Getting answers from the leadership of the National Park Service to questions of public interest has become more and more difficult, as the agency increasingly takes a no-comment approach to challenging, uncomfortable, or accountability issues.

“Do you all like spooky, scary stories?” ranger Sarah Bachan asks as we stand among the cobwebs in the cellar of the Philadelphia house where macabre literary genius Edgar Allan Poe once lived. “I assume you’re here because you do.”

The Laurel Falls Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the most popular in the park, and has had past problems with too many people wanting to experience the trail, not enough parking, and resource impacts. Now the National Park Service has settled on a plan to improve the visitor access there.

Earlier in October, Yurok condor A6 (Me-new-kwek’, "I am bashful or shy"), along with several other condors in the new population, fed on a poacher-killed elk within Redwood National Park in the Bald Hills of Humboldt County. In a routine autumn health check conducted a few days later, five out of eight birds were found to have concerning levels of lead in their blood.