There are many resources to help you get the most out of your national park adventures. And there are dozens of guidebooks, it seems, that profess to be the authority on visiting the parks. But there’s a book coming out later this spring that takes a new approach to visiting the parks, an approach built around a park’s residents – their plants, wildlife, and even geology.

Scenic Science of the National Parks, An Explorer’s Guide to Wildlife, Geology and Botany, is scheduled to arrive March 31. This really is a wonderful new book in the national park genre. You won't find lodging details, or a long list of hiking trail recommendations. But you will find information that draws you closer to a park's natural resources, the uniqueness of the different plants and animals, and some of the amazing geological details. It's content perfect to entice the aspiring scientist or nature writer into the parks and possibly into a lifelong vocation or avocation.

I had an opportunity to discuss this title with the authors, Emily Hoff and Maygen Keller, to get an understanding of what they hoped to accomplish. What follows is a somewhat truncated Q&A that I had with them. You can hear the entire interiew on Traveler Episode 51.

National Parks Traveler: I’ve long thought that there had to be a different way to guide visitors to parks beyond the usual park guidebooks. You know, the books that talk about lodgings and best trails and where to dine and what to bring. And it seems that you two have hit on one incredibly obvious approach. How did you get there?

Emily Hoff: Maygen and I actually went to undergrad together, a million years ago, and from that time, when we bonded over being enormous nerds who loved making elaborate study guides together, we knew that we wanted to take on some creative projects together, and we knew that we wanted to focus it around curiosity and around the idea of free choice learning. The idea that you can learn a fact just because it's fun to know it. Not for any purpose. You do not need to go get a PhD, you don't need to do anything with it, other than just sort of know something or look a little differently at the world around you.

And we went through a lot of different iterations of the project, and it finally came down to, we both have a really deep interest in traveling, and specifically traveling in the national parks, and of course there are many different ways to travel and many different reasons to travel. You can travel for art or music or food. But we found ourselves asking questions about what would it mean to be a science tourist? How could we travel through the lens of science? And so we started taking little trips to the parks and hiking with very obliging paleontologists and astronomers who answered all sorts of insane questions from us. And little by little this idea of finding a way to help people see the parks with somewhat of a secret decoder ring or a pair of X-ray glasses that help you see the same sites as everyone else, but pay attention to the little details that bring it all into focus in a totally different way.

Traveler: Do you guys have science backgrounds? I mean what type of degrees did you get?

Maygen Keller: When we met, we were both theater majors in our undergrad. I did technical theater, and Emily did acting and performing, but also she had a focus on history, and I had a focus on English. Like Emily said, we really wanted to work together. Emily can tell her story better than I can, but after we left undergrad, I ended up doing theater professionally for a while, and then moving into publishing. I worked in higher education publishing for a few years, and then I was in sales and had done a lot of sales and project management on a fulltime and freelance basis as Emily and I were kind of working through what our business relationship would be and what this ultimate project would be. Emily's background makes a little more sense.

Emily: Maygen was a stage manager as part of her technical theater thing, and if anyone out there is considering going into business with anyone, find yourself a stage manager. They know exactly what's going on at all times, they're brilliant business partners. I ended up taking a track into museums; I got a graduate degree in history and museum studies, but immediately out of grad school was poached onto a museum project for NASA. With zero science training I became this perfect liason between the average lay person and a bunch of really smart engineers and astronauts. I was working on a project to research and write the exhibit for the new space shuttle, Atlantis. It was at the very end of the shuttle program, which tells you how long ago I went to grad school.

So I sort of got catapulted into the science world and have been there ever since. I work with all sorts of museums all over the country and all over the world developing science exhibits, and also touring programs, mostly focused on being a science communicator. So, I have this sort of abiding interest in communicating science in a really casual and fun way. It seemed really unapproachable to me for a very long time, and so I'm happy to help other people see that it is approachable. Maygen and I have long loved nature documentaries, especially David Attenborough documentaries, and so this book is more or less an attempt for us to be David Attenborough in the parks.

Traveler:  So how did you go about collecting the information that you've crunched and presented in a highly digestible form?

Maygen: That was our big goal. We did a lot of research before we went into the parks, both by way of park websites but also digging into things that we thought might be interesting, or hikes that we thought might be interesting. We actually did a lot of travel. I guess, 2016, 2017, 2018, we spent a lot of time in those summers traveling and moving through the parks. When we would go to a park we would often just go to the visitors center and talk to the wonderful people who work at the visitor centers about what they find interesting in the parks, where their favorite places are, and kind of explain what the project was and that we were focusing on wildlife, geology and botany, and so they often shared things that they didn't necessary always get to talk about with your average visitor.

