Greetings from Three Island Crossing State Park, located on the Snake River between Twin Falls and Boise, Idaho. It is the morning of July 7 and life is good here in the land of the spud.

What should National Park Service rangers do when they come across a visitor who has gone astray of park regulations? For instance, should they have cited those women in Glacier National Park who squeezed off a round from a .357 to scare a deer, or was the warning enough?

California's Shasta Lake Recreation Area was a National Park System property for only three years before it was transferred to the Forest Service on July 1, 1948. The Forest Service now administers the lake as a component of Shasta-Trinity National Forest and Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area.

Greetings from Idaho’s Massacre Rocks State Park on the Snake River. It is the morning of July 5th and the weather is excellent. Potential travelers to the state of famous potatoes will be pleased to know the park wasn’t named for RV owners massacred by road bandits.

Thanks to a tenacious Native American banker who grew up on the flanks of Glacier National Park, the federal government is moving to correct mismanagement of oil and gas royalties due Native Americans across the country.

Greetings from the town of Rock Springs, in the southwestern corner of Wyoming. Another night in a motel as the wind was blowing hard and we were unable to locate two BLM campgrounds in the high country northeast of here. Plus, the weather forecast was spotty and we were both tired.

National parks, long treasured as providing glimpses into our past, are proving to be better time capsules than we might have imagined just a decade ago. Proof lies in a 10,000-year-old hunting weapon found below a melting ice patch near Yellowstone National Park.

While it's perhaps easier to monitor natural resources rooted in the earth in the national parks of the Pacific Islands, that doesn't mean those below the ocean's surface get ignored. This short video looks at some of those resources and explains how National Park Service researchers keep track of their health.

Greetings from Casper, Wyoming, where we are at the Marriott Courtyard. Casper was where the emigrants left the North Platte with its accompanying grass and water. Many pioneers considered the trip along the North Platte to be the easiest portion of the trail west.

Autumn comes to Denali National Park and Preserve between the last week of August and the first week of September. During this time, the entire tundra floor (almost the whole landscape) turns shades of yellow and red. This is my favorite time to be in the Alaska interior (except for high-altitude mountaineering where conditions are better in the spring), with changing weather and the mosquitoes gone.

Greetings from the visitor center at Scotts Bluff National Monument in western Nebraska. It is Wednesday afternoon and outside it is hot and windy. The monument is a few miles outside the town of Scottsbluff, where we spent last night in the municipal campground.

Here is the list of all 392 NPS units. How many have you visited? Start counting, and let us know.

Lake Texoma is a hugely popular flatwater playground on the Texas-Oklahoma border. It was once, albeit briefly, a national park.

Greetings from North Platte, Nebraska, at the fork of the North Platte and South Platte rivers. Monday night we camped in Cody Park, a very nice municipal park on the north side of North Platte, Nebraska.

You can call it a ripple effect, or “trickle-up conservation” or, in concepts that rabid anglers know in their hearts, the value of wild, sustainable fisheries and what they really mean.

Greetings from Fort Kearny (pronounced as "Carney", the first and considered one of the most important military posts on the Oregon Trail. Following our stay at Rock Creek Station, we zigzagged 125 miles to the northwest following as closely as possible the Oregon Trail that itself traced a stretch of the Little Blue River.

At Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park this summer you can pay $55 for a Segway tour of a portion of the Civil War park. The question lingering over this program, though, is whether those who sign on are doing so to check out the latest rage in personal transportation or to learn some history?

It is Saturday noon and we are at the Rock Creek Station visitor center that is located beside the California-Oregon Trail in southern Nebraska. This is a Nebraska state park and we spent last night at the park campground. Rock Creek Station was a stop for the Pony Express as well as a rest stop for emigrants departing from Independence and St. Joseph on the Oregon and California trails.

Countless Blue Ridge Parkway motorists peek over Wildcat Rocks to see tiny Caudill Cabin 1,500 feet below in North Carolina’s Doughton Park. Take this hike to the cabin and explore a quintessential setting of Appalachian isolation.

As our road warriors continue on their trek across the country, touching as many units of the National Park System as possible, they recently found themselves at the start of the Oregon National Historic Trail.