The Yellowstone region was known for millennia by Indigenous people, who would frequent the area in search of game and other resources—they had been in the area for at least 11,000 years! Obsidian from the region was an especially prized commodity, and artifacts made from obsidian taken from Yellowstone’s numerous lava flows have been found as far east as the Ohio River Valley.

A century-old cabin on the Green River shoreline in Dinosaur National Monument is being restored thanks to funding from the Great American Outdoors Act.

President Biden on Tuesday captured a poignant chapter of U.S. history when he designated the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, which protects three historic sites in Illinois and Mississippi that were central to Emmett Till’s racially motivated murder, the acquittal of his murderers, and the subsequent activism by his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, that helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.

Work is underway in Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas to plug two orphaned oil wells, work that was made possible with $550,000 from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.