lands that are eligible, but have not yet been designated, as wilderness.

Among the stories we'll bring you is one from Rita Beamish looking at the risks to parks posed by mining and enegy exploration. “Drill, baby, drill,” the prominent anthem of Donald Trump’s successful quest for another presidential term, harkened a bright path for oil and gas development. Less discussed but also facing a brighter outlook is another important resource industry, hard-rock mining, including in locations that impact U.S. national parks, such as a mining access road planned to cross Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Dismayed environmental and cultural advocates are vowing not to go down without a fight in the face of a red wave washing over Washington.

The proposed route of the Ambler Road would cross Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and Kobuk Wild River/Alaska DNR

Lori Sonken writes about another risk to parks, not tied to natural resources, but rather one confronting the public that loves them.

Costs are not preventing people from frequenting the national parks — the park system recorded more than 325 million visits in 2023. Of the 13 million individuals who overnighted in parks last year, almost 3 million stayed in lodging run by concessioners, according to NPS data. But lodging stays are not in everyone’s budget. 

“You know the parks are for everybody, but yet they’re not because they are pricing people out. You can get through the gate, and you can do stuff and enjoy the park for relatively little money. But the lodging part, unless you’re camping, the lodging’s prohibitive,” said Bruce Andersen, a retired U.S. Forest Service environmental planner now living in southwestern Colorado.

One thing that is harming natural resources across the park system is severe weather tied to climate change. Kim O'Connell, who visited Cape Hatteras this past summer to report on houses toppling into the Atlantic, looks at how Southeastern parks, places like Great Smoky Mountains National Park and De Soto National Memorial, are being impacted by stronger hurricanes, storm surges, downed trees, destruction of cultural resources, dune erosion, and more.

“The threats [to the national parks] are myriad and depend on location,” Lauren Casey, a meteorologist with Climate Central, told O'Connell. “Sea level rise is going to continue to threaten our coast, hot sea surface temperatures contribute to coral bleaching, and then we have rainfall and flooding [like we had] in Appalachia. The thing with climate change is there are cascading impacts.”

O'Connell also reports on how exceptional storms such as 2024's Hurricane Helene, combined with other threats, are risking the future of the southern end of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail.

The southern reach of the Appalachian Trail was littered with downed trees after Hurricane Helene/Appalachian Trail Conservancy

Helene's impacts were so significant and unprecedented along hundreds of miles of the Appalachian Trail — “the most destructive natural disaster the century-old trail had seen,” according to The New York Times — adding to ongoing concerns about invasive species, pollution, and habitat loss and forest fragmentation that have plagued the trail landscape for years. Scientists predict that potentially more than 17 million acres of forestland in the Southeast, including areas around the A.T., might be lost by 2060, she writes.

And it's not just the East Coast that is subjected to these impacts. Justin Housman, Traveler's associate editor, lays out how sea-level rise is impacting West Coast parks.

"Parts of Point Reyes National Seashore are gradually disappearing as the ocean behaves in ways not seen in millennia," he found. "In this case, it’s not a canary that’s sounding the rising sea level alarm with a chirp. It’s van-sized, roar-grunting elephant seals."

And, of course, politics can't be ignored when it comes to the parks and the Park Service.

Scientists, park personnel, and other experts we interviewed voiced worries that the incoming administration will promulgate dramatic and potentially radical changes that roll back not only environmental protections the Biden administration installed, but years, even decades, of progress on environmental stewardship and park preservation that could reverse the Park Service's policy, supported by the federal courts, to hold conservation of natural resources above recreation.

The stories we'll begin rolling out later this week present a sobering look at the state of the National Park System and the challenges the National Park Service faces in working to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for their enjoyment in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired..."