As National Parks Traveler this month embarks on its 17th year, it's time to take stock of where we are today, and where we have to go.

In August 2005, the Traveler was launched as a means to generate ideas revolving around parks, the environment, and wildlife to pitch to magazines. That first week, some 400 readers visited the site, an impressive number in that there was no marketing campaign, no announcement.

While the print magazine world soon thereafter went through a drastic transition, shrinking in the face of Internet advertising, readers continued to head to the Traveler to find the latest news on national parks and protected areas.

Today, as we look ahead, annual readership and listenership to the Traveler website and its podcasts has grown to 3 million and more. Content has grown extensively, with features focused on both travel and issues in the parks and daily news reports from around the park system. We've expanded into Canada, and our weekly podcasts are ranked among the top 2.5 percent of the world's 2,590,349 podcasts, according to Listen Notes.

We're producing a growing number of special reports on parks, touching on topics such as wildfire in the parks, the health of the Colorado River and parks along its path, invasive plant and animal species, and oil exploration in the parks. And the Traveler is the only media outlet that produces an annual Threatened and Endangered Parks package.

Looking ahead, we need to expand our coverage from across the park system, both with the written word as well as via more multi-media productions, with more podcasts generated in the parks themselves. There are stories of exploration and inspiration that deserve coverage, and more analysis of not only how the National Park Service is funded, but how those funds are spent. That type of coverage is not inexpensive; our goal is to raise $400,000. If each of our monthly readers contributed just $10, we'd raise four times that goal.

The one thing we keep hearing time and again from readers, National Park Service staff, NGOs, and others in the outdoor industry is how valuable the Traveler is, what a strong role it plays, and how it can’t go "dark," aka shut down. 

If you value our editorially independent content, if you agree it would be a sad day if the Traveler didn't exist to report on national parks and protected areas, support us with a donation today. We are not part of the federal government, we have no shareholders, no deep pockets behind our operations dictating our coverage. We rely greatly on readers and listeners to provide the operating funds that enable coverage from Alaska to Hawaii and east to the Caribbean.

Since the Traveler transitioned to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization in 2016, we've had nearly 1,000 donations from individual supporters. Those donations, along with support from our sponsors, have enabled us to grow our coverage to where we are today.

With your support, we can soar past 1,000 donations and continue to expand our content and make it more robust, more informative, more helpful. Because we don't charge readers to access our content, because we don't inundate you with pop-up ads and other obnoxious web tools to raise money, please donate today so we can continue to keep you informed on not just the wonders of the parks, but how they're being managed, and what they are threatened by.