It was a year ago that a deadly fire, the result of arson and strong, gusting winds downing power lines, raged across part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and neighboring Gatlinburg, Tennessee. As devastating as that fire appeared on the landscape at the time, recovery to the park's forests is well under way, as this video shows.

Channel Islands National Park continues to demonstrate the richness that national parks protect. In the past year alone the park off California's coast has been found to have attracted brown boobies, which rarely are found so far north, has held a previously unknown Native American site that dates back thousands of years, and has given up a prehistoric mammoth skull. The latest discovery is a fossil of a sea cow that could be 25 million years old.

What better way to prepare for the year-end holidays then celebrating as 19th century settlers did?

It gets dark, very dark, at Obed Wild and Scenic River on the Kentucky-Tennessee line. So dark, in fact, that the park has received designation as an International Dark Sky Park. With this designation, Obed Wild and Scenic River is now the second National Park Service unit east of Colorado to earn this designation and the 17th national park in the United States to do so.