For most, a national park vacation entails booking a room in a lodge or reserving a spot in a campground, arriving at the park and checking in, and then spending a number of days hiking, paddling, or traveling the park to view various sites, whether they focus on waterfalls, geysers, deep forests, museums, or cultural focal points. Here are some alternatives to that approach, some pricey, some not so.

A "sister park" agreement between Grand Teton National Park and an Argentine national park is building more than good will -- it's leading to more durable hiking trails in the Austral Andes.

It's fall. There's a crispness in the air, trees are painting the landscape with their colorful leaves, elk are in the rut. And in some national parks, hunters are being dispatched to tamp down those elk populations. Is that the right way to approach wildlife management in the National Park System?

What's ho-hum in one park, when it comes to bikes, is decidedly more controversial in another. Which should make the coming few weeks interesting.