Mammoth Cave National Park Superintendent Sarah Craighead has announced that all river users in the park will have to wear personal flotation devices at all times when on Green River or Nolin River.

The spine of the Appalachian Range runs north and south through the Mid- and South-Atlantic states, a rumpled stretch of mountains that long has provided a corridor for species. One uninvited species, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, arrived in 1951, and since then has attacked hemlock forests once commonplace in Shenandoah National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since 1988 the National Park Service has been battling the tiny insect, and has met with varying success in those three parks. While much work remains to be done, there is optimism some of the hemlock stands will be saved. In the following stories, we take a look at the campaign.

Travel in Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, and Shenandoah national parks, and no doubt some others, was dicey Friday morning due to a winter storm that was coating roads with ice and snow.

If you find yourself homebound for one reason or other this winter, there are two websites worth exploring for a quick national park fix: the National Park Service’s Treasured Landscapes site (which showcases art collections telling America’s stories) and the Open Parks Network (“350,000 cultural heritage objects and 1.5 million pages of gray literature...”). That’s a lot of information.