Most of us face some challenging tasks from time to time at work, but you can be thankful you weren't put in charge of the Yorktown Sesquicentennial celebration. It gets my vote for the most ambitious special event ever held in a National Park System area.

Many people are more familiar with the names of the component parts of this park than they are with the whole. Colonial National Historical Park includes Yorktown Battlefield, Jamestown and the Colonial Parkway, and a great time for a visit is coming up in mid-October.

National parks and historical events which occurred at those sites have provided the setting or the inspiration for dozens of movies, as Bob Janiskee has previously discussed on the Traveler. Fame can be a mixed blessing for the staff of the featured parks, however, as employees at Colonial National Historical Park learned a few years ago when Hollywood decided to bring Pocahontas to the big screen.

I don't know of anyone who is happy about the current economic situation, but while we're waiting for a turn-around, here's a question to ponder: Can a bad economy ever be good for parks? Here's how the Great Depression helped save the Yorktown Battlefield from private development.