More than 40 years ago, the then park ranger Jon Waterman took his first journey to Alaska’s Noatak River. Captivated by the profusion of wildlife, the rich habitat, and the unfamiliar landscape, he spent years kayaking, packrafting, skiing, dogsledding, and backpacking in Arctic North America—often alone for weeks at a time. After three decades away from the Noatak, he returned with his 15-year-old son, Alistair, in 2021 to find a flooded river and a scarcity of the once abundant caribou. The Arctic had warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.

The next year, 2022, Waterman took a last journey to document the changes. The following is excerpted and adapted from his prologue in Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis (Patagonia Books, November 12).

A former ranger in Rocky Mountain�����Ի� Denali national parks, Waterman is the author of 17 books, including (National Geographic Books), In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, Running Dry, and Arctic Crossing. He has made five films about adventure and wild places.

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The below is adapted from Into the Thaw: Witnessing Wonder amid the Arctic Climate Crisis.

A Certain Type of Fun, July 10-12, 2022

My hands, thighs, and calves have repeatedly locked up in painful dehydration cramps, undoubtedly caused by our toil with leaden packs in eighty-degree heat up the steep streambed or its slippery, egg-shaped boulders. After my water bottle slid out of an outside pack pocket and disappeared amid one of several waist-deep stream fords or in thick alders yesterday, I carefully slide the bear spray can (looped in a sling around my shoulders) to the side so it doesn’t get knocked out of its pouch, an action I will come to regret. Now, to slake my thirst, I submerge my head in Kalulutok Creek like a water dog.

Kalulutok Creek would be called a river in most parts of the world. Here in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, amid the largest span of legislated wilderness in the United States, it’s just a creek compared to the massive Noatak River that we’re bound for. But in my mind—after we splash-walked packrafts and forded its depths at least 30 times yesterday—Kalulutok will always be an ice-cold, wild river.

It drains the Endicott and Schwatka Mountains, which are filled with the most spectacular granite and limestone spires of the entire Brooks Range. One valley to the east of us is sky-lined with sharp, flinty peaks called the Arrigetch, or “fingers of the outstretched hand” in Iñupiaq.

As the continent’s most northerly mountains, the sea-fossil-filled Brooks Range—with more than a half-dozen time-worn peaks over 8,000 feet high—is seen on a map as the last curl of the Rocky Mountains before they stairstep into foothills and coastal plains along the Arctic Ocean. The Brooks Range stretches 200 miles south to north and 700 miles to the east, where it jabs into Canada. Although there are more than 400 named peaks, since the Brooks Range is remote and relatively untraveled, it’s rare that anyone bothers to climb these mountains. My river-slogger companion, Chris, and I will be exceptions.

We carry a water filter, but it would be silly to use it. We’re higher and farther north than giardiasis-infected beavers and there is no sign of caribou. The creek is fed from the pure ice of shrunken glaciers above and ancient permafrost in the ground below. In what seems like prodigious heat for the Arctic, the taps here are all wide-open.

Thirty-nine years ago, I decided to learn all I could about life above the Arctic Circle. As a climber, I traded my worship of high mountains for the High Arctic. I felt that unlike the study of crevasse extrication and avalanche avoidance—you couldn’t just read about the Arctic or sign up for courses. You have to go on immersive journeys and figure out how the interlocked parts of the natural world fit together. Along this path, acts of curiosity out on the land and the water can open an earned universe of wonders. But you must spend time in the villages, too, with the kindhearted people of the North to make sure you get it right. And you can’t call the Arctic “the Far North”—it is “home” rather than “far” to the many people who live there.

So, after twoscore of Arctic journeys, in the summer of 2022, I’m on one more trip. I could not be on such an ambitious trip without all the previous experiences. (The more I learn, it sometimes feels like the less I know about the Arctic.)

But this time the agenda is different. I hope to understand the climate crisis better.

Chris Korbulic and I are here to document it however we can. Since my first trip above the Arctic Circle in 1983, I have seen extraordinary changes in the landscape. Only three days underway and we’ve already flown over a wildfire to access our Walker Lake drop-off point. And yesterday we trudged underneath several bizarre, tear-drop-shaped landslide thaw slumps—a.k.a. thermokarsts—caused by the permafrost thaw.

