National Parks Traveler

An Interior Department priority list for tackling deferred maintenance projects in the National Park System and other public lands with funds generated through the Great American Outdoors Act fails to describe the projects in detail.

Exploring the West by canoe or kayak long has been near the top of my to-do list, and Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, with its 149 river miles to paddle, is naturally on that list. I'll just have to remember not to drink the water.

On Saturday the Mission San José Tricentennial Mural will be unveiled at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas.

Cooking on a backcountry trip in Yellowstone National Park can be challenging, especially when you want to boil a couple chickens. One group solved that problem by placing the plucked birds in a burlap bag and tossing it into a hot spring in the Shoshone Geyser Basin.

Mount Rainier can be deadly, but death is hardly what prevents most from succeeding up the glacier-shrouded volcano. Although climbing carries inherent risks, it’s not how most deaths in the sprawling Mount Rainier National Park occur. Of the 425 fatalities recorded over more than a century -- 1897 to 2017 -- about 90 were summit climbers, in addition to 35 or so climbing accidents that were non-summit related, park data shows. The rest of the deaths run the gamut through the park.

We’re awash this year in a sea of propaganda and misinformation. Fake news sites, false reports, news-like stories selected and spun not to make us smarter, but to make us hate, to steer us toward supporting someone else’s cause.

A young woman scuba diving in Lake McDonald at Glacier National Park died during the outing, while two men appear to have been suicide victims at Mount Rainier National Park.

Leave it as It Is is the most engaging and powerful book about Western public lands that I have read in a long time. Gessner published a terrific book in 2015 titled All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West, and I find some Abbey and Stegner in this new book, both in style and content. He traveled the West in search of Abbey and Stegner in that book as he does with Teddy Roosevelt in this one. He looks at all these icons in the context of the modern West with a clear and analytical eye.

Can there be too much of a good thing in the National Park System? There just might be at a patch of sand and water in Gulf Islands National Seashore in Florida, where its growing popularity is leading to adverse impacts on Gulf of Mexico fisheries and deadly accidents.

A gray wolf wearing a radio collar was shot and killed illegally in Grand Teton National Park, where rangers are seeking information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the individual responsible.