Hot, dry weather caused by climate change is reshaping the landscape in many Western national parks, and bringing with it an uneasiness over how plants, animals and visitors will be impacted.

A soaring, 1.3-million-acre swath of the High Sierra would make a wonderful addition to the National Park System, one that could help slow the sixth mass extinction, forward the Biden administration's 30 by 30 initiative, and possibly even help the fight with climate change.

They were ornamentals, showy vegetation once viewed as being beautiful and helpful landscape additions, but today many have turned into invaders that are adversely impacting national park landscapes.

"In the beginning, it was the root, the tree, the bark that taught my ancestors,” says Todd Labrador as he splits a long spruce root into sinewy twine used to stitch birchbark onto a canoe frame. Each summer, Labrador builds a birchbark canoe at a shelter in Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site in Nova Scotia. This particular canoe was nearing completion in August 2019 when I signed up for a one-day workshop with Labrador, keen to say I had a hand in building this traditional and oh so Canadian craft. “We don’t have the elders to teach a lot of these things anymore, but the material will teach you how, if you listen to it.”

As more and more people heading into the National Park System to escape being cooped up, rangers are finding themselves responding to more and more search-and-rescue calls.

Dialogues about offensive climbing route names have ramped up in the last year as protests and ongoing dialogues about race and equity have happened across many sectors.

This summer's heat waves baked the Cascades and the glaciers in national parks there, but last winter's heavy snowpack might have been enough to shield the ice rivers from retreat.

Cycling west from Cheticamp, the road itself tells me where Nova Scotia’s Route 30 ends and the highway through Cape Breton Highlands National Park begins. Both are part of the Cabot Trail, but crossing the Cheticamp River into the park, the quality of the road surface visibly improves. It widens and the blacktop is newer without the patches, cracks and bumps typical of the provincial section.

Everglades National Park conserves a sweeping subtropical landscape, one with rare and beautiful plants, flights of colorful birds that can cloud the sky, and curious and fearsome wildlife, from crocodiles and alligators, to panthers and more recently, massive constricting snakes. But this landscape has been under siege.

As drought, high temperatures, and wildfires take a toll on Southwest landscapes, they increasingly are being accompanied by financial calamity for economies built around national parks.

Across the National Park System, more than $100 million a year is spent in a bid to control invasive plant and animal species, though the actual cost in lost recreational opportunities is difficult to measure.

Our intrepid correspondent, having following the Santa Fe National Historic Trail from Santa Fe, New Mexico, east to Franklin, Missouri, now reverses course and heads back west on the stretch of trail known as the Mountain Route.

Two threads from the same fabric, the Santa Fe National Historic Trail actually is two trails separated at times by hundreds of miles. While pioneers used oxen to pull their wagons, our correspondent turned to the couple hundred horses under her vehicle's hood to traverse the trail.

Aquatic ecologist Danny Boiano loves fish, grew up fishing, studied fish in Yosemite National Park for his master’s degree. So is it odd that today Boiano’s National Park Service job centers around eradicating entire fish populations?

The National Park Service plans for a warmer, drier future but record drought in the Southwest shows there’s no time to spare. National Parks Traveler is producing a multi-part series of articles this summer exploring the effects of climate change on the National Park System’s landscapes, wildlife, economics, and planning.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park is an atypical national park. The massive, thousand-year-old pueblos blend mysteriously into the towering canyon walls. Mystery and curiosity are among the top reasons thousands of visitors make the intentional trek far from paved roads deep into the Navajo Nation.

A party boat in the form of a double-decker, Mississippi-style sternwheeler isn’t what comes to mind when I think of transport to Georges Island in Halifax Harbour. But it is indeed a reservation aboard the Harbour Queen that gets me there. And yet, maybe it’s the perfect conveyance to help celebrate the opening of the island to the public after a 55 year wait. While Georges was declared a National Historic Site in 1965, it wasn’t until 2020 when Parks Canada installed a new wharf on the north shore that it became accessible.

Washington's National Park Fund has been working with staff at Mount Rainier National Park to make the park more welcoming and inviting to the Pacific Northwest's Latinx community.

Rising 30 feet and more above the blue waters of Lake Powell, the gray, crusty band of mussel shells reflects an invasion that has swept through the ecosystem practically unimpeded.

Unless climate change is abated, warmer temperatures, less snowpack and associated spring runoff, and a longer growing season by the end of the century will alter the appearance of Yellowstone National Park, according to a rigorous analysis of past, present, and predicted climate conditions for the Greater Yellowstone Area.