It’s a rare double heron day at the only national park dedicated to preserving aquatic plants. A Yellow-crowned Night Heron is stalking crustaceans in a water lily pond straight out of a Claude Monet painting. A Green Heron clutching a lotus stalk stands surrounded by pink and white flowers, huge, cup-shaped leaves and bright green pods that look like shower heads.

A new visitors’ center — one with unique architecture that harmonizes with the landscape and showcases its rich history — will strengthen the connection visitors have with Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.

Scenery and history come together at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, which preserves a western passageway cut by Daniel Boone and fought over during the Civil War.

Somewhere in the ten miles from the visitor center at Mississippi National River and Recreation Area in St. Paul, Minnesota, across the river to Minneapolis, I crossed an invisible line. It would have risen like a wall of ice, perhaps a mile high, just 15,000 years ago – a line demarcating the extent of the last glaciation.