In much of Alaska, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) says that permafrost thaw from 2005 to 2010 has caused the ground to sink more than four inches, and in places to the north of us, twice that. The land collapses as the permafrost below it thaws, like logs pulled out from beneath a woodpile. AMAP believes this will amount to a “large-scale degradation of near-surface permafrost by the end of the twenty-first century.” Roads and buildings and pipelines—along with hillsides, Iñupiat homes, forests, and even lakes—will fall crazily aslant, or get sucked into the ground as if taken by an earthquake.

On this remote wilderness trip, we don’t expect a picnic—known as Type 1 Fun to modern-day adventurers. A journey across the thaw on foot and by packraft for 500-plus miles won’t resemble a backcountry ski trip or a long weekend backpack on Lower 48 trails. We have planned for Type 2 Fun: an ambitious expedition that will make us suffer and give us the potential to extend ourselves just enough that there will be hours, or even days, that won’t seem like fun until much later when we’re back home. Then our short-circuited memories will allow us to plan the next trip as if nothing went wrong on this one. An important part of wilderness mastery is to avoid Type 3 Fun: a wreckage of accidents, injuries, near-starvation, or rescue. We’ve both been on Type 3 Fun trips that we’d rather forget.

Today, to get Chris, a caffeine connoisseur, to stop, I simply utter, “Coffee?” His face lights up as he throws off his pack and pulls out the stove. I pull out the fuel bottle. Since Chris isn’t a conversational bon vivant, I’ve learned not to ask too many questions, but a cup of coffee might stimulate a considerate comment or two about the weather. As I fire up the trusty MSR stove with a lighter, we crowd around and toast our hands over the hot windscreen as if it’s our humble campfire. We’re cold and wet with sweat and we shiver in the wind. But at least we’re out of the forest-fire smoke—this summer more than two million acres have burned in dried-out Alaska.

Today, with the all-day uphill climb and inevitable back-and-forth route decisions through the gorge ahead, we’ll be lucky to trudge even five miles to the lake below the pass. Why, I ask myself, as Chris puts on his pack and shifts into high gear, could we not have simply flown into the headwaters of the Noatak River instead of crossing the Brooks Range to get here? I heave on my pack and wonder how I’ll catch Chris, already far ahead.

Shards of caribou bones and antlers lie on the tundra as ghostly business cards of a bygone migration, greened with mold, and minutely chiseled and mined for calcium by tiny vole teeth. We kick steps across a snowfield, then work our way down a steep, multicolored boulderfield, whorled red and peppered with white quartz unlike any rocks I’ve seen before. As rain shakes out of the sky like Parmesan cheese from a can, we weave in and out of leafy alder thickets while I examine yet another fresh pile of grizzly feces. I stop to pick apart the scat and thumb through stems and leaves and root pieces. This griz appears to be on a vegetarian diet.

“Hey, bear!” We yell the old cautionary refrain again and again until we’re hoarse. I hold tight to the pepper spray looped over my shoulder to keep it from grabby alder branches.

A half mile farther the route dead-ends so we’re forced to descend into the gorge again. With Chris 20 yards behind, I plunge step down through a near-vertical slope of alders and play Tarzan for my descent as I hang onto a flexible yet stout branch, and swing down a short cliff into another alder thicket. A branch whacks me in the chest and knocks off the pepper-spray safety plug. When I swing onto the ground, I get caught on another branch that depresses the trigger in an abrupt explosion that shoots straight out from my chest in a surreal orange cloud. Instinctively I hold my breath and close my eyes and continue to shimmy downward, but I know I’m covered in red-hot pepper spray.

When I run out of breath, I squint, keep my mouth closed, breathe carefully through my nose, and scurry out of the orange capsaicin cloud. Down in a boulderfield that pulses with a stream, I open my mouth, take a deep breath, and yell to Chris that I’m O.K. as I strip off my shirt and try to wring it out in the stream. I tie the contaminated shirt on the outside of my pack and put on a sweater. My hands prickle with pepper.

