The folks at Washington's National Park Fund love the idea of wild in Washington State. For over 100 years, Washingtonians have hiked, climbed and picnicked at Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades national parks. But trails aren’t wild; they’re created and maintained by people, especially when nature takes its toll.

Cabrillo National Monument is one of the little gems of the National Park System. Located at the tip of Point Loma, a peninsula that’s on the northwest side of San Diego Bay. Only 160 acres and surrounded by a major Naval base and Coast Guard station, Cabrillo is nevertheless a tiny treasure — and because of its proximity to one of America’s largest urban areas, it’s one of the most heavily visited pieces of the park system.

As snow falls in the North Cascades of Washington state and the highway closes for another winter, life is slower and quieter at the Environmental Learning Center at the North Cascades Institute. After a busy summer and fall of teaching, the institute's naturalists are off for a well-earned break, some upriver staff head out on furlough, but learning continues at the organization's campus on Diablo Lake.

Urbanization, agricultural runoff, and water management in South Florida along with climate change and invasive species have combined to create a cocktail of threats to Everglades National Park, placing it among 17 natural World Heritage Sites deemed to have a “critical” conservation outlook by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.