Yellowstone National Park

Migratory Bird Day will be marked this Saturday in Yellowstone National Park, where rangers will take you birding and staff from the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center will teach you about raptors seen in the park.

There is nothing as traditional as camping out in the national parks for summer vacation. Reserving a campsite on www.recreation.gov can lock in a site long before you hit the road, but sometimes you just don’t get around to doing that. So what to do?

The early birds were ready and waiting this morning when the South Entrance to Yellowstone National Park opened for the season.

The East Entrance to Yellowstone National Park will open for the season Friday as originally scheduled, according to park officials.

Traveler's 2nd Annual Essential Friends + Gateways publication, a collaboration between the Traveler and a core group of national park foundations, cooperating associations, trusts, friends groups, and gateway communities, is aimed at enhancing and furthering the now nationally significant role of these organizations and entities in the preservation and enjoyment of our parks.

It wasn't exactly like the meeting of the Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory Summit in 1869, but there still was plenty of celebrating when snowplows from the state of Wyoming and the National Park Service met near Grant Village.

Just in time for National Park Week -- Traveler's 2013 magazine Essential Friends + Gateways! Flip through 50+ pages of full-color features celebrating national parks, their increasingly indispensable friends' groups—along with great park gateways and the local insight and travel tips you need to savor summer in the country's top national parks.

Access to Yellowstone National Park’s Black Sand Basin will be temporarily closed until at least the Memorial Day weekend while maintenance crews replace and reroute a section of boardwalk that has been damaged by the area’s thermal features.

Sequestration. Budget cuts. Tough times for America’s most cherished places – its national parks. For Yellowstone National Park, a bit of relief from the fiscal hard times is coming from the Yellowstone Park Foundation, which is underwriting $600,000 worth of projects in the park this year.

More wheeled access will be possible in Yellowstone National Park this Friday -- barring a major snowstorm -- as the routes from Mammoth Hot Springs and West Yellowstone, Montana, to Old Faithful are scheduled to open.

Wolf numbers in the northern Rocky Mountain states of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and parts of Washington and Oregon at the end of 2012 showed only a slight decrease from a year earlier, though the number of packs increased, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A preferred winter-use plan for Yellowstone National Park that is crafted around "transportation events" and which could allow more than twice as many snowmobiles into the park on a given day than has been experienced in recent years is open for public comment.

Yes, our national parks are grappling with the loss of millions of dollars due to the failure of Congress and the Obama administration to treat the country's ailing fiscal condition, but they're still open, and still spectacular places to explore.

If you're looking for an incredible bike ride in the national parks, head to Yellowstone National Park now, when you can pedal between West Yellowstone, Montana, and Mammoth Hot Springs without sharing the road with private vehicles.

"Cascade corner," which draws its name from the many waterfalls in Yellowstone National Park's southwest corner, long has been a rather overlooked area of the park. But with more and more visitors taking notice and heading there, park officials are looking into ways to improve their visits.

While photographs are a great way to remember a national park vacation, artworks are equally as memorable and wonderful to collect. If Yellowstone National Park is your favorite park, you might consider picking up one of Marsha Karle's watercolors...and benefit the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in the process.

Acadia, Yellowstone, and Yosemite are some of the most adored units of the National Park System, but they don't show up in the top 10 list of most-visited parks during 2012. They're quite a ways from the top 10, actually.

An outpouring of community support from gateway towns is helping Yellowstone National Park open for the spring on schedule, as opposed to several weeks later as officials thought they'd have to do under budget cuts.

Pretty pictures of national park vistas are commonplace. But how would you react to a photo that showed the crumbling side of the parks?

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack. -- Jodi Picoult

"Mountaineers are always free" is West Virginia's state motto, but that sentiment is getting harder and harder to find in the National Park System, where an imbalance in fee structures charges you for sleeping on the bare ground but not for burning gas as you negotiate the 11-mile loop of Cades Cove.

Signals of climate change seem to be more and more frequent in some parts of the country. In the Rocky Mountains, snowfall patterns are changing, temperatures are warming, bird behavior is alternating.

Yellowstone National Park was a wild and remote place in the late 1800s, and in winter it beckoned only the heartiest, most adventurous souls. Renowned photographer Frank Jay Haynes was certainly one of those adventuresome explorers.

Yellowstone National Park's spring opening will be pushed back one to two weeks as the park searches for ways to meet budget cuts mandated by the sequestration ordered by President Obama and Congress.

Two weeks in Mount Rainier National Park left Russ Aquilar dirty, tired, and sore. But it also left him with a life-changing decision, to share the natural world with others.

When I tell people that I teach a summer course on the politics of Yellowstone, I always brace myself for the next question. “What politics can there be in a national park?” Plenty, as it turns out.

It must be tough to be a snowshoe manufacturer. Since most recreational shoes moved away from wooden frames to aluminum ones, their lifespan went up incredibly. But that doesn't mean it might not be time for you to upgrade to one of the latest models.

At Glacier National Park, exactly when in summer the Going-to-the-Sun Road will be open end-to-end is hard to predict, due to the heavy snows that fall along the Continental Divide there. In Yellowstone National Park, a schedule determines when the road over Sylvan Pass will open, and park crews try to adhere to it with artillery rounds.

Xanterra Parks & Resorts has been selected to operate the majority of the concession business in Yellowstone National Park during the next 20 years.