Winter long has been regarded as the slow season for national park visits, and that's a good thing if you prefer to have the parks to yourself. With most travelers confined by school schedules to the summer months, and many convinced winter is a bad time to be outdoors, you can savor the best of the parks from coast to coast in winter. Here are some snapshots of wintry fun in the parks that bear that out.

Counting sea turtles is no easy task when you're scanning the ocean looking for them, but that's just what the National Ocean Service's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and the National Marine Fisheries Service did earlier this fall.

Mountain goats have been described as "supreme mountaineers," can appear somewhat professorial in appearance with their goatees, and have uncanny agility. Now, in the tragic wake of a hiker being fatally gored in the Olympic National Park backcountry, some might also describe them as killers.

A history-making and much debated project to restore the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State has taken a big step forward. A contract has been awarded to remove the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams in an ambitious, and expensive, effort to reverse decades of environmental damage to an important river system.