Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an enormous outdoor playground with 800-plus miles of trails stretching across its 500,000+ acres. As you can imagine, those trail miles require quite a bit of upkeep.

A proposal to build an emergency access route across a lava-covered section of Chain of Craters Kalapana Road at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park is not without hazards to the environment in the form of "potentially ecosystem altering" invasive species such as fire ants and coqui frogs.

Yellowstone National Park officials, seeking to cover more of their bills, are proposing sweeping changes in their fees, from higher entrance fees to backcountry user fees. If all the proposals were instituted, it would generate roughly $3 million for the park, which currently spends about $4 million a year in existing fees on projects ranging from campground upgrades to road repairs.

Among individuals associated with the Cherokee and their forced journey to a land they didn’t consider home, none was more influential than Sequoyah, the Cherokee who gave his people a system for recording and reading their language.