Park the rig and ride the bike. That's the tack being taken in the Cataloochee Valley of Great Smoky Mountains National Park this fall to better manage visitors and elk.

Fall, that lofty season when Eastern hardwood forests don foliages red, gold, and orange, lures us like motorized lemmings into national parks to admire nature’s wizardry. We inch along, practically bumper to bumper at times, to be dazzled in a final seasonal hurrah before the paint-by-number leaves are shed and winter’s first squalls convince us that being inside really isn’t such a bad thing.

Just the name of Petrified Forest National Park plants the notion in your mind that the Arizona park is full of petrified wood. But this parched-looking landscape also holds stories of the dinosaurs that once roamed here.

The numbers at Lake Mead National Recreation Area are sobering: the leading cause of unintentional deaths at the park is drowning and none of the drowning victims were wearing a life jacket. The park is trying to change those statistics by offering free loaner life jackets at two popular swim beaches.