National Parks Traveler

Twenty years ago, the National Parks Traveler launched on an early generation blogging platform to help me generate story ideas to pitch to magazines. Since that humble beginning, the Traveler has evolved into a nonprofit news organization that produces content focused on national parks and protected areas that attracts 2.5-3 million readers and listeners a year.

Through the years we've covered efforts to overturn the National Park Service's Congressional mandate to preserve national parks and their resources for future generations, human tragedies, catastrophic storms that greatly impacted parks, wildlife issues, overlooked corners of the National Park System, and so much more.

The Traveler has introduced you to parks, produced annual packages of stories that point to "threatened and endangered" units of the park system, reported on climate-change impacts and invasive species, unraveled paleontological puzzles, and, since 2019, brought you weekly podcasts that further explore the parks and the many challenges they face and the wonders they hold.

I hope you'll help ensure that this coverage continues by donating towards our 20th anniversary fundraising goal of $20,000 by Labor Day. Your support keeps journalists, not Artifical Intelligence, producing essential coverage of the places you love.

It enables us to stay atop tough issues surrounding the parks and Park Service, such as the Trump administration's efforts to weaken the park system and the Park Service and the state of threatened and endangered species in the parks. It ensures that we can scratch beneath the surface of parks coverage and bring you such stories as the consequences of the administration's slashing of a third of the Park Service staff in its Alaska Regional Office, why the administration needs to invest more, not less, in the agency's Inventory and Monitoring Program, and how the Park Service is working to protect and preserve cultural resources.

Here's the bottom line: The National Parks Traveler is not some AI aggregation. It's your one-stop website for staying informed on national park and National Park Service issues. Your support enables us to grow and expand that work. Our editorial direction is not dictated by any government or corporate organization. It's overseen by a core group of professional journalists with more than 200 years of combined experience who follow the news where it leads.

So we can continue doing this important reporting, please make a donation to the National Parks Traveler today, and urge others in your network to do the same.