To say this is the slow season in many national parks is an understatement. However, if you're flexible and curious about off-season vistas, the slow season can carry many benefits. Such as half-off on lodging in some parks.
It's going on three decades since you last could drive your rig to the old Olympic Hot Springs Resort and automobile campground in Olympic National Park. And now park officials are proposing to erase the last vestiges of that asphalt road.
Shenandoah National Park in late spring and early summer can be a glorious place, with wildflowers popping up in the meadows, songbirds returning to the mountainous setting, streams running full, and warm breezes.
In light of the weak economy, should it be any surprise that lodging deals are starting to materialize in the national parks? At Glacier National Park, for instance, you can find lodging discounts up to 40 percent per night for visits this coming June.
Normally when you hear "22 below" you think of places like Fraser, Colorado, or Ice Box Canyon, North Dakota, not Tennessee. But that was the temperature near the top of Great Smoky Mountains National Park the other morning.
Yellowstone National Park entered the new year shaking and rattling. Fortunately, there hasn’t been any real rolling just yet. But over at Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Redoubt Volcano has been going through its own gyrations, and volcanologists suspect it just might erupt any time now. Against that backdrop, if you want to see volcanics in action, or signs thereof, the National Park System has many opportunities for you.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in a move that repudiates the Bush administration's energy policies, on Wednesday scuttled a series of controversial oil and gas leases near national parks in Utah.
Scientists are continuing to take the pulse of Redoubt Volcano in Lake Clark National Park and Preserve 24 hours a day. While more than a week ago they were saying an eruption was "imminent," this week they've stepped away from that pronouncement somewhat.