Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas has everything you might want in a national park –- isolated mountains for hiking and camping, a scenic and wild river for kayaking, canoeing, and rafting, dark skies for stargazing and a species-rich desert for birdwatching and exploring.  But because the park is located hundreds of miles from a major airport and one hundred miles from the nearest interstate highway, it is perhaps one of the country’s least visited of the big national parks. 

This has been one of the most newsworthy years in recent memory for the National Park Service and the parks. There’s finally a Senate-confirmed director at the helm, billions of dollars are flowing into the parks for a variety of projects, wildfires chewed through Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Lassen Volcanic national parks, lakes Powell and Mead are shadows of their former selves.

When you visit Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, after you’ve gazed into the Kīlauea crater itself if it’s erupting, you should make a point to hike the Kīlauea Iki Trail. Starting from an overlook near Nāhuku (aka the Thurston Lava Tube), the trail descends through the rainforest and out across a crater floor created back in 1959 by one of the most spectacular eruptions of the 20th century at the national park. It was an eruption that saw lava fountains shoot roughly 1,900 feet into the sky.

It’s hard to imagine that camels, lions, and mammoths once roamed the landscape around Las Vegas, Nevada.  But such was the case during the latter part of the Pleistocene era, which spanned a period of time between 11,000 years and 2.5 million years ago.  The area -- known as the Upper Las Vegas Wash –- is rich with the fossils of these and many more creatures as well as ancient plants and pollens.