For most, a national park vacation entails booking a room in a lodge or reserving a spot in a campground, arriving at the park and checking in, and then spending a number of days hiking, paddling, or traveling the park to view various sites, whether they focus on waterfalls, geysers, deep forests, museums, or cultural focal points. Here are some alternatives to that approach, some pricey, some not so.

There was a news event earlier this week that seemed to sail under the radar, but it's something to keep an eye on. A large coalition of groups has come together to lobby for the waters that flow through Everglades National Park, the parks and lakeshores that dot the Great Lakes and touch the Chesapeake Bay, as well as many other watery ecosystems across the country.

Paper topographic maps are being shoved aside. The digital US Topo maps now available free on the Web perform like traditional USGS 7.5-minute quadrangle paper maps while offering important technical advantages, including data layers that permit on-screen geographic analysis.

Plans by the state of Indiana to build a hardened stone seawall along a portion of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore don't sit well with lakeshore officials, who cite a number of problems, including the lack of permits from the National Park Service and requisite environmental studies.