A 35-year-old Massachusetts man exploring Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming was seriously mauled by a grizzly bear but is expected to fully recover.

You could be excused if you only chose to spend a couple of hours touring Badlands National Park from your car, since there aren’t many trails and most of what you can see is from the road and overlooks. That would be a shame, though, because there is plenty to do in and around Badlands for a good three-day stay.

On an uninhabited island off the coast of Southern California where pygmy mammoths once roamed, I trekked along sandstone cliffs and up a steep footpath into one of the rarest native pine forests in the United States. Dwarfed and gnarled by the fierce winds, the endangered evergreens with freakishly large pine cones were so mesmerizing that I almost missed seeing a fox that is found nowhere else on earth.

A 23-year-old Colorado man who climbed Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park last weekend died in a fall while descending.