Last month we let you take a peek "behind the scenes" with Steven Bumgardner and his crew at Yosemite Nature Notes as they were working on a segment about glaciers in Yosemite National Park. Well, here's the resulting product, which is a great primer on the park's glaciers.

Is there any purer method of landscape painting than plein air? If there's any doubt, visit Zion National Park this week to watch some of the best landscape artists at work in the 2nd annual "In the Footsteps Of Thomas Moran" contest.

During my recent hike in Shenandoah National Park along the Appalachian Trail, I came upon a tight crook in the trail that carried Ivy Creek downhill amid a flurry of gold, red, orange and yellow leaves of fall. There can be no more spectacular setting that the hardwood forests of the East. Unless it's set ablaze by the pastel daubs of spring wildflowers in places such as Glacier, Saquaro or Canyonlands national parks.

In a precedent-setting move, the U.S. Public Health Service has agreed to take over operation of the Yosemite Medical Clinic, which was threatened with closure at the end of the year.