Horace Kephart found both himself and his inspiration in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, and it was there that he became one of the fiercest proponents for saving the mountains from logging companies.

It took only a handful or two of days between the disappearance of snow in the Santa Fe National Forest and the start of the Cerro Pelado fire, a growing blaze that has intruded into two units of the National Park System in New Mexico in an early season signal that the coming summer months will be smoky in many parts of the park system west of the Rockies.

In the roughly three years since the National Park Service under the Trump administration decided it wasn't helpful to announce the dollar amount of deferred maintenance in the National Park System, that number has nearly doubled, to roughly $22 billion, in part due to a new calculation formula.

A corner of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico was threatened Monday by flames from the Cerro Pelado wildfire, which was burning through "very dry" forestlands and being fanned by wind gusts to 45 mph.