As our lodging experts, David and Kay Scott, continue on their 2010 odyssey across the National Park System, they get to sample some of the best lodging, food, and coffee there is to be had. This dispatch came from the Bluffs Lodge along the Blue Ridge Parkway
They'll be rounding them up and moving them out Saturday morning in Grand Teton National Park, which means you could encounter traffic delays near Moran Junction for a while.
Before Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan came out with their view of the National Park System, many others were turning their cameras on the parks. One collection I've found that is worthy of space in your DVD collection is Treasures of America's National Parks, a six-disk collection of some of the system's icons.
Florida panther kittens dosed with dewormers. Black-footed ferrets inoculated against plague. Sterilizing horses at Cape Lookout National Seashore and elk at Rocky Mountain National Park. And now Yellowstone National Park bison that could be vaccinated against brucellosis via air gun.
Who says those automated phone answering systems, the ones that incessantly ask you to push this number for that information or that information for this tidbit, can't be helpful? A new one operating at Dinosaur National Monument helps you relatively quickly learn when you might be able to land a permit to float the Green or Yampa rivers in the park.
Ever-present concerns that bison from Yellowstone National Park might spread a deadly disease to Montana cattle has park biologists considering the use of an air-gun-delivered vaccine for the bison.
Let's see how much you know about the intricate business of passing along genes in our national parks. Answers are at the end. If we catch you peeking, we'll make you write on the whiteboard 100 times: "Bacterial conjugation, which is sometime erroneously characterized as the bacterial equivalent of sexual reproduction, cannot succeed unless the donor bacterium hosts a plasmid, transposon, or similar genetic element that is conjugative or mobilizable."
There is a pressing need to protect large swathes of ocean environments much like national parks preserve terrestrial landscapes, according to nearly 250 marine scientists from around the world.