Then we’re off again. As we clamber up steep scree to exit the gorge, my lips, nasal passages, forehead, and thighs burn from the pepper. The pepper spray spreads from my thighs to my crotch like a troop of red ants, but I can hardly remove my pants amid the incoming storm clouds and wind. With the last of the alders below us, we enter the alpine world above the tree line. By the time we reach the lake, the drizzle has become a steady rain. I’m nauseous and overheated underneath my rain jacket with the red pepper spray that I wish I had saved for an aggressive bear instead of a self-douche. Atop wet tundra that feels like a sponge underfoot, we pitch the Megamid tent with a paddle lashed to a ski pole and guy out the corners with four of the several million surrounding boulders left by the reduction of tectonic litter.

I fire up the stove and boil the water, and we inhale four portions of freeze-dried pasta inside the tent. We depart from wilderness bear decorum to cook outside and away from the tent because it’s cold and we’re tired. Chris immediately heads out with his camera. His eyes are watery from just being within several feet of me.

I’ve been reduced like this before—wounded and exhausted and temporarily knocked off my game. So, I tell myself that this too will pass, that I’ll get in gear and regain my mojo. That maybe, I can eventually get my shy partner to loosen up and talk. That we will discover an extraordinary new world—the headwaters of the Noatak River—from up on the pass in the morning. And that I will find a way to withstand my transformation into a spicy human burrito.

Snow feels likely tonight. It’s mid-July, yet winter has slid in like a glacier over the Kalulutok Valley.

I am too brain-dead to write in my journal, too physically wiped out and overheated in the wrong places to even think of a simple jaunt through the flowers to see the view that awaits us. I pull down my orange-stained pants and red underwear, grab a cup filled with ice water. I try not to moan as I put in my extra-hot penis and let it go numb.

Type 2 Fun for sure.

Jon Waterman lives in Carbondale, Colorado. An all-round adventurer, he has climbed the famous Cassin Ridge on Denali in winter; soloed the Northwest Passage; sailed to Hawaii picking up microplastics; dogsledded into and up Canada’s Mount Logan; and run the Colorado River 1,450 miles from source to sea. He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and three grants from the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council. Into the Thaw is available to purchase from Patagonia Books and for pre-order on Amazon for November 19.

For more by this author:

A Former National Park Ranger Reveals His Favorite Wild Places in the U.S.

The post The Worst Kind of Type 2 Fun in the Arctic appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Jon Waterman, a former ranger in Denali and Rocky Mountain national parks and a member (with Roger Mear and Mike Young) of the team to make the 1982 first winter ascent of the 20,310-foot Denali’s Cassin Ridge, has spent a lifetime exploring the natural world. He has written 16 books, including��In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, High Alaska, Running Dry, Arctic Crossing, and the upcoming Into the Thaw (from Patagonia Books), in addition to making five films about adventure and wild places.

Waterman’s most recent book, will be published October 3. Below, he explains his idea of wilderness and, in an excerpt from the book, reveals some of his favorite places in the far reaches of the U.S.

No place can truly be called wilderness, because the term is more a feeling about undeveloped landscapes, a subjective and often elusive state of mind rather than a defined geography. But more than ever before—and on the eve of the 60^th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act—we need wild places as antidotes to the madding world and as balms for the soul. Wild places are essential amid population growth, diminished natural habitats, adjacent development of natural resources, and the climate crisis.

I’ve chased the wilderness ideal all my life. From Baxter State Park in Maine, where I cut my teeth as a mountaineer, to the cherished lakes in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. I paddled the Colorado River from source to sea, marveling at the wonder of its vast delta with a sky that feels as big as all the desert hemisphere. I took to the Arctic repeatedly, most recently through the remote Noatak National Preserve, struck by our greatest of all legislated wilderness areas. I’ve repeatedly climbed the Yukon’s gigantic, ice-cloaked Mount Logan—hidden amid the greatest non-polar icefields on earth—in the seldom-visited Kluane National Park. I’ve taken to the granite or carried my skis into the ever popular John Muir Wilderness of California. These are six of my favorite trips and places.

Baxter State Park, Maine

December 29, 1974: We left our tent at Chimney Pond in the dark, kicking steps up Katahdin in our double boots. When we reached tree line an hour later, I donned sunglasses and marveled at dawn as it sparkled off lake ice, then blazed over an infinitude of spruce stretching across the horizon.

My crampons squeaked against subzero névé as I continued up. Waist-high krummholz trees lay plastered with horizontally suspended daggers of rime ice that pointed to the lee as if to caricature the wind. Up above, rime encrusted everything: rocks, the summit cairn atop Pamola, and hair that hung below our balaclavas. As we descended down onto the Knife Edge for the final mile-long crossing to Baxter Peak, we threaded over and around frosted boulders and bashed off huge branches of rime with our ice axes to avoid being poked as we balanced along the precipice.

