National Parks

Are You Pissed Yet? 5 Things You Can Do For Our Planet Now

by
Dawn at Quiet Lake in Idaho's Cecil D. Andrus-White Clouds Wilderness, created in 2015.
Dawn at Quiet Lake in Idaho’s Cecil D. Andrus-White Clouds Wilderness, created in 2015.

By Michael Lanza

How’s it feel to be a conservationist in America today? Does it feel like people who want the government to protect the environment—which is a large majority of Americans—suddenly find themselves losing a war that it seemed we had already won?

These are strange and frustrating times for conservation. We have to wonder: How could so many Americans believe that climate science is bogus—or even a “hoax,” as a certain world leader calls it? How could so many of our countrymen and women applaud as the current White House takes an axe to the agency created four decades ago to protect the very environment we live in? Or buy into the corrupt notion that ceding control of our prized public lands to private interests could, in any way, be in our public interest?

Read on

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park.

Photo Gallery: Celebrating the National Park Service Centennial

by

By Michael Lanza

When the National Park Service turns 100 on Aug. 25, it will mark not just the diamond anniversary of what writer and historian Wallace Stegner famously called “the best idea we ever had”—it marks the evolution and growth of that idea from a handful of parks created in the early days to a system in many ways without parallel, that protects 52 million acres of mountain ranges, canyons, rivers, deserts, prairies, caves, islands, bays, fjords, badlands, natural arches, and seashores in 59 parks. Without that protection, these places that draw visitors from around the world would otherwise almost certainly have been exploited and destroyed.

Read on

Sunset above Buck Creek Pass, Glacier Peak Wilderness, Washington.

Photo Essay: A Year of Outdoor Adventures

by

By Michael Lanza

A few weeks ago, as I hiked with my daughter up the steep Grandview Trail in the Grand Canyon, knocking off the last few miles of a three-day backpacking trip that had been wonderful on many levels, I was feeling awfully satisfied. For starters, through most of this fall, I’d had a bad itch to get out somewhere—and the Big Ditch, it turns out, is a pretty good place to scratch that itch. Plus, we’d just enjoyed three absolutely gorgeous, summer-like days of father-daughter time, and the company of two other families who joined us.

But seen from a longer view, returning to the Grand Canyon again felt like the perfect way to cap off another good year outdoors. In 2013, I got to seven national parks; five federal wilderness areas; an Idaho mountain range (the White Cloud Mountains) that might… no, should… become either federal wilderness or a national monument in the near future; and had the unforgettable pleasure of standing with my 12- and 10-year-old kids, my 15-year-old nephew, and my 76-year-old mom on the crater rim of Mount St. Helens.

Read on