Fire Island National Seashore

You can add Fire Island National Seashore to the growing list of National Park System units with an online reservation system for backcountry camping. While the seashore won't charge you per night in the backcountry, there is a $20 reservation fee.

With Memorial Day Weekend still two weeks off, more and more facilities at Fire Island National Seashore are reopening after repairs necessitated by last fall's Hurricane Sandy.

If ever there was an exclamation point to a report warning of the consequences of climate change, Hurricane Sandy was it. As the storm swept up the Eastern Seaboard last fall it cut national seashores in two, inundated mainland parks that lie at sea level, downed untold scores of trees, and in its aftermath left the National Park Service with a glowing opportunity to put its parks back together with similarly potent storms in mind.

Photographic slides paper-clipped to strings to dry out. Officer's Row at Fort Hancock propped up with two-by-fours. Multi-use paths ripped out in places and buried in sand elsewhwere. That was part of the aftermath from Hurricane Sandy at Gateway National Recreation Area.

Barrier islands are creatures of the seas, cast about and pushed around by the waves and currents. Proof of that can be found today at Fire Island National Seashore along the New York coast, where the barrier island it sets on was cut in two as well as shoved closer to the Long Island mainland by Hurricane Sandy.

Today, four months after Hurricane Sandy battered and bruised the Eastern Seaboard, the disarray the storm delivered across many units of the National Park System continues to be cleaned up. Some damage remains to be discovered. And though summer remains months away, some units will be severely challenged to be fully operational by Memorial Day.

Work to recover Fire Island National Seashore in New York from Hurricane Sandy continues, but it's too early to plan a Memorial Day Weekend escape there, according to national seashore officials.

Congress has been asked to provide nearly $400 million to help National Park System units recover from damages inflicted by "superstorm" Sandy earlier this fall.

Crews continue to work to return to service units of the National Park System that were hammered by Superstorm Sandy back on October 29, with personnel coming from as far as the National Park Service's Intermountain Region to help with the cleanup.

Reaching Cape Hatteras National Seashore by vehicle in the near future will be hard, if not impossible, due to breaching of Highway 12 by storm waters from Hurricane Irene.

As Hurricane Irene continues plodding towards the Eastern Seaboard, units of the National Park System up and down the coast are preparing for the storm.

As Hurricane Earl assails the Outer Banks parks, producing damaging winds, rough surf, overwash, and beach erosion, Cape Cod National Seashore and other coastal parks in the Middle Atlantic and New England regions get ready for the powerful storm's arrival.

The Kemp's ridley may be little as sea turtles go, but it's got big problems. It was already the world's most endangered marine turtle before the mammoth Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatened to wreak havoc on its vital habitat.

A diminutive shorebird and a string of villages both dependent on the same necklace of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina are being pinched in a precarious setting that demonstrates the folly of trying to control nature.

Twenty-one units of the National Park System, including five national seashores and four national lakeshores, have been nominated for status as "Marine Protected Areas."

Each spring, certain areas in Acadia National Park in Maine are closed to visitors as peregrine falcons return to their ancestral nesting sites on seaside cliffs. With great anticipation, park visitors gather below the cliffs with binoculars, spotting scopes, and zoom lenses to watch the peregrines — — a species that in the mid-1960s was on the brink of extinction.

National Lighthouse Day is being observed around the country on August 7, and there are some excellent examples of those beacons in NPS areas. Some parks will host special events this weekend; one of them is more often associated with a famous battle than a lighthouse.

In honor of International Migratory Bird Day, Fire Island National Seashore in New York is offering a special three-hour ranger-guided tour at 9:00 a.m on Saturday, May 9, followed on Sunday, May 17 by a "Peak of Spring Migration" Bird Walk.

For years, summer trips to Cape Cod were an annual ritual for my family. My parents had retired to the Cape, and our boys loved romping in the surf and building castles in the sand. Lobster feasts, game-fishing, and whale watching were added benefits, as were exploring the seashore’s lighthouses, roaming its dunes, and looking for sea creatures in its mudflats.