Badlands sprawled out in every direction I looked. East, west, south, or north, from the Ridgeline Trail in the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park it was easy to understand how the "badlands" term was coined.

Predictions on how colorful the fall foliage will be for any given year is always a bit of a dice roll, but the forecasts for the current season in eastern national parks were generally promising. So...how accurate were those educated guesses? I took a drive on a short section of the Blue Ridge Parkway this week to find ou

True, the year-end holidays are a ways off yet, but the lights on the National Christmas Tree in Washington will be turned on December 6, and if you want to be there in person it's time to start planning.

Though it's surrounded by development, cross into Shenandoah National Park and you'll find a surprisingly large amount of acreage that is managed as wilderness and which appears much as it did 100, or even 200 years ago. This weekend you can celebrate that wild setting during the park's annual "Wilderness Weekend."