Sacred mounds built thousands of years ago are under threat of erosion next to a changing Mississippi River in Effigy Mounds National Monument.

Two weeks out from the presidential election, it's time to take stock of the national parks and the National Park Service, but it's not all political fallout. There will be time to assess that, but now there are some matters that have given me some pause.

In the late 1970s, wolf biologist Diane K. Boyd tracked a lone female wolf named Kishinena in country around the North Fork of the Flathead River in Montana. As Doug Chadwick writes in his Foreward to this book, most people think wolves were first introduced in the mid-1990s in Yellowstone National Park, but by that time Diane and her colleagues had been studying them on the North Fork country, in Glacier National Park and surroundings, for well over a decade.