Latest Acadia Podcast Episodes
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Alaska's Stained Rivers
National Parks Traveler Podcast - June 30, 2024 12:00 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsIn the remote wilderness of the Brooks Mountain Range in Alaska, where untamed rivers wind through vast expanses of tundra and towering mountains, a peculiar and alarming phenomenon is taking place. Since 2017 at least 75 pristine waterways, which once shimmered with crystalline clarity, have ta...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | State of Grand Teton National Park
National Parks Traveler Podcast - June 23, 2024 12:00 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsHave you ever wanted to scratch beneath the surface of a national park and gain a better understanding of the issues the National Park Service is challenged with? Or to see what research is being conducted, or understand what goals are being chased? The staff at Grand Teton National Park just ...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Managing Yellowstone Bison
National Parks Traveler Podcast - June 16, 2024 12:00 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsAs the National Mammal and a symbol closely tied to the National Park Service and the national parks, bison are highly revered in the United States. But that doesn’t mean they’re free of controversy. Recently the staff at Yellowstone National Park released the Final Environmental Impact Statem...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Letters from the Smokies
National Parks Traveler Podcast - June 09, 2024 12:00 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsThere is so much rich history across the National Park System, from chapters of the Revolutionary War held in parks in the eastern half of the country to stories from the gold rush that stampeded through Alaska during the late 1890s. This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at The National Parks Tr...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Parks as Founts of Wildlife
National Parks Traveler Podcast - June 02, 2024 12:00 - 45 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsRecently 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 bi...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Underwater Photography with the Submerged Resources Center
National Parks Traveler Podcast - May 26, 2024 12:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsDid 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 ...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Traveler's Summer Outlook
National Parks Traveler Podcast - May 19, 2024 12:00 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsSummer 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 loo...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | NPS Budgetary Blues
National Parks Traveler Podcast - May 12, 2024 12:00 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWith 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 ove...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Smokies Life
National Parks Traveler Podcast - May 10, 2024 17:54 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsSmokies 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 chie...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Fossilized Parks
National Parks Traveler Podcast - April 28, 2024 12:00 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsHave 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 b...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Wolverine Recovery in Colorado
National Parks Traveler Podcast - April 21, 2024 12:00 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWolverines, the largest land-dwelling members of the weasel family, once roamed across the northern tier of the United States, and as far south as New Mexico in the Rockies and southern California in the Sierra Nevada range. But after more than a century of trapping and habitat loss, wolverines ...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Cultural Resource Challenge
National Parks Traveler Podcast - April 14, 2024 12:00 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsSpur a discussion about traveling to a national park for a vacation and odds are that it will revolve around getting out into nature, looking for wildlife, perhaps honing your photography skills, or marveling at incredible vistas. Will the discussion include destinations that portray aspects o...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Total Solar Eclipse of the Parks
National Parks Traveler Podcast - April 07, 2024 12:00 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsTens of millions of people in the United States will be able to witness a Total Solar Eclipse on Monday as the rare astronomical event cuts a path from Texas to Maine, up to 122 miles wide in some spots. This is a great opportunity to see the exact moment when the moon fully blocks the sun, cre...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Music Inspired by the Parks
National Parks Traveler Podcast - March 31, 2024 12:00 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWith March madness down to the Sweet 16, and Opening Day of Major League Baseball having arrived, we’re going to take a break this week and dive into our podcast archives for this week’s show. This is Kurt Repanshek, your host at the National Parks Traveler. My NCAA bracket was busted the ve...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Padre Island's Sea Turtles
National Parks Traveler Podcast - March 24, 2024 12:00 - 45 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsOne of the most popular public events in the National Park System was the release of sea turtle hatchlings, shuffling off into the Gulf of Mexico at Padre Island National Seashore. I say was, because the number of those public events has been drastically scaled back in recent years. The progr...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Polluting the Parks
National Parks Traveler Podcast - March 17, 2024 12:00 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsAir pollution and climate change impacts can have outsized effects on the National Park System, as well as lesser noticed but just as concerning effects. But are those impacts spread across the entire park system, or clustered around a few? Back in 2019 the National Parks Conservation Associat...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | State of the Parks 2024
National Parks Traveler Podcast - March 10, 2024 12:00 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWhile most visitors to the National Park System view the parks as incredibly beautiful places, or places rich in culture and history, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes within the parks, and with the National Parks Service. Traveler editor Kurt Repanshek has closely followed the par...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | National Park Guidebooks
National Parks Traveler Podcast - March 03, 2024 13:00 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWith nearly 430 units in the National Park System, of which 63 are National Parks, we all probably could use a little help in planning our adventures into the park system. But do you simply visit a park’s website to plan your trip? Find an online guidebook? Buy a hardcover guidebook? Or simply w...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Staying Safe At Hawai'i Volcanoes
National Parks Traveler Podcast - February 25, 2024 13:00 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsHawai’i Volcanoes National Park is such a unique destination in the National Park System. Located on the Big Island, it’s surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, it has rainforests, and it boasts two active volcanoes in Mauna Loa and Kilauea. A visit to Hawai’i Volcanoes comes with a number of opti...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Vanishing Treasures
National Parks Traveler Podcast - February 18, 2024 13:00 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsFrom the Rocky Mountains to the West Coast and up to Alaska, there are thousands of historic structures and archaeological sites on National Park System landscapes. They range in variety from homesteader cabins to pre-historic cave dwellings. Taking care of these buildings and archaeological s...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Coming to the Aid of Giant Sequoias
National Parks Traveler Podcast - February 11, 2024 13:00 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsStand before a giant sequoia tree in Sequoia or Kings Canyon national parks or nearby Yosemite National Park and you’re overwhelmed by their size, and assume they’re impervious to anything that might be thrown at them. But as we learned from wildfires in 2020 and 2021 in Sequoia and Kings Canyon...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | California Mountain Lions
National Parks Traveler Podcast - February 04, 2024 13:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsMountain lions are an incredibly charismatic animal on landscapes within, and adjacent to, the National Park System. But they’re seldom seen because of their nocturnal tendencies. There recently was a new report that focused on a comprehensive estimate of mountain lions in California, and th...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Manassas Battlefield Threats
National Parks Traveler Podcast - January 28, 2024 13:00 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsManassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia protects one of the defining battlefields of the Civil War. It was there that the first battle of the war was waged, in 1861, it was the scene of a second battle a year later, and it was where Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson got his Ston...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | National Park Reservation Systems
National Parks Traveler Podcast - January 21, 2024 13:00 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsMount Rainier National Park is the most recent unit of the National Park System to announce that you’ll need a reservation to enter the most popular areas of the park during the busy summer months. At the same time, Shenandoah National Park has announced that a pilot program it’s been running fo...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | The Future of the Endangered Species Act
National Parks Traveler Podcast - January 14, 2024 13:00 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWhen Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, it said that species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the US have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untampered by adequate concern and conservation. Other species of fish, wildlife, and plants have b...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Golden Spike National Historical Park
National Parks Traveler Podcast - January 07, 2024 13:00 - 28 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsAs 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...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | 2023 Park System Year in Review Part 2
National Parks Traveler Podcast - December 31, 2023 13:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWe’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 Prote...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | 2023 Park System Year in Review Part 1
National Parks Traveler Podcast - December 24, 2023 13:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsThe 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, climat...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | An Underwater Ecological Disaster
National Parks Traveler Podcast - December 17, 2023 13:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWho 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 wate...
National Parks Traveler Podcast | Support Keeping the Lights On
National Parks Traveler Podcast - December 10, 2023 13:00 - 37 minutes ★★★★★ - 102 ratingsWhen 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 listene...