National Parks Traveler Podcast Kurt Repanshek

Recently I read “The Wolverine Way”, by Douglas Chadwick. It’s a book from 2012 that really dives into the lives of wolverines, a small mammal with a cantankerous reputation that the US Fish and Wildlife Service late last year announced would be a threatened species. The book is a fascinating biography, if you will, of wolverines. Chadwick has an engaging writing style and Glacier National Park provides a fascinating backdrop for the story, two things that keep the story flowing. 
One thing that he mentions that struck me is how important Glacier National Park is for the wolverines survival. He notes that the surrounding national forests offer much the same habitat that wolverines need, but points out that the national forests don’t provide the same protection from hunting and trapping that national parks do. 
Of course, with wolverines gaining protection under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species, the animals will have the same protections in national forests and other public lands. 
Still, do we sometimes take for granted the protections that national parks provide for species that are either losing habitat elsewhere, or don’t have the same protections from hunting and development that the parks provide? To continue this discussion, we’re joined by Kent Redford, who runs Archipelago Consulting, through which he helps individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation, and Bart Melton and Ryan Valdez from the National Parks Conservation Association. Bart is a senior director of NPCA’s Wildlife Program, while Ryan is the Association’s Senior Director for Conservation Science and Policy. 

Did you know that there are some five and a half million acres of our National Parks that are underwater? There are sunken ships and aircraft. There are remnants of industry and mining. There are coral reefs and underwater caverns.
The Submerged Resources Center of the National Park Service is where these water resources are explored and documented. Underwater photography is crucial in the understanding of what lies beneath the surface, and images taken by the SRC Staff are essential not only for mapping and documenting, but to help the parks address issues and solve problems. 
This week, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick sits down with Bret Seymour, the Submerged Resources Center Deputy Chief and Audio-Visual Production Specialist who has spent some thirty years with the Park Service, photographing the mysteries below the surface.

Summer is almost here. The upcoming Memorial Day weekend is the official kickoff to the summer travel season, and I’m happy to say that the National Parks Traveler will be continuing to bring you news about the parks and how you can enjoy them.
As much as Editor-in-Chief Kurt Repanshek was looking forward to retiring, listener and reader support has enabled the news organization to continue on with its editorially independent coverage of National Parks and protected areas.   
Kurt and Lynn will be discussing this good news this week, as well as exploring some of the new content the Traveler will be bringing you in the months ahead, and looking out across the National Park System concerning some recent events.

With the summer vacation season not too far off, no doubt many National Park Service Superintendents are trying to figure out how to manage the crowds and avoid impacts to natural resources in the park system. 
With Memorial Day weekend just two weeks away, and Congress in its usual battles over how to fund the federal government, we wanted to take a look at how the funding situation looks for the Park Service. To help understand the financial setting across the National Park System, we’ve asked Phil Francis, from the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks to provide some insights.  

Smokies Life, which most of you who closely follow Great Smoky Mountains National Park know was previously known as the Great Smoky Mountains Association, produces educational and informational materials for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This week we’re joined by Laurel Rematore, the chief executive officer of Smokies Life, to discuss the name change as well as how her organization lends a big hand to the Park Service staff at Great Smoky. 

Have you ever closely inspected the landscape when you’re touring the National Park System, particularly in the West? You never know what you might find.
Back in 2010 a 7-year-old attending a Junior Ranger program at  Badlands National Park spied a partially exposed fossil that turned out to be the skull of a 32-million-year-old saber-toothed cat.
If you’ve ever visited Petrified Forest National Park you’ve no doubt marveled over the colorful fossilized tree trunks. There are also fossilized trees on the northern range of Yellowstone National Park, but nowhere near as colorful.
For this week’s episode we’ve invited Vince Santucci, the National Park Service’s senior paleontologist, to discuss the many fossil resources that exist across the National Park System, from coast to coast and north to south.