If you visit Bryce Canyon National Park in winter, and there is snow on the ground and blue sky overhead, the one hike you must take is the Queen's Garden-Navajo Loop Trail.

'Tis is the season for counting birds as the 111th annual Christmas Bird Count rolls out across the country, and more than a few national parks are welcoming you to count birds.

For an overwhelming majority of visitors, national parks offer spectacular vistas that provide surroundings perfect for enjoyment, contemplation, and relaxation. For a small, yet significant, number, though, the parks are where they decide to die.

How do you hoist and move a 25-ton cannon? These days, the answer usually involves a crane or other heavy equipment, but those aren't options at one of the most remote national parks in the country. The staff at Dry Tortugas National Park solved the problem with a combination of old-fashioned technology, ingenuity and teamwork.

The tarantula's fearsome appearance belies the fact that this docile, reclusive creature is nearly harmless.

Not far from the bright lights and card tables of Las Vegas there's a stretch of desert so relished by developers that street names were attached to blueprints of suburbia. Now, though, that landscape and its unique collection of Ice Age fossils is being promoted as the country's next national monument.

If you've never been to the East Entrance of Grand Canyon National Park, you owe yourself the trip. Naturally, the canyon from this South Rim vista is expansive, and there are wonderful views of the Painted Desert, too, but equally alluring is the Desert View Watchtower. This rustic edifice, built in 1932 by architect Mary Colter, sits hunched against the very rim of the canyon, a lonely outpost, built to be a place for contemplation.

The Ahwahnee's 1943-1945 stint as the United States Naval Special Hospital was certainly one of the most interesting episodes in its long and storied history.

Two national monuments, separated by only about 15 miles, provide some great history on 16th, 17th, and 18th century colonization of Florida. Here's the Traveler's checklist to help you plan your visits.

A tool handy for national park visitors, educators, and researchers is blossoming under a collaboration between the National Park Service and a non-profit organization focused on preserving cultural sites, one that showcases the power, depth, and usefulness of the Internet.

The name is forbidding but the history is compelling along the centuries-old route known as the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man). Two new hiking trails and exhibits allow visitors to sample short sections of the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail, which extends for 404 miles across parts of Texas and New Mexico.

Most teachers would be happy to keep their students as far away from scorpions as possible. But not Cameron Elementary School teacher Sheryl Marino.

Mike Keller has studied Yellowstone’s thermal features and volcanic underworld since high school, and when he’s not busy directing operations for the park’s concessioner, he spends most of his free time geyser gazing. As the president of the Geyser Observation and Study Association, Mr. Keller possesses both an extreme passion and an extensive knowledge about all things geothermal.

With the Republican Party sending various signals that it won't work with President Obama, would the president be willing to return the favor by protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from energy development by declaring it a national monument? A group of senators certainly hopes so.

A typical American shells out more to see one movie than their annual income taxes contribute to the National Park Service, according to the "taxpayer's receipt" calculated by a non-profit think tank.

With the federal budget in dire shape due to the sour economy, celebrities are coming forward to express their concern over the potential of sweeping budget cuts to national parks.

The first viewing of the Grand Canyon by Europeans is usually credited to a party of Spaniards led by Don Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas in 1540, but the location of that event has never been confirmed. Now the discovery of an old inscription carved in sandstone offers an intriguing clue

Haleakala National Park and other Hawaiian sites provide nesting habitat for the Hawaiian petrel, an endangered pelagic bird that faces many hazards, including the perilous flight that fledglings must make from nest to sea.

Decades of "bleaching" events and diseases have been devastating to coral reefs surrounding national parks in the Caribbean and off South Florida, so much so that the losses are akin to "losing the Redwoods."

It seemed like a good idea at the time.