It wasn't much more than a goat path. Or, more appropriate for the setting, a desert bighorn sheep path. With the wind swirling about us and a lapis lazuli sky overhead, we played connect-the-dots with the small stacked cairns that looped across the sandstone amphitheater and took us higher and higher. This was Canyonlands National Park at its best.

In years past there have been schemes to divert water out of the Yampa River, the last major undammed tributary in the Colorado River system, for use on Colorado's Front Range. None has ever been approved. Now, however, a Colorado man is seeking approval to divert 55,000 acre-feet of water a year from the Green River just upstream of Dinosaur National Monument to the Front Range.

Growth in the population of the humpback chub, an endangered fish in the Colorado River system, has the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposing that the species be upgraded to "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

While the majority of us and our cameras visit a national park to capture The Big Picture, it's often the smaller things we should remember to photograph in order to flesh out our national park photographic story. Contributing photographer and writer Rebecca Latson explains why these little things are important contributors to The Big Picture and how you can capture great shots of those little things using one or more techniques she details in this month's article.