We look to national park vacations as a healthy lifestyle ingredient, one filled with fun, laughter, and lasting memories. Not on our agendas is worrying about mercury in the fish we pull from mountain streams, droughts that would beach our boats, or industrial and agricultural pollution that impairs the very waters we enjoy in the parks. Sadly, those issues aren’t foreign to the National Park System.

With Memorial Day Weekend still two weeks off, more and more facilities at Fire Island National Seashore are reopening after repairs necessitated by last fall's Hurricane Sandy.

Barrier islands are creatures of the seas, cast about and pushed around by the waves and currents. Proof of that can be found today at Fire Island National Seashore along the New York coast, where the barrier island it sets on was cut in two as well as shoved closer to the Long Island mainland by Hurricane Sandy.

Work to recover Fire Island National Seashore in New York from Hurricane Sandy continues, but it's too early to plan a Memorial Day Weekend escape there, according to national seashore officials.