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Featured Stories

Some stories, whether focused on travel or a specific issue, deserve a longer treatment.

Essential Paddling Guide: Paddling The Buffalo, America's First National River

Massive, water-stained bluffs soaring over 500 feet above your canoe or kayak; the highest waterfall between the Appalachians and the Rockies; potential campsites on gravel bars along over a hundred miles of clear, free-flowing river; all this and more make the Buffalo National River a worthy addition to your list of must-do float trips.

Essential Paddling Guide: Keeping Our Paddling Waters Clean And Healthy

We look to national park vacations as a healthy lifestyle ingredient, one filled with fun, laughter, and lasting memories. Not on our agendas is worrying about mercury in the fish we pull from mountain streams, droughts that would beach our boats, or industrial and agricultural pollution that impairs the very waters we enjoy in the parks. Sadly, those issues aren’t foreign to the National Park System.

Essential Paddling Guide: Row Your Boat, Deep In The Canyon With O.A.R.S.

I've often said that if you've seen one Grand Canyon you've seen them all. Well, that does make some sense because, after all, there's really just only one in the world. And deep in the bottom of this desert chasm lays the main culprit of erosion, the granddaddy of all American waterways: the Colorado River. It's the big ticket, the plum, the one that challenges all paddlers and rowers.

Traveler's Essential Paddling Guide To The National Parks

Paddling down a river or across a lake in a national park setting is truly a wonderful, memorable experience, one that carries thrills and life-long memories. You can retrace the historic 19th-century journey of John Wesley Powell, or land on a lodgepole pine-studded shore where camp is set under swaying trees and the evening brings a vivid sunset.

Traveler's View: Don't Let The Sportsmen's Heritage And Recreational Enhancement Act Undermine National Parks

The U.S. Senate should strip from the Sportmen's Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act an amendment that would bar the National Park Service from better managing motorboat access in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways.

Photo History From National Park Lookouts Shows Landscape Changes Over 70+ Years

There's an intriguing page within the vast nps.gov domain that opens a wonderful portal of history, one that allows us to compare today with yesteryear. The site, within the National Park Service Fire and Aviation Management section, compares historic photos taken from fire lookouts in the National Park System with today's landscapes.

A View From the Overlook: “How Do You Get A Permanent Job With The NPS?”

“How Do You Get A Permanent Job With The NPS?” This is a frequently asked question, Neighbors! No doubt about it, the NPS is a feel-good agency that many people would like to join, and they are not easily dissuaded. Unfortunately, the answer to that question is complicated, ambiguous and fluid.
  • By PJ Ryan - January 29th, 2014 3:00am

Can The Tourism Industry Help Save Africa's Wild Elephants?

Tourism is big business in Africa, and one of the major draws is the wildlife in the continent's national parks. By almost any measure, however, the future of wild elephants in Africa is bleak unless major strides can be made against poaching fueled by the demand for ivory. Now a new campaign called S.A.F.E, (Safeguarding a Future for Africa’s Elephants) hopes to mobilize the tourism industry to help save the elephants.

Plowshares Into Swords – The Story Behind A Cannon At Saratoga National Historical Park

The National Park Service manages dozens of sites of famous battles, and although every area has a unique story, many of them have something in common: cannons. You may find them perched on redoubts, still facing a long-vanquished enemy, or resting sedately inside a museum, and perhaps you've wondered how all that ordnance managed to survive for all these years.

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