National Parks Traveler

An early season blast of winter made the news the other day when it actually snowed out Game 3 of the National League Division Series between the Phillies and the Rockies. With hopes that the storm was a harbinger of a bountiful winter on its way, here's a list of hikes to help you figure out what to do if you make it to Rocky Mountain National Park when the snow is deep and getting deeper.

The Park Service acquired South Carolina’s Castle Pinckney National Monument in 1933, but was glad to see it abolished and transferred in the 1950s. Lacking a glorious past, and too expensive to restore, the old island fort now sits rotting in Charleston harbor.

They are simple structures, and "shacks" is no doubt a good way to describe them. Built more than a century ago to house members of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, these board structures hidden amid the dunes of Cape Cod National Seashore have taken on a second, or third, life as artists' roosts. But what should the national seashore do with them?

Wilderness. It's where the wild things are. It's a place where the stress of everyday life in the "real" world can be swept away.