Featured Articles on National Parks Traveler

Greetings from Great Falls, Montana, where the Corps of Discovery encountered five large waterfalls on the Missouri River that delayed by several weeks their trip to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had expected a single falls they would be able to portage in a day. Rather, they found five significant falls that required nearly two weeks of backbreaking toil.

On July 30, 1956, Verendrye National Monument was delisted from the National Park System and transferred to the state of North Dakota. Congress decided that the claim of historical significance on which the 1917 national monument proclamation had been based was spurious.

Just getting out of your rig in the parking lot atop Logan Pass in Glacier National Park offers spectacular views, but with a little effort and perhaps two hours of time you'll be searching for a word to amplify "spectacular."

Greetings from Lewis & Clark Trail State Park in eastern Washington, where we are finishing our seventh week on the road. Heading east on the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, we've followed the Columbia River and found memorable places galore.

On September 25th, more than 175,000 people are expected to volunteer for National Public Lands Day at more than 2,000 of our nation’s beautiful public lands. Volunteers will perform work ranging from pulling invasive species, clearing trails, planting trees and removing trash.

Sometimes a short, easy hike is just what you need for a nice change of pace during a park visit. Here's a suggestion for a visit to Rocky Mountain National Park—and an alternative to the justly-popular Bear Lake Trail.

Here we go again, only along a different route. This time we are headed east instead of west, and along the Lewis & Clark Historic Trail rather than the Oregon Trail. We would have preferred to follow the Corps of Discovery on its outbound journey to the Pacific, but we need to get back to our home in South Georgia.

What would it take, and be like, to follow the Oregon National Historic Trail from Missouri to the coast of Oregon? David and Kay Scott look back on their three-week odyssey.

At South Carolina's Ninety Six National Historic Site, where Americans fought and died in two Revolutionary War battles, the Park Service has been locked in a different sort of struggle. Although critical preservation and interpretation issues must be resolved, the resources available allow for little more than a holding action. It's awfully difficult to serve steak on a mac-and-cheese budget.

Greetings from Oregon City, the western terminus of the Oregon Trail. This is the promised land for hundreds of thousands of pioneers who set out from Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri.

Greetings from The Dalles, Oregon, located on the Columbia River at a point where pioneers following the Oregon Trail were required to make a major decision. Some chose to rent, make, or buy rafts on which they placed their wagons and possessions to float west on the Columbia River.

Some ideas are good ones. Others are not so hot.

Three days might not qualify for official "vacation" status, but the First Family's trip this weekend to Acadia National Park should provide enough time for President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and their kids to sample some of the highlights of this Down East treasure.

Greetings from Baker City, Oregon, a small town with a rich history. Baker City, formerly just Baker, was (and may still be) a town of wealth, as gold was discovered nearby