National parks provide us with so many services, from providing us with inspiration, allowing us to leave our stress behind for a few hours or a few days, offering a recreational outlet, and enabling us to pursue hobbies from photography to other artistic endeavors, and looking for wildlife.

The parks also allow us to go back into history through living history programs and interpretation, provided both by rangers and by organizations that produce interpretive materials. They also serve as a great background for storytellers.

Today our guest is a former ranger who held the informal title of Chief Storyteller. Tom Medema until recently was Associate Director for the National Park Service, with a focus on interpretation in the parks. We'll discuss all things interpretation and inspiration tied to the National Park System.

Across the United States, there are many thousands of collisions between vehicles and wildlife each year, killing people and animals and causing millions of dollars in property damages. Some solutions revolve around creating bridges specifically for wildlife, from elk and mountain lions to even turtles and salamanders.

It's been estimated that collisions with wildlife in the United States kill around 200 people and injure more than 26,000 per year. Building wildlife crossings can reduce those collisions by up to 97 percent.

Back in 2021 the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided $350 million to be doled out as grants over five years on building such crossings. But the funding runs out this year, and the National Parks Conservation Association has been urging Congress to not just renew the program, but see that it provides $200 million a year going forward.

To explain the problem and associated costs with the lack of wildlife crossings today's guests are Bart Melton, senior director of NPCA's wildlife program, and Renee Callahan from ARC Solutions, a nonprofit that works to facilitate new thinking, new methods, new materials and new solutions for wildlife crossing structures.

You might not entirely appreciate the wonders and majesty of national parks unless you venture out after dark and gaze up at what often is referred to as the other half of the national park system. The view can be quite dazzling, with planets, stars, the Milky Way, and for the lucky, a comet or shooting star.

Sadly, not every park offers such dazzling views. Light pollution reaches more than a few national parks, and can really infringe on your nighttime enjoyment of the parks.

Gavin Heffernan is among those park travelers who are troubled by light pollution. He's a California-based photographer with a unique long-form time lapse style. And he's hoping this approach brings a fresh awareness to the wonders of night skies in the national parks and creates advocacy to fight light pollution and the damage it wreaks on natural habitats.

Warming oceans, pollution, more potent hurricanes, anchor drops, dredging and trawling. The Florida Reef struggles with a lot of impacts today. In fact, only about 2 percent of the reef that stretches some 350 miles from Biscayne National Park past Everglades National Park and down to Dry Tortugas National Park is covered with living coral.

For several months now at the National Parks Traveler we've been building an ongoing series of stories and podcasts focused on impacts to the Florida Reef and whether it can be saved. Today our guest is Dr. Erinn Fuller, an associate vice president for research, senior scientist, and coral health and disease program manager at the Mote Aquarium in Florida.

Dr. Fuller is on the forefront of efforts to offset impacts to the Florida Reef and restore its corals. She'll explain the various impacts to the reef and the work being done to offset them.

Capitol Reef National Park in Utah is one of the Mighty Five, as the state likes to say in its tourism promotions, and while it's somewhat off the beaten path, visitors are finding it.

In 2024, visitation to the park was a record 1.4 million, a number that likely increased in 2025 and will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.

Cognizant of the rising tide of visitation, the National Park Service staff at Capitol Reef has been working on a visitor use management plan intended to better manage growing visitation. Our guest today is Sue Fritzke, a former superintendent of the park and a member of the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks.

What do you do, where do you go, when you pull into your favorite national park and can't find a place to park or a trail without crowds?

Those are good questions probably going through many people's minds as the national parks become more and more popular with more and more people.

Mike Oswald might have the answers you're looking for, at least for the Western half of the country. Oswald is the writer and publisher behind Your Guide to the National Parks, a thick, fact-filled guidebook to the 63 national parks in the country. This year he's veering outside of the parks with a new book titled, simply, Public Land, 1,000 Western Wonders.

Congaree National Park is an often-overlooked unit of the National Park System. Indeed, only about 250,000 visitors set foot in Congaree each year. Those who do are awestruck by the size of the trees there, as the park contains the highest concentration of champion-sized trees anywhere in North America.

Our guest today is Professor Kimberly Meitzen from Texas State University. Before arriving at Texas State, she studied at the University of South Carolina, where she fell in love with Congaree, its floodplain, and its big trees.

A growing majority of bat species are in serious trouble, largely because of white nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that resembles a white fuzz on infected bats.

As the disease has spread across the country, it's decimated bat populations – killing upwards of 99 percent of some populations – and turned up in many national parks.

As part of the National Parks Traveler's Threatened and Endangered Species Project, contributing writer Kim O'Connell has been looking into the situation with bat species.