National Parks Traveler Podcast

This podcast explores the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act and its impact on protecting plants and animals. The podcast discusses the successes and challenges of the Act, the importance of critical habitat designation, the impact of changes made during the Trump administration, the economic value of biodiversity, the significance of collaboration among different agencies, and the future of the Act with a focus on funding and technological advancements.

As a young boy growing up in New Jersey, a year-end holiday treat was setting up our model railroad. It gave me and my two brothers hours of fun and an opportunity to learn a little about the steam age of railroads. Our first railroad featured Lionel O gauge locomotives and cars. Later we moved into HO gauge trains, and many years later I had an N gauge layout. That boyhood love of model railroads drove me to visit Golden Spike National Historical Park in northern Utah not far from the Great Salt Lake. That's where, on May 10th, 1869, the Transcontinental Railroad was completed when the Jupiter and No. 119 steam locomotives of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met head-on. To learn more about those two locomotives, I headed north to Promontory Summit and caught up with Ranger Cole Chisam, who is the engineer who drives the two locomotives at the park. I'll be back in a minute with Cole.

We're closing out the year with a look back at some of the top stories around the National Park System, and involving the National Park Service. We opened this look back a week ago, with Kristen Brengel from the National Parks Conservation Association, and Mike Murray from the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, discussing issues involving the National Park Service, and outside impacts affecting the National Park System. Today, in the second half of this discussion, we're focusing on natural resource issues in the parks.

The past year has been a trying one for the National Park Service, and for many of the units in the National Park System. For the agency, employee morale continued to be a major issue as housing, pay, and leadership remained sore spots for many who worked for the Service. On the ground, climate change continued to impact parks, from sea level rise and more potent storms, to wildfires, and hotter and dryer conditions that adversely affected vegetation, wildlife, and facilities. With time running out on 2023, and 2024 on the horizon, we're going to be taking a look this week and next at many of the top stories that played out, or are playing out, across the National Park System and the National Park Service. Joining us for the conversation are Mike Murray, Chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, and Kristen Brengel, the Vice President of Government Affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Who wouldn't like to visit a tropical paradise? Virgin Islands National Park in the Caribbean is one such paradise. It resides on the island of St. John, and features beaches sparkling white and lined with palm trees and other tropical vegetation. Those beaches are washed by warm, turquoise waters that provide habitat for sea turtles the size of trunks, colorful fishes like blue tang and parrot fish, and even menacing barracuda. While the national park might seem idyllic from above water, beneath the surface of the Caribbean Sea, the once vibrant coral reefs have been impacted by a bleaching event caused by abnormally high ocean temperatures compounded with disease, that together could have devastating consequences. Snorkel or scuba dive in the national park's waters, or those that surround Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument, Buck Island Reef National Monument, or Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve, and in many directions you'll see a seemingly lifeless seascape. To better understand what's going on, we're joined today by Jeff Miller, a National Park Service fisheries biologist who, before he retired back in 2021, worked with the South Florida Caribbean Inventory and Monitoring Network on developing a coral and fisheries monitoring program.

When Kurt Repanshek launched the Traveler back in August of 2005, it was primarily to find stories that he could pitch to magazines. But the magazine world took a nosedive, while at the same time readership on the Traveler continued to grow. Today, between 2.5 and 3 million readers and listeners a year turn to the Traveler to learn more about the National Park System, both its wonders and how it's being managed. Unfortunately, the Traveler hasn't been financially sustainable, and can't continue unless we can attract the funding necessary to employ a small staff, upgrade IT resources, and allow us to tackle the growing number of critical stories that fall by the wayside because more and more news organizations are paring back, or totally going out of business. Rebecca Latson, the Traveler's contributing photographer, and Lynn Riddick, who hosts many of the Traveler's weekly podcast, discuss their participation in pulling together the Traveler's editorial content, and how that's given them greater appreciation of the value of having a news organization whose focus is solely on national parks and the National Park Service.

It's been six years since an oil company headed out across the marl prairie of Big Cypress National Park with vehicles weighing as much as 30 tons to search for oil reserves. Signs of that work continue to show on the prairie, despite stringent National Park Service requirements for restoring the landscape after the searching was completed. Located to the north of Everglades National Park, Big Cypress is a "split estate" – the Park Service owns the surface of the more than 720,000-acre landscape, while the mineral rights are privately owned – energy exploration and possible development were allowed in the preserve's enabling legislation. But how that exploration is allowed to be performed can be a matter of contention. While the National Park Service sounds mostly satisfied with the restoration work done by Burnett Oil, the National Parks Conservation Association strongly disagrees. The park advocacy group just released a 24-page report, "Speaking Up For The Swamp," that points to remaining scars from that exploration work on the preserve. We'll be back in a minute with Melissa Abdo, NPCA's Sun Coast regional redirector, to discuss that report.

Utah has five spectacular national parks, and Arches is one of them. It's a relatively small park. The scenic drive is only 18 miles long, ending at the Devil's Garden area, but you'll have incredible views of the reddish rockscape the entire way right from your vehicle. Of course, it's always better to get out on the trails and take in as much off-road as your timetable and legs will allow. Two of the park's most impressive arches – Delicate Arch and Landscape Arch – are well worth the hiking you'll need to tackle to stand in awe before them. This week the Traveler's Lynn Riddick and her trip companion, Tica Nathan, spent a day and a half in the park and offer up some of their experiences and observations.

Throughout history the barrier islands that today are home to Cape Hatteras National Seashore have been attractive to wildlife. A variety of sea turtle species come ashore to lay their nests, and a variety of shorebirds settle there, too, to lay their eggs. But the thing with wildlife nesting on the beaches of Cape Hatteras is that one great season can be followed by a poor one. Influencing the outcome can be human disturbances, storms, and predation. How was 2023 for piping plovers, a threatened species, at Cape Hatteras, and what about the sea turtles? To get the answers to those questions we've invited Meaghan Johnson, the seashore's Chief of Resource Management and Science to join us.

It was just over a month ago when the federal government was staring at the possibility of a shutdown. Well, little seemingly has changed in the ensuing four weeks, other than that the House of Representatives has a new speaker in Mike Johnson from Louisiana, and the full chamber has settled on its budget numbers for fiscal 2024…which started back on October 1. While most national parks likely will close if there is a government shutdown on November 17, what is more pressing for the National Park Service is what budget numbers Congress will settle on for the current fiscal year and whether President Biden will go along with them. Our guests today are John Garder, the senior director for budget & appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, and Mike Murray, a long-time NPS employee and superintendent who now serves as chair of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks. They're here to discuss the current situation facing the Park Service and Park System.