In the beginning, national parks were mostly about scenery — not entirely because some early parks like Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake featured unusual marvels of the natural world. But the focus was on scenic beauty and providing opportunities for visitors to enjoy it. From those earliest days wildlife, particularly big critters like bears and elk, were one of the attractions in some parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite where they were on “display” at, for instance, the Yellowstone garbage dumps. Wildlife protection was an afterthought if a thought at all in the establishment and management of national parks. George Melendez Wright changed this, at least for a while.

A library of books has been written about John Muir, many of which mention Robert Underwood Johnson, but not many adequately describe his long collaboration with Muir. In this book, Dean King remedies that oversight. Muir’s life story and his contributions to the preservation of what is now Yosemite National Park have often been chronicled and King presents the highlights of that story. What King adds to the Muir story is who Robert Underwood Johnson was and what his role and contributions were in helping Muir in his many battles for protection of Yosemite.

Explore the National Park System extensively and not only are you likely to come across some incredible vistas, diverse natural resources, and rich history, but also some incredible meals in the lodge at day's end, or even at the start of your day.

Wild New World is a big book, Big History, and deserves big attention. This is a history we must know.

As nice as those folding park maps you get when driving into a national park are, trying to collect them all and organize them for your road trips can be a challenge, to say the least. sure, you could punch holes in them and organize them in a three-ring binder, but an easier approach to exploring the parks is National Park Maps, a forthcoming atlas of the 63 "national parks."

Jack Loeffler has explored the Southwest landscape and come to see it as “an integrated biogeographical system” in which Indigenous people “developed profound spiritual relationships with their homelands.” Avowing that he is not a religious man in the conventional sense, he has come to a recognition “of the sacred within the flow of Nature,” and this book explains how he got there.

One of historian Douglas Brinkley’s “fortes,” as he puts it, is presidential history, and one project has been to focus on the conservation and environmental records of presidential players in 20th century America.

Bernard Devoto was an overlooked giant in the battle to save public lands in the West from development, according to a new book examining his conservation battles.

Everglades National Park is unique in America’s National Park System in many ways, not least because it is a wetland and did not, when it was proposed in the late 1920s, feature the typical scenic attractions of most units of the system.

Advice to writers is to write what you know, and few know more about America’s recent national park history than the brothers Jarvis.

McKenzie Long is a rock climber, graphic designer, and writer who, inspired by the “contest” over the Bears Ears National Monument where she loved to climb in the Indian Creek basin, decided to visit a select group of national monuments to gain a deeper understanding of why and how they are contested.” Her travels take her from Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument to Hawaii, just beyond which is the vast Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

While most of us memorialize our national park adventures with photographs, a great companion to those images are your thoughts, and Stefanie Payne has given us much room to record those thoughts in The National Parks Journal, Plan & Record Your Trips To The US National Parks.

For park travelers you prefer having a tactile national park guide in their hands, the 3rd edition of Your Guide To The National Parks has arrived with a number of updates, not the least of which is the inclusion of four "new" national parks.

When and why did the idea of national parks emerge in American history? Several creation myths, or “campfire tales” as Diamant and Carr call them, have been embraced by historians and government officials. Among them are the discussion around the campfire at Madison Junction on the Yellowstone Plateau during the 1870 Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition broaching the idea, which was then promoted by Langford on behalf of the Northern Pacific Railroad and resulted in the creation of Yellowstone as the world’s first national park.

I find the title interesting because a requiem is a dirge, an expression of sadness and mourning, often a lamentation for the dead. Yochim knew his time was short, was he in such a mood as he considered the future of the national parks? I think not, but he knew they were jeopardy.