We asked this of people: What do you hear most often as your question? They hear about 'Where is the bathroom?' They don't hear really compelling questions, and so when they have the opportunity to talk about what they're passionate about they were very generous.

So we leaned on them a lot, and after we left the parks we also had a lot of information that we needed to distill and go through, and that was really the storytelling component and the distilling component of what will mean something to people here, and what is visited enough that it's not to difficult for people to get to, but still has a compelling story line. So we really worked hard to find those interesting story lines in scientists' research, often written at a very high level and then we would contact those people and have conversations to try to tell that story in a more translatable way. So it really involved a lot of research and a lot of travel and actually getting into the parks. 

There were some really fun parts of it too. We hiked in every single park, and it's not a hiking book. But we do reference some cool trails where people can go interact with the science with their hands, so it was this amazing combination of us getting to travel as regular people and also travel as information gatherers, and I think that was a really powerful part of our experience.

Traveler: In the book, you've hit on some obvious topics, and on some not so obvious topics. I'm not sure that any other park guidebook discusses lichens at Yosemite. Why did you choose that for a topic to include?

Maygen: I was really wondering what we could do with Yosemite, because unfortunately we weren't able to visit Yosemite because of the fires that were happening. And so I believe at the time we were scheduled to go to Yosemite all but one entrance was closed. We were encouraged not to go. It was a huge park on our list that we thought visiting would make an impact because it's so heavily visited. So when we were back doing our research about story lines in Yosemite, I was really taken by some of the climate change research that they're doing there, and not to get political at all, but right now with our current administration there isn't as much of a focus on climate change research in some of these spaces, and so a lot of the foundations in Yosemite are supporting that research right now.

I came across an article about all of the lichens that you see through all of the elevations of Yosemite and what story that actually tells. I spoke with a wonderful scientist who was doing research in Yosemite and working for the park, and he now works for the Forest Service ... and basically what we can tell from the lichen that we see is how the air quality is doing. The interesting thing is that given Yosemite's location, it's so near agricultural bastions, there's a lot of information that we can gather kind of early on in the climate change process. So when certain lichens are thriving and certain lichens are struggling, we can learn about how the air quality is changing. Given the fact that Yosemite is a protected space it tells us a little more than just gathering that data in a regular city. What's something everyone will see? Everyone who goes to Yosemite will see a lichen. And how can we tell a story about that?"

Traveler: There's another interesting tidbit that jumped out at me, from Yellowstone National Park, one of my favorite parks, and bison, one of my favorite animals. You guys point out that those bison that winter in thermal areas of the park actually have shorter lifespans than those that don't.

Maygen: We were in the park, I guess in 2017, and a ranger actually shared, again, just a brief tidbit when we were on a group hike about the bison wintering near these thermal features. We hadn't known anything about that. Obivously bison are incredibly iconic, certainly in Yellowstone. We thought we could tell a story about bison. What is it about these teeth? Is there actually something to it, or was it just a tidbit? ... There's no way to really know for sure, but it looks like the fact that there's silica in the water that is being absorbed by the grasses that the bison are eating near those thermal features, it actually wears their teeth down more quickly than the bison that choose to winter elsewhere. And so, when we think about teeth erosion and their ability to eat and sustain themselves, it can have a huge effect on their mortality.

Traveler: Along with educating readers on plants, animals, geology, you also weren't afraid to educate them on proper behavior in the parks, such as enjoying wildlife from a distance or staying out of desert potholes.

Emily: That was something that was really important to the subject matter experts, the rangers and the scientists that we spoke with about their work in the park. And also as park travelers it's something that's really important to us. We have unfortunately seen quite a lot of the bad behavior that you hear about in parks, and many times it just stems from people not knowing any better. Sometimes that's willful ignorance, sometimes it's not. But it's always helpful to take an opportunity to say here's how you can appreciate this thing, but here's how to do it safely, and here's how to do it in a respectful manner.

Traveler: Did you ever encounter anybody being disrepectful when you were out there in the parks?

Maygen: Oh Kurt. All the time. It really gave us an opportunity to be real empathetic to the people who are kind of constantly walking through the park as rangers, hoping to do interpretation and hoping to help people engage with the land. And having to often kind of discipline people. We could give any number of stories I think. I think the biggest thing for us was being our own advocates and certainly being advocates for the park and trying to inform people when they were doing something that they shouldn't be in a gentle way, and assuming the best, even though it's possible that they were nefarious in their intentions.

Scenic Science of the National Parks won't be available until March 31, but you can preorder it now in some of the usual places.