How much have the national parks changed since you were a kid? Have they changed? When you return to a park that you haven't been to in decades, is it like returning to an old friend, or visiting someplace totally alien?
Though covering fewer than 36,000 acres -- and most folks simply gaze down on most of that acreage -- Bryce Canyon National Park carries the impact of a park much, much larger.
To have a palette as dazzling as Bryce Canyon National Park in your backyard is tough to beat. Marion Littlefield gets to see the park in so many moods and seasons, and fortunately most of the time he has his camera with him.
This recent shot of Natural Bridge shows that the park is having a pretty good winter, snow-wise.
Sweeping panoramas, fluted slot canyons and fossilized sand dunes are among the subjects that Jon Ortner brings into focus with Canyon Wilderness of the Southwest, an expansive coffee table book.
It was just about a year ago that I wrote about the invasion of "GPS Rangers" into the national parks. Back then I wasn't so keen on this hand-held electronic tour gizmo, but there does seem to be a hidden blessing in it.
Marion Littlefield lives in an enviable place -- right outside Bryce Canyon National Park. As a result, he gets to photograph the park in all of its moods and settings. With the Bryce Canyon Winter Festival on tap for Presidents Weekend, it's good to know that there will be plenty of snow on hand.
It took more than a year, but crews at Bryce Canyon National Park have been able to reopen the Navajo Loop Trail, which had been closed by a rock slide in May 2006.
Bryce Canyon is in Marion Littlefield's backyard, which provides him plenty of opportunity to capture the park's many moods. In this photo, he's caught the early morning light from a sunrise late in September.
With Fall officially under way, it won't be too long before the season's most spectacular colors are daubed, stroked, and splashed across the national park system. The good news is that you haven't missed the peak yet. The bad news is that if you don't already have a room reservation, you probably won't find a vacancy in any of the well-known fall foliage parks.
The other day a federal judge tossed out a lawsuit that aimed to open Surprise Canyon in Death Valley National Park to ORV traffic. That post generated a lot of debate over the propriety of a road in that rugged canyon. Those who filed the lawsuit claimed they had a right to the road thanks to a Civil War-era statute known as R.S. 2477. Well, Death Valley isn't the only park that could suffer from this statute.