For the past 240 weeks, the National Parks Traveler has brought you weekly podcasts examining life, news, and exploration of the National Park System. It’s been a long-running series that has never lacked for topics. We hope you’ve found those episodes as informative and interesting as we have. 
 

Bison have been in the news recently. The Interior Department this past week released $5 million to help fund both bison restoration and grasslands rehabilitation.  And next month Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan will release their latest documentary, The American Buffalo. The American Buffalo documentary traces the history of how bison nearly went extinct, and how they came back. It will be delivered in a two-part, four-hour series on public television.

If you were to plan an extended trip through the National Park System, how would you do it?  Where would you go first?  How would you prepare? 

In this week’s podcast, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick talks with Cristian Garza, who recently returned from a four-month jaunt through the parks. He clocked some 300 hours of driving across 17,000 miles of the U.S. and Canada and shares some of his experiences and perspectives with Lynn.

The New York Times recently summed up one of the biggest climate change stories of the year so far. The planet’s average sea surface temperature spiked to a record high in April, and the ocean has remained exceptionally warm ever since, the paper reported. In July, widespread marine heatwaves drove temperatures back up to near record highs, with some hot spots nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.