Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will be in New York City on Tuesday to join Mayor Michael Bloomberg in announcing a partership between the National Park Service and New York City to cooperatively manage urban parks in the greater New York metropolitan area.

Plein air artists, who head to the fields, mountains, and lakeshores to capture the settings in front of them on canvas, produce impressive, moving works that can provide unique perspectives on the settings. Through late August you can enjoy some great plein air works created in the national parks if you find yourself in Georgia.

Tucked far north in Montana, hard against the Canadian border, Glacier National Park is a rumpled and craggy masterpiece. Within the park’s 1 million acres rise rustling aspen glades, stands of an unusual evergreen—larch—that loses its needles in winter, even a temperate rainforest of Pacific red cedars, hemlocks and Pacific yew. This is the kingdom of grizzlies and wolves, wolverines and lynx, species that for many exist only in books, magazines, and nature documentaries.