Despite years of promises, diversity among the superintendent ranks of the National Park Service remains lacking.

Scenery and history come together at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, which preserves a western passageway cut by Daniel Boone and fought over during the Civil War.

At Metra Electric’s 111th St. Pullman station in Chicago, three privately owned railcars from a bygone era are parked on one side of the platform while plain jane commuter trains whiz by on the other side.

A troubling sign of climate change are the nearly 600 miles of rivers in Alaska's Brooks Range that have been stained orange.

Somewhere in the ten miles from the visitor center at Mississippi National River and Recreation Area in St. Paul, Minnesota, across the river to Minneapolis, I crossed an invisible line. It would have risen like a wall of ice, perhaps a mile high, just 15,000 years ago – a line demarcating the extent of the last glaciation.

Halfway through a one-hour set, the Arrowhead Jazz Band stops for 15 minutes and invites questions from the audience. It’s an unusual move from an even more unusual band made up partly of park rangers.

It's been said that the night skies are the other half of the National Park System. Well, maybe it should be viewed as one "third," with another third being the surface of the park system and another the underwater resources.

Badlands National Park in South Dakota is a treasure trove of fossils. Walk in any direction and you may find a fossil bone shard or tooth or seed or even a dung beetle ball (yes, seriously). If you are really lucky, you might even discover a fossil skull. But, how do you identify fossils out there when everything looks the same? And what should you do with that fossil find?

Flies pester you as you walk through Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and recent studies have demonstrated just how many species of flies you might encounter on your hike.

Local advocacy groups are fighting efforts to locate a large data processing center next to Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia.

Thirty-two-million years after a saber-tooth cat stalked prey on the landscape known today as Badlands National Park, a 7-year-old girl working for her latest Junior Ranger badge spotted the animal's fossilized skull protruding from a hillside.

Wildfires, drought, sea level rise, more frequent and intense storms, and warming oceans are sometimes destroying and occasionally improving or allowing cultural resources to emerge at national park units.

Though Costa Rica wins praise for its commitment to healthy ecosystems, a look beneath the surface reveals struggles to keep faith with the nation’s conservation ideal.

They have been called the Sinagua – The People Without Water. Spanish explorers referred to this region as Sierra Sin Agua, “mountains without water,” and archaeologists adopted the name.

The National Park Service has a toxic problem that no one wants to talk about, and that’s a problem.

The namesakes of this place are disturbingly absent, their names erased. Yet, the trails somehow bring the Chiricahua leaders to mind, as if, according to Apache mysticism and worldview, the land itself still tells their stories.

Can artificial intelligence safely create a vacation to Yellowstone National Park? Don't bet on it.

Cuts in visitor interpretation and education, not enough money for employee pay raises or to replace jobs lost by past years' cuts, and less money for replacing worn out equipment are troubling areas of President Biden's FY25 budget request for the National Park Service, which continues to see visitation rise and additional units for the agency to manage.

Underground in Mammoth Cave National Park, John-Paul Hodnett gazes at his rocky surroundings that are studded with fossils millions of years old and admits that, “For me, it is literally a kid in a candy store situation."

There’s a four-armed saguaro living on the western edge of Tucson that has one broken arm, one newborn arm, one thick older arm pointing to the Arizona sky and one slender younger arm pointing towards the Sonoran Desert soil.