By drips and weeps over thousands if not millions of years, beauty is created underground. Here in the subterranean world the moist air and mineral-rich water create castles, not in the sky, but in the caves of the National Park System.

For the second time this summer, the body of a missing hiker has been found in the high, rugged backcountry of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Grizzly bears that roam the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a sprawling 34,000-square-mile landscape of national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, and state and private lands, gained a reprieve from hunting seasons that were to open in Wyoming and Idaho on Saturday when a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting the hunts.

With Tūtū Pele seemingly having come to the end of her latest eruptive run, staff at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park are working to get back to the business of running a national park, not responding to an erupting volcano. But it won't be business as usual at the park now, or for the foreseeable future, as repairing the damage carries a bill of an estimated $100 million, at least, and some areas might never reopen for a long, long time.