National Parks Traveler Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Have you ever been to Mammoth Cave National Park? It’s really not that impressive, is it. Sure, it’s more than 425 miles long, but only about 10 miles are open to the public.

Mammoth Cave is indeed a big, dark hole in the ground. And apparently there are a fair number of visitors to the national park in Kentucky who are not impressed with the cave and its underground artworks created by dripstones, stalactites, and stalagmites. In fact, a recent survey ranked Mammoth Cave as the third-most disappointing destination in America.

Really? To get the park’s response, we’re joined today by Molly Schroer, the park’s management analyst. We’ll be back in a minute with Molly.

From Maine to Florida, coastal units of the National Park System are being impacted in various ways by the changing climate. Some of the impacts affect wildlife, some natural resources, and some the human populations who either live in or come to visit these beautiful areas.

At the National Parks Traveler. We’ve been working on a series of stories looking at these changes that are showing up.

In recent shows we’ve discussed impacts to manatees that live in the waters of Everglades and Biscayne national parks as well as Cumberland Island National Seashore, and how sea level rise is impacting salt marshes that are vital for wildlife and which serve as buffers to hurricanes and tropical storms.

At Acadia National Park in Maine, the impacts are materializing in various ways. 

Rainstorms are becoming heavier and more damaging, invasive species such as the Asian shore crab are showing up in the waters of Frenchman Bay, and the number of bird species that winter on Mount Desert Island have decreased.

To take a closer look at these changes, we’re joined by Nick Fisichelli, the president and CEO of the Schoodic Institute, a nonprofit science center based on the national park’s Schoodic Peninsula to discuss some of the impacts that have arrived and the research being done to better understand them. 

Have you ever wanted to scratch beneath the surface of a national park and gain a better understanding of the issues the National Park Service is challenged with? Or to see what research is being conducted, or understand what goals are being chased?

The staff at Grand Teton National Park just released their 2024 Grand Glimpse of the Park and the many issues and challenges park staff, and even visitors, face. To dive into that report, we’re joined by Grand Teton National Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins.

As the National Mammal and a symbol closely tied to the National Park Service and the national parks, bison are highly revered in the United States. But that doesn’t mean they’re free of controversy.

Recently the staff at Yellowstone National Park released the Final Environmental Impact Statement on a bison management plan for the park. The preferred alternative in that plan calls for a bison herd ranging in number between "about 3,500 to 6,000 animals after calving." It also calls for a continuation of the transfer of bison to tribal lands via the Bison Conservation Transfer Program, and continuation of both a "tribal treaty harvest" and public hunting outside the park to regulate numbers.

But is that a good plan? We’re going to discuss that today with Erik Molvar, the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project which long has followed how the Park Service has managed bison in Yellowstone. 

There is so much rich history across the National Park System, from chapters of the Revolutionary War held in parks in the eastern half of the country to stories from the gold rush that stampeded through Alaska during the late 1890s.
 
This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at The National Parks Traveler. I’ve always been fascinated with history. And when you look at parks in the eastern half of the country, the reservoir is so much deeper than in the western half if only for the reason that more was written down.
 
Michael Aday has a similar passion for history, and has a great job to soak in it. He is, after all, the archivist or librarian at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Recently he came out with a book, Letters from the Smokies, which is built around 300 years of written down history that’s held in the park’s archives.

Recently I read “The Wolverine Way”, by Douglas Chadwick. It’s a book from 2012 that really dives into the lives of wolverines, a small mammal with a cantankerous reputation that the US Fish and Wildlife Service late last year announced would be a threatened species. The book is a fascinating biography, if you will, of wolverines. Chadwick has an engaging writing style and Glacier National Park provides a fascinating backdrop for the story, two things that keep the story flowing. 
One thing that he mentions that struck me is how important Glacier National Park is for the wolverines survival. He notes that the surrounding national forests offer much the same habitat that wolverines need, but points out that the national forests don’t provide the same protection from hunting and trapping that national parks do. 
Of course, with wolverines gaining protection under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species, the animals will have the same protections in national forests and other public lands. 
Still, do we sometimes take for granted the protections that national parks provide for species that are either losing habitat elsewhere, or don’t have the same protections from hunting and development that the parks provide? To continue this discussion, we’re joined by Kent Redford, who runs Archipelago Consulting, through which he helps individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation, and Bart Melton and Ryan Valdez from the National Parks Conservation Association. Bart is a senior director of NPCA’s Wildlife Program, while Ryan is the Association’s Senior Director for Conservation Science and Policy. 

Did you know that there are some five and a half million acres of our National Parks that are underwater? There are sunken ships and aircraft. There are remnants of industry and mining. There are coral reefs and underwater caverns.
The Submerged Resources Center of the National Park Service is where these water resources are explored and documented. Underwater photography is crucial in the understanding of what lies beneath the surface, and images taken by the SRC Staff are essential not only for mapping and documenting, but to help the parks address issues and solve problems. 
This week, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick sits down with Bret Seymour, the Submerged Resources Center Deputy Chief and Audio-Visual Production Specialist who has spent some thirty years with the Park Service, photographing the mysteries below the surface.

Summer is almost here. The upcoming Memorial Day weekend is the official kickoff to the summer travel season, and I’m happy to say that the National Parks Traveler will be continuing to bring you news about the parks and how you can enjoy them.

As much as Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek was looking forward to retiring, listener and reader support has enabled the news organization to continue on with its editorially independent coverage of National Parks and protected areas.   

Kurt and Lynn will be discussing this good news this week, as well as exploring some of the new content the Traveler will be bringing you in the months ahead, and looking out across the National Park System concerning some recent events.

With the summer vacation season not too far off, no doubt many National Park Service Superintendents are trying to figure out how to manage the crowds and avoid impacts to natural resources in the park system. 
With Memorial Day weekend just two weeks away, and Congress in its usual battles over how to fund the federal government, we wanted to take a look at how the funding situation looks for the Park Service. To help understand the financial setting across the National Park System, we’ve asked Phil Francis, from the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks to provide some insights.  

Smokies Life, which most of you who closely follow Great Smoky Mountains National Park know was previously known as the Great Smoky Mountains Association, produces educational and informational materials for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This week we’re joined by Laurel Rematore, the chief executive officer of Smokies Life, to discuss the name change as well as how her organization lends a big hand to the Park Service staff at Great Smoky.