I had come to northern Maine to experience the ultimate New England wilderness. In this place that demanded self-sufficiency, I wanted to learn the craft of winter mountaineering on New England’s most arctic mountain so that I could climb in the world’s great ranges.

As I clambered slowly across the spine of a mountain sharpened by the last ice age, I focused on each step. Inches to the right, frosted slabs dropped more than a thousand feet to Chimney Pond. Then [Lee Nonemaker] yelled, pointing left: “The Brocken spectre!” We had been engulfed in mist, and the sun cast our clearly defined shadows—surrounded by strange rainbow halos—onto a thick cloud bank in front of us. We lofted our ice axes to the sky.��

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Minnesota

September 12, 2021: Shaded by tall pines at a campsite in mid-Winchell Lake on a sunny afternoon, we promptly pitched our tents, assembled our fishing rods, and stepped back into the canoes. Over the last two days, none of us had caught a fish, and because we were eager to take a break from freeze-dried food, we paddled out into a narrow bay and started our casts.

The end of the bay bristled with sedges, and as Peter [Stock] and David [Rhude] worked those shallow waters, Gil [Bovard] and I cast into the depths alongside granite ledges below our campsite. Earlier in the day we had heard the persistent howl of a wolf, but this afternoon only a blue jay called, and the air laid still amid fragrant pine, loamy-smelling dead logs and the sweet rot of fall.

We returned with a large northern pike. After Gil expertly filleted the fish, we deflated its bladder, paddled the skeleton out, and reverently sank it in the deep water of the lake.

According to the Ojibwe origin story, back in a time when gods interacted with humans, there was an animal god named Wemicus. He had repeatedly killed off all but one of his human sons-in-law, but in a final birch-bark canoe race, Wemicus was outsmarted. Goaded by his last son-in-law, Wemicus capsized in his canoe in the wind. When the man paddled over to the spot where Wemicus had fallen into the water, he saw his father-in-law transformed into the pike.

Four hungry canoeists couldn’t have been more thankful.

Upper Gulf of California Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve, Baja

December 2, 2008: At the border Pete McBride and I had paddled our pack rafts down an increasingly narrow stream that was once the mighty Colorado River. But within a day we were forced to carry our pack rafts and walk the route of 19th-century steamships. We bushwhacked and trudged through sands washed from the Rockies; baked by the hot sun, we perspired faster than we could drink. We stumbled south with blistered feet because it was no longer possible to float the last 90 miles to the sea.

Occasionally the river would reemerge in stagnant ponds shaded by cottonwoods and guarded by reluctant great blue herons, sentries of a former cornucopia. Most of the time we were lost in the dried-out maze of delta cut by farm fields and salty canals. Eventually, a small tributary, el Rio Hardy, resuscitated the delta.

Before the vast, dried-out sponge of a delta absorbed the large creek, we reinflated our boats and began to paddle. On the second day afloat, entering the biosphere reserve, we found an unexpected wet paradise. The glowing green phosphate water turned clear, scrubbed clean by a rowdy coiffure of reeds and plants.

These curlicues of hidden river were lush with an upwelling of underground water, temporarily arisen before it would be reabsorbed and blocked from the ocean by ancient sand grains spread as far as we could see. Here, briefly, nature endured: rattling kingfishers, squadrons of circling mallards, and hushed, stern-faced cattle egrets. We could smell the postcoital tang of ocean tides.

Tamarisk thinned. Salt grass bearded the ground. Pintail ducks, curlews, ibis, plovers, and black-crowned night herons fluttered and gabbled and splashed. Sere mountains surrounded us under an infinite sky bisected by a once unstoppable river that scarcely knew banks. As the stream narrowed, we could feel it gather momentum, as if it would once more meet the sea.

Noatak National Preserve, Alaska

August 5, 2021: As I rowed down the Noatak into the preserve, a golden eagle swooped silently 40 yards south. Then a bull caribou swam the river, its antlers held high like a waiter lofting a tray. It came ashore with a clatter over the river cobbles, then dashed out of sight into a thicket of dwarf birch.

