Every now and again, nature rises up and lets you know you didn't build something in the right place, or sturdy enough. At Rocky Mountain National Park, that message came through clearly in September 2013 when torrential rains spawned massive flooding that erased parts of some trails. Now park officials are wondering how best to reroute and repair those trails.

Dave Uberuagua could be viewed as a poker player facing the slim prospects of filling an inside straight draw. The superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park doesn't like, or agree with, the analogy, but in less than two months concession services on the South Rim of his park will be shuttered unless he can do in that period what the National Park Service has failed to accomplish for three years: negotiate a concessions contract.

A thin ribbon of Yosemite National Park asphalt that during summer can be backed up with traffic enjoys its quiet season from mid-November through April, and often into May. That’s a long, wonderful period when snows muffle sound and block wheeled-traffic on a long stretch of the Glacier Point Road.

The possibility that a gray wolf is roaming the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park has prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to quickly approve an effort to capture the animal and test its DNA to confirm whether it is, or is not, a full-blooded gray wolf, not a Mexican wolf and not a hybrid.