Swirling clouds of blue, white, and pink once rose above the Everglades in drifts that practically stained the sky when herons, egrets, storks, ibises, and spoonbills that numbered in the hundreds of thousands nested in the River of Grass. They took to the sky in giant, whirling clouds of feathers, intent on providing their chicks with enough food to fledge.

One of the best ways to prepare for a national park vacation is to read up on the park you're destined for. With that in mind, here is a great selection of titles to get you ready for your visit to Yosemite National Park.

Visitor and employee safety, transportation, access, and even historic structures all are being jeopardized by the nearly $12 billion backlog in maintenance work that reaches into nearly every corner, forest, and beach of the National Park System. During the past six months, National Parks Traveler's editors and writers have examined the issue of deferred maintenance and its impact on not just on how parks are enjoyed, but how their resources are being impacted.

Fifty years ago, on October 2, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed North Cascades National Park into law. In certain ways, today looks a lot like 1968. American society is struggling with cultural, racial, gender, and class divides. An unpopular president sits in the White House. And public support for the environment is strong.

Craftsmanship flowed through the main building and surrounding cabins the Civilian Conservation Corps built above the Current River in the hill country of southeastern Missouri. But the passage of nearly nine decades has taken a toll on the Big Springs Lodge and Cabins at today's Ozark National Scenic Riverways, where the National Park Service shuttered the buildings four years ago until they could be rehabilitated.

With mid-term elections a small handful of weeks off, senators and congressmen up for election have less time than normal to work on passing legislation. And yet, groups anxious to see passage of a measure that would make a significant down payment on erasing the National Park System's roughly $12 billion deferred maintenance bill are optimistic it will happen by year's end.

The citizens of Minneapolis are coming together to give new life to the riverfront along the Mighty Mississippi. Nearby, old mills are now museums, warehouses are co-op apartments, light transit abounds, and pedestrians walk new trails. This bustling metropolis is looking towards the river, knowing that in order to preserve historic structures in historic areas that have outlived their usefulness, you have to give them new life with a new purpose.

Dude and Guest Ranch Vacations go hand-in-hand, and as ecotourism is becoming more popular than ever, the Dude Ranchers’ Association’s dude and guest ranches stand as the pioneers of green living and green vacations. At a guest ranch you can reconnect with nature in some of the country’s most tranquil, pristine national parks and national forests.

A lack of money, nearly $700 million, has left National Park Service crews are far behind in caring for the maintained landscape of the National Park System, the battlefields, the campgrounds, even the historic orchards that can be found in some parks and the trails that wind through the underground of Mammoth Cave National Park.

By drips and weeps over thousands if not millions of years, beauty is created underground. Here in the subterranean world the moist air and mineral-rich water create castles, not in the sky, but in the caves of the National Park System.

With Tūtū Pele seemingly having come to the end of her latest eruptive run, staff at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park are working to get back to the business of running a national park, not responding to an erupting volcano. But it won't be business as usual at the park now, or for the foreseeable future, as repairing the damage carries a bill of an estimated $100 million, at least, and some areas might never reopen for a long, long time.

They had me surrounded at the border. The border of Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park, that is. And “they” were a dusty herd of bison, moving from one lush meadow of grass to another, with their skittish young in tow.

My friend James, a wildlife guide in Kenya, warned me: “And whatever you do, do not run over a Maasai’s goat.” Check. I never plan on running over animals so I should be fine. “I’m not too worried about that,” I say with a sharp grin. “I’m serious,” he said. “You won’t be able to reason with them if you hit a goat. They’ll tell you it was pregnant and still had generations of goats to give birth to. Even if it was a male.”

In the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, just about an hour shy of the Ohio state line, sit a couple of National Park System units that might not be on your radar. I wouldn’t call them obscure, but being from the West Coast I had not heard of either until my NPS passport led me there a few months ago. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin’s wilderness house at Friendship Hill National Historic Site and Fort Necessity National Battlefield, a small palisade built by then Lt. Colonel George Washington at the very beginning of the French and Indian War, introduced me to history that I was only vaguely familiar with.

In a bid to counter development, a group is working, parcel-by-parcel, to establish a corridor flora and fauna can travel north and south along the Eastern Seaboard.

Photographer Rebecca Latson recently completed a 3-week road trip and move from southeast Texas up to central Washington State. During that time, she visited five national parks. In those parks, she saw some pretty stupid stuff such as litter, people driving faster than the posted speed limit, and poor choices in hiking footwear, to name a few things. Rebecca wrote an article of her observations, which are a good reminder for us all to do some planning and be a little more thoughtful of how we treat our national parks as guests.

From a vast, fascinating underworld in western South Dakota to the mighty Mississippi in Minnesota on down to Florida where "supercolonies" descended on Everglades National park, there is much to see in the National Park System. And Traveler's Essential Park Guide for this fall will point you in the right directions.

“How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, will in the long run tell what kind of people we really are.” These words, spoken by philanthropist Laurance S. Rockefeller, reflect the passion that philanthropists large and small exhibit when they invest in the National Park System. Whether the Congress as a whole embraces that passion remains to be seen.

Dan Wenk, wistful at times and even regretting that his encounters with reporters as Yellowstone National Park's superintendent were soon going to run out, touched on everything from bison and lodging rates in the park to how he was backed into retirement by the Trump administration during a nearly two-hour call that offered a measure of closure to his 43-year National Park Service career.

Once upon a time, passenger trains were the transportation lifeblood of the country. Along the way, they carried countless visitors to Western national parks. Once again Congress' mettle for supporting passenger rail traffic -- Amtrak -- is being tested, and historian Alfred Runte makes an argument for supporting passenger trains.