There are, off the more well-trod roads in the National Park System, lesser-known parks that nevertheless offer some unexpected delight.

Efforts to blunt the ferocity and destruction of wildfires are dividing conservation advocates over proposals that would sidetrack science and allow for less analysis under the country’s hallmark environmental law. Critics fear that approach could accelerate unnecessary logging in national forests.

Love was definitely in the air on Isabela Island and we yearned to become voyeurs.

It’s appropriately uncomfortable when interpretive park ranger Jazmyn Bernard starts chanting “two, four, six, eight — we don’t want to integrate” on Little Rock Nine Way in front of Little Rock Central High School. Without warning, she transports our tour group back to September 1957 when Elizabeth Eckford was one of nine African American teenagers subjected to racist white mobs resisting desegregation.

In the mid-afternoon of April 19, 1775, a group of men from the American colonies prepared to ambush retreating British soldiers near Hartwell Tavern in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Creeks, streams, and rivers provide a sense of place, a grounding at times, an identity for surrounding communities. They provide a recreational outlet, and can provide food, but often it's that sense of place that roots deepest. Hurricane Helene disrupted all that when it swept out of Gulf of Mexico and reached deep into southern Appalachia.

Uh-oh, this doesn’t look good. A kayaker is careening down the narrow winding river, letting the current pull her towards danger instead of paddling like mad away from it. “Stay hard right,” shouts Hailey Albers. “Stay away from that root wad.” Whooping and hollering, the woman rather gleefully crashes right into a partially submerged tangle of tree roots.

Being caught in a national park in unexpected weather can mean the difference between an enjoyable outing and one that is dangerous or deadly.

To be honest, I have no clue what I’m looking at beyond the fact that it’s a key object in the World War II-era race to develop the world’s first atomic weapons before Nazi Germany. There is a giant wall full of holes that reminds me of a Lite-Brite toy, mannequin men with rods and a legend that talks about donut, iodine and uranium fuel slugs.

President Trump’s zest for rapidly shrinking the government is triggering anxiety about conservation priorities that have been embedded for more than five decades in the country’s national parks and wildlife refuges.

Amid rising water levels, some of the country's oldest and most valuable historical artifacts are at risk of being lost forever.

On a recent trip to Tennessee, I lost count of how many people told me the same strange and unusual thing about Great Smoky Mountains National Park. If you stacked up all of the park’s salamanders against its roughly 1,900 black bears, the salamanders would weigh more. Or was it salamanders versus all of the mammals and birds, or even all the wildlife?

The first time that I went seabeaning, I triumphantly scooped up what looked like a shrivelled brain from a national seashore that was dotted with plastic trash. I turned the fist-sized oddity over in my hands, admiring how the deep grooves on its bumpy brown surface created brain-like patterns.

On the cusp of careers envisioned to last decades, fired National Park Service employees are left wondering about what might have been.

A federal hold on funding could upend a novel approach to preventing mosquitoes from sending a number of Hawaiian bird species into extinction.

An undersea wonderland some 80 miles off the New England coast that bursts with a biodiversity so bountiful that it’s dubbed the Yellowstone of the Atlantic needs better protection, maintain marine ecologists.

Every seven seconds we hear it — the long, drawn out “hooooooo” of one of the world’s rarest birds. The Grenada Dove may be shy, elusive and critically endangered, but it’s cooing its heart out on this drizzly day in the Caribbean.

While the National Park Service, and other federal agencies, are in a state of turmoil under the administration's push to drastically shrink the size of government, the agency has no idea how many vacant superintendent positions exist across the National Park System.

The EXPLORE Act was celebrated by many in the outdoor community, but wilderness advocates had some reservations.

National park visitors could be confronted by "chaos" this summer if the hold on seasonal hirings by the Trump administration is not lifted soon, says former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis.