Giving threatened and rare plants a chance to thrive. Keeping the big wheel turning at a historic mill. Sharing the photographic history of the Blue Ridge Parkway with the world. These are just a few of the projects the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation’s Community of Stewards will bring to fruition in 2019.

Who really does manage most national park lodgings? For the big operations in places such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Shenandoah, corporations. Not surprisingly, while many of the 500 management contracts administered by the National Park Service, such as providing firewood or operating a bicycle rental operation, are relatively straightforward, those for large commercial facilities such as lodging in Yosemite or Yellowstone are extremely complicated. David and Kay Scott bring some clarity to this issue in their latest article pertaining to lodging in the National Park System.

There is a place where you can escape the crowds at Acadia National Park and find solitude in the dramatic setting of coastal Maine. Contributing writer Kim O'Connell was fortunate enough to immerse herself in Isle au Haut for five glorious days.

While an investigation has cleared Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Christine Lehnertz of any wrongdoing in managing the park, it has placed the National Park Service in a hard to defend position by leaving her accusers in the park.

Kids of all ages love dinosaurs. As a six-year-old, I remember playing with plastic dinosaurs with names like Brontosaurus, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaurus Rex and imagining about 100 million years ago when those big reptiles walked the earth. It kept me occupied for hours. A recent visit to Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming and Dinosaur National Monument in Utah rekindled my childhood dinosaur interest.

The grizzly bear population has steadily grown in Grand Teton National Park and the surrounding Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem over the last several decades, providing visitors to the area ever increasing opportunities to view these magnificent creatures in their natural habitat. The presence of grizzlies adds to a robust population of black bears and, when combined with large numbers of park visitors, has increased the potential for conflicts between humans and bears. This has led to a variety of challenges for land and wildlife managers.

What the Eastern part of our great country lacks in iconic landscape parks - Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or Yosemite - it makes up for with important historic and cultural parks that are equally as iconic in their own way. As the only national park unit dedicated to American painting, Weir Farm fits that bill.

Olympic National Park encompasses scenery ranging from rugged beaches to temperate rainforests to craggy peaks. Contributing photographer and writer Rebecca Latson traveled to this large national park in January during the latter part of the most recent government shutdown for a little winter photography. Although seasonal road closures as well as storm damage, snow buildup, and lack of personnel during the shutdown kept Rebecca from seeing everything she wanted, the images she captured and the photo tips she provides should whet your own photographic appetite for a visit to this national park any time of the year.

Many travelers (readers of the Traveler excepted) mistakenly believe commercial facilities in the national parks – lodging, dining, and retail - are operated by the federal government. While national park officials have ultimate oversight on things such as pricing, these facilities are operated by private companies that bid for the right to rent rooms, operate dining facilities, sell T-shirts, and offer specified activities such as trail rides and guided tours. NPS rangers continue to staff visitor centers and offer interpretive activities, but nearly all commercial activities are handled by the private sector.

The rain has been doing its magic in Southern California. Green has returned to the fire-blackened Santa Monica Mountains, fresh growth emerging from the ash of the biggest fire ever to sweep the 154,000-acre park that’s hemmed by the Pacific’s white beaches and the sprawl of greater Los Angeles. Tiny seedlings dot many slopes, looking in the distance like a green peach fuzz, and brilliant lime grasses, invasive as well as native, stretch beneath craggy mountains that still wear the charcoal face left by November’s ferocious Woolsey Fire.

Most of us spend our time looking up at our mountains. Often we reach a vista, or sometimes a peak, moving forward while jutting our chins toward the sky. The rare occasion is one where we get to look down at the majesty.

Lionfish. Impossibly beautiful, incredibly invasive. Arriving on Florida's shores in the 20th century, the initial population influx of lionfish probably resulted from an accidental or intentional release from a hobbyist fish tank.

How often is a new lodge added to the National Park System? Not very often, as David and Kay Scott point out in recounting the new facilities they've encountered while working on their guidebook to national park lodges.

My husband and I went from 0 to 11,000 ft in less than 24 hours. That was not my intention. We planned a trip from Florida to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for one of my freelance writing projects, and originally scheduled a day in Denver (at 5,280 feet in elevation) to acclimate. Frontier Airlines had a different idea.

Lodging can be hard to come by in the National Park System depending on the season you want to book a room for. It's also a little harder because some lodges have disappeared from the parks down through the decades. Do you remember the Echo Bay Resort? David and Kay Scott take a look back at some of those places.

An agreement to produce a guide to national park lodges turned into a 20-year odyssey for David and Kay Scott as they crisscrossed the National Park System time and again to update that guide.

Since 1977, a nonprofit organization has developed one of the world's most successful wildlife rescue programs for orphaned African wildlife. This is the story of the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Though the National Park Service makes up only one-tenth of 1 percent of the federal budget, it takes up a much larger share of the public imagination. The parks are also prominent in media coverage on the federal government. That’s especially true during one of our regular government shutdowns, when the media tells stories of closed parks, disappointed visitors, vandals, and piles of trash.

Ask people to name the most iconic buildings in the United States, and they will probably rattle off some usual suspects—structures like the Chrysler Building in New York City, Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, or the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles. Ask them to describe the national parks, however, and chances are architecture won’t be the first thing that leaps to mind. Yet the national parks also contain many notable works of architecture, ranging from rustic and rough-hewn to modern and sleek.

In this provocative essay, Dr. Alfred Runte examines, and questions, the recent transfer of public lands to Native American governments.