In the beginning, national parks were mostly about scenery — not entirely because some early parks like Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake featured unusual marvels of the natural world. But the focus was on scenic beauty and providing opportunities for visitors to enjoy it. From those earliest days wildlife, particularly big critters like bears and elk, were one of the attractions in some parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite where they were on “display” at, for instance, the Yellowstone garbage dumps. Wildlife protection was an afterthought if a thought at all in the establishment and management of national parks. George Melendez Wright changed this, at least for a while.

Explore the National Park System extensively and not only are you likely to come across some incredible vistas, diverse natural resources, and rich history, but also some incredible meals in the lodge at day's end, or even at the start of your day.

As nice as those folding park maps you get when driving into a national park are, trying to collect them all and organize them for your road trips can be a challenge, to say the least. sure, you could punch holes in them and organize them in a three-ring binder, but an easier approach to exploring the parks is National Park Maps, a forthcoming atlas of the 63 "national parks."

One of historian Douglas Brinkley’s “fortes,” as he puts it, is presidential history, and one project has been to focus on the conservation and environmental records of presidential players in 20th century America.