In an effort to protect resources and make it easier for visitors to explore their park, Acadia National Park staff is proposing a reservation system for vehicle entry to some areas of the park during the busy summer season, from roughly mid-May through mid-October.

Due to extreme fire danger, Big Bend National Park has closed 11 backpacking sites in the Chisos Mountains. The Juniper Flats, Boulder Meadows, and Pinnacles campsites are closed until further notice. The Pinnacles Trail remains open to hiking.

It was not quite a decade ago that I traveled to Great Smoky Mountains National Park to better understand efforts there to track down every species that calls the park's rumpled landscape home. At the time the list of previously unknown species that were discovered had reached more than 900. Today that number has grown to nearly 1,000.

An oil company looking for energy reserves beneath Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida left miles of deeply rutted and damaged wetlands despite requirements calling for immediate mitigation. The company is back in the field now, and environmentalists fear more damage is being done.