If you're planning a drive through Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park this week, you might want to postpone it, as park crews are planning to burn about 700 acres of fields in the cove.
Winter long has been regarded as the slow season for national park visits, and that's a good thing if you prefer to have the parks to yourself. With most travelers confined by school schedules to the summer months, and many convinced winter is a bad time to be outdoors, you can savor the best of the parks from coast to coast in winter. Here are some snapshots of wintry fun in the parks that bear that out.
Enjoying winter in the national parks doesn't mean traveling west to the Rockies or High Sierra. There are more than enough wintry adventures in the east at parks such as Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, and as Randy Johnson explains in the following article, even along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Reading about the Civil War is one thing, walking across the battlefields is something entirely different. As you follow the rise and fall of the landscape, see the forests, the cannons, the earthworks, it's not hard to imagine the terrible fighting that took place 150 years ago.
Another dozen black-footed ferrets now call Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota home, the result of plague preventing their release elsewhere in the West.