#national-park-closure

#national-park-closure

A 2025 study shows that 80% of world heritage sites are facing climate stress as materials such as wood and stone struggle to adapt to a hotter world.

"Nobody is asking for this. None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody." Robert Bonnie, former Forest Service undersecretary, highlights widespread opposition to the reorganization.

Jackie, the world-famous Big Bear bald eagle, has been melting hearts and educating the public about her species since 2015, thanks to a web camera run by the California nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV).

Great Smoky Mountains National Park was the most popular park in the country last year, drawing more than 11.5 million visitors, according to data from the National Park Service. In fact, the park, which straddles North Carolina and Tennessee, accounted for 12.3 percent of all national park visits.

'Our results show that the next 20 years are critical,' lead author Dr Rob Cooke told the Daily Mail. 'By around 2050, we reach a point where the choices we make on emissions and land use will largely determine whether Britain moves towards a much more degraded or a much more nature‑positive future.'

The nine national parks in the Golden State - including Yosemite, Death Valley and Joshua Tree - attracted nearly 12 million recreational visits in 2025, according to statistics from the National Park Service. That's up more than 800,000 visits from 2024 and up more than 300,000 from the previous record set in 2019, according to the data, which stretches back to 1979.

For 2025, there was good news and bad news: overall, these areas were visited 323 million times over the course of the year. That's the good news; the bad news is that this figure was down ever so slightly - specifically, 2.7% - from a record-setting 2024.

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of 'partisan ideology,' descriptions that 'disparage' Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation's 'beauty, abundance, or grandeur.'

A lot of people really underestimate the sizes of our national parks, as well as the accessibility of certain features. A lot of people come to Death Valley, and they want to see that, but they don't often realize that it's along a pretty crappy, 25-mile dirt road, and it often takes well over an hour and a half to get to.

Avalanche Canada currently rates the danger as 'Extreme,' or the highest level of danger. People are encouraged to stay out of the backcountry and prepare for road closures if crews deem additional control work necessary.

These sagebrush-covered foothills of primarily Bureau of Land Management land have a higher concentration of sage grouse than anywhere else on the planet, likely in part because the birds have room to move. More than a thousand elk winter there, too, sustained by the high-elevation landscape's cured grasses, dried wildflowers and shrubs. So do pronghorn and mule deer, wintering or using the area as a stopover on their journeys, which include the longest documented mule deer and pronghorn migrations in the Lower 48.

Longer days, blooming flowers, and increasing temperatures make spring the perfect time for an escape to one of the 63 major US national parks. After traveling solo to all of them, there are a few I think are especially worth seeing between the months of March and June.

The only interest he has in our parks is the money he can make from them. Case in point is how Socha, as an executive for the hospitality company Delaware North, sued the NPS for $51 million for the naming rights to Yosemite National Park, Ahwahnee, Wawona, etc., claiming they were the company's intellectual property. Twenty-two years as concessionaire entitles them to own and profit from the names? How absurd and disrespectful.

The new trees number in the thousands - at least 4,000 per acre or as many as 20,000, depending on who is counting. A few rise above head-height, the most energetic sentinels of regeneration. What will become of this nursery in the wild in the next hundred years, or thousand, is the crux of a scientific and policy dispute.

Tell your peeps to watch for sheep! Share the range with the Tetons' original mountaineers. Bighorn sheep have worked hard to survive the winter at high elevation. By late winter, their fat reserves are running thin and every bit of energy counts. Giving them space will help them make it through the final weeks of winter.

The National Park Service has updated its policy to discourage visitors from defacing a picture of President Trump on this year's pass. The use of an image of Trump on the 2026 pass rather than the usual picture of nature has sparked a backlash, sticker protests, and a lawsuit from a conservation group. The $80 annual America the Beautiful pass gives visitors access to more than 2,000 federal recreation sites.

Wildlife populations are in decline. Recreation sites are crowded and often underfunded. Wildfires are larger, more destructive and harder to control. Climate change is reshaping natural systems, from ocean fisheries to mountain snowpacks, faster than institutions can respond. At the same time, communities are being asked to host new energy projects, transmission lines and mineral development - often without clear processes, adequate resources or trust that decisions are being made in the public interest.

Western water law is based on the prior appropriation doctrine, which gives the first entity to make "beneficial use" of water the right to keep on using that amount, even if that means that upstream "junior" users' spigots will get shut off. By the early 1900s, a rapidly growing California was enthusiastically diverting the Colorado River, with huge irrigation districts gobbling up the senior water rights.

Yosemite National Park is closed through Friday because of impacts from the winter storm, including heavy snowfall and heavy trees. The National Park Service announced Thursday that the park is closed and that visitors with lodging reservations may still enter the park through Highway 140 at the Arch Rock entrance. Since Monday, Yosemite Valley and the park has received about 4 feet of snow and up to 52 inches in some areas, according to the National Weather Service in Hanford.

I trekked it in December 2023 with plans and a permit to camp at Bright Angel Campground, a scenic cottonwood-shaded hideaway just near the famed Phantom Ranch (the only lodging on the world wonder's floor). Then, two days before my trip, a miracle happened: One last-minute reservation became available for Phantom Ranch. The ranch digs typically book out over a year in advance, but if you're lucky, you can either get in via the lottery or a last-minute opening. This made the grueling but gorgeous hike down and up the steep South Kaibab Trail even more memorable.

The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in Northern California's Sierra Valley. He started finding the bleeding bodies of calves-some still alive, so badly paralyzed that they'd need to be shot. After weeks of this, Roen finally saw a kill himself. "One wolf grabbed a cow and spun her around, while another grabbed a calf," he told me. "He tore it into three pieces in 30 seconds."

Many of them were built for purposes that no longer exist - cattle drives, mining prospecting, early U.S. Forest Service fire patrols - while others were packed by the footprints of the Chumash people well before the colonization of North America. Sections of trail cling to steep slopes that seem to barely resist gravity, shedding soil and stone with each winter storm.

"Wildflower growth depends on a delicate mix of weather factors, including rain and its timing, amount of sunlight, seasonal temperature patterns, and wind," State Parks wrote in its forecast. "Depending on the region and weather, the peak bloom season typically begins in mid-February onward." Currently, some colors have already been spotted in both the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, which is northeast of San Diego, and the Red Rock Canyon State Park, which sits north of Los Angeles.

The terrain is choked with rhododendron and dog hobble, ground cover that makes it easy to get lost and hard to be found. There are eight hundred and forty-eight miles of trail, and countless manways, which masquerade as trails. The many waterfalls are fed by rain on par with that of the Pacific Northwest. The rivers rise and boil with astonishing speed. There's little to no cell service.

I've traveled to all 63 major US national parks, but Grand Teton stands out as my favorite.