We don’t expect adventure on a flatwater river, but sometimes it just happens.

Much talk has been expended during the past decade concerning the health of Florida's Everglades and Everglades National Park. Now there are substantial signs that real progress is being made in restoring this incredible and unique ecosystem.

Earlier this year the Traveler offered up a post on what priorities we hoped the National Park Service would address in the coming year. Mike Snyder, director of the agency's Intermountain Region, has his own list of issues his region has in its sights this year.

The events of this past week and the advent of a new government cannot help but take our minds back to other times in our history, particularly to 1933. It was in that winter, another troubled time in our national history, that Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency. As it does now, the United States in 1933 faced severe and unresolved economic problems.

Images of volunteers filling sandbags in a race against rising waters have unfortunately become commonplace this year, in locations from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast. You don't normally expect to see such scenes in the desert Southwest, but they were repeated last week in Big Bend National Park.

We all love America's national park system, but we often have different expectations about local federal parks than about places farther away. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in arguments about Point Reyes National Seashore.

The park marking the spot where Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto probably didn’t land in North America in 1539 turns 60 today. On March 11, 1948, Congress created the De Soto National Memorial in the mangrove swamp on Shaw’s Point, in Bradenton, Florida.

Would a change in the national park system's gun laws pose a threat to wildlife? In Alaska, there are some concerns that brown bears at Katmai National Park and Preserve might appear too threatening to some gun owners.

Snowmobiles, off-road vehicles, and personal watercraft are perhaps the most polarizing recreational issues within the national park system. In this guest column, the specter of greater ORV access in Big Cypress National Preserve's Bear Island Unit is examined.

A recent Miami Herald article on manatee research in the Everglades does a good job of identifying some of the questions that still need to be answered with regard to this fascinating but still poorly understood species. However, the question of a major cause of manatee deaths within the boundaries of Everglades National Park is already well documented.