While growing up, nerve-racking, spine-tingling, heart-pumping stories of hunting man-eating tigers and leopards in India by such legends as Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson ensured that my passion for the wild and the wilderness was set on a never-ending, all-consuming fire, while stories by forest guides and jungle guards about their encounters with tigers, leopards, elephants, sloth bears, wolves, jackals, and hyenas went a long way in painting a magical and mysterious picture of the jungle in my heart and mind. In August 2007, I made my way into the Jim Corbett National Park armed with a fine but borrowed point-and-shoot camera. Since then I have progressed to be a professional natural history photographer.

Barataria Preserve is one of six sites managed as part of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, an umbrella park of natural and cultural sites named for the early 19th-century French pirate and smuggler who helped Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans during the War of 1812. Taken together, the sites paint a rich portrait of coastal Louisiana: The Barataria unit protects some 26,000 acres of wetlands, while the Chalmette National Battlefield unit honors the resounding American victory in January 1815.

Thanksgiving week brought a lot of snow to much of the country. I returned home to find 8-9 inches of the white stuff in the yard, and a decided chill (low teens) in the air. All of which naturally got me thinking about how to enjoy the winter months in the cold weather side of the National Park System. If you’re looking to enjoy parks chilled and blanketed by winter, here are some destinations to consider.

Take saguaros out of Saguaro National Park, and you’d lose more than the park’s namesake cactus, one that gives skyward structure to the vista here. You might strain to catch the drumming of the Gila woodpecker, fail to catch an elf owl peering out from its cavity nest, and not know where to look for Lesser long-nosed bats. All these creatures rely on the saguaro for food and shelter. Realizing those possible losses to this Sonoran Desert landscape begs the question, "How are the park’s saguaros doing?"