We camped at a stream so gin clear that for once, amid America’s greatest wilderness, I abstained from a filter, cupped my hands, and drank like a passing wolf from water so cold my teeth ached. My son Alistair looked at me as if I had gone mad.

Hungry, I cast repeatedly out into the cloudy Noatak River and reeled back in along the confluence of pellucid, insect-laden waters. When a fish hit the lure, I lifted the rod tip and a torpedo-shaped, silvery grayling swam quickly past my feet, where I guided it ashore and dispatched it fast and mercifully.

His colorful dorsal fin protruded like a sail, battened with a score of rails and bordered ruby red with freckled pink dots. His eyes still held the light, with shiny gold irises that circled night-black pupils bigger than any fish. To keep bears out of camp, I slit its belly in the cold water and briefly held his shiny entrails in my hand, with appreciation, before I released all that we could not eat into the current.

We minced garlic into spitting olive oil, and I sautéed the white meat, scales down. Wind blew against the stove, and I could imagine a bear miles downstream, standing up while parsing out floating molecules of fried fish through its nose.

With the spatula, I flaked the grayling out onto a half dozen plates. Before anyone could eat, my son said, sotto voce, “Thank you, fish.” And as we all recited our thanks, it felt better than church.

John Muir Wilderness, California

April 8, 1993: In midweek after a big snow winter, we shouldered our packs at the trailhead hoping to ski Whitney and then continue a circumnavigation around the mountain. [Deborah Hutchinson and I] clumped uphill in our big boots, then cut off the broken mule trail and made our own trail in unbroken snow up toward Upper Boy Scout Lake, our skis like cumbersome antennae as they bumped Jeffrey pine branches and released the sweet smell of butterscotch. Atop the snow near the lake at 11,000 feet, we laid out our pads and slept contently under the stars—as if they provided heat on that cold night.

Before dawn under our headlamps, we unrolled the ski skins and strapped them to the skis, stepped into the bindings, and began walk-sliding up to Iceberg Lake. The Mountaineer’s Route proved too steep to continue with skins, so we strapped the boards on our packs and continued kicking several-inch-deep steps in hard snow up the route. It took little more than hour to race one another to the notch just above 14,000 feet. We stashed our skis there and strapped on our crampons for the last steep bit. We frontpointed side by side up firm snow, with our ax picks a-squeak with every punch. Although our breath came in gasps, we were exhilarated by the dance of axes synchronized with crampons. Above all else in the lower 48, the sky seemed an impossible cobalt, and peaks stretched in a dazzle of white as far as we could see.

We had the broad, helmet-crested summit to ourselves, but with the temperature rising, we couldn’t linger. Back at the skis, we clipped into our bindings with the snow now perfectly softened and corned up. We carved glorious turns, one at a time, slipping and sliding on velvet snow, arcing close to a hundred figure eights down, down, down in the footsteps of John Muir.

Kluane National Park, Yukon

July 9, 1978: After nearly a month out, we had climbed all the blue ice pitches up and across the unclimbed West Ridge of Mount Logan (19,551 feet). But the last two days—as we drug our gear across the high plateau and wheezed through the 16,000-foot air—proved an incredible workout.

Before the sun disappeared on one of our final nights, [Steve Davis, Roger Hirt, George Seivwright, and I] laid out our black tarps on a sloping snowfield and shoveled snow on top. Within an hour, the intense sunlight absorbed by the black tarp began to melt the snow, and several quarts of water trickled down into our pots at the bottom. The technique had saved us nearly a gallon of stove fuel over the last weeks of travel through the frozen wilderness.

Then as the sun fell below the horizon—in the penumbral light that constitutes night in the summer subarctic—George and I broke trail for an hour’s steady climb up to the North Peak. We couldn’t stay long on top in 20-below temps, with our beards iced over and frozen snot-sicles tusking out of our nostrils, but we were rewarded by the view to the north: three vertical miles down to the ice fields, gilled like the flanks of sharks with dark crevasses and dozens of snow-covered peaks as far as we could see, with no trees or buildings or roads or humans anywhere. In between were several more peaks we still needed to climb on the Logan high-altitude plateau. Off to the south, like a great planetary reflection mirror, the Gulf of Alaska glowed across the whole horizon, and I couldn’t help but shiver for how small it all made me feel. One look between us was all it took to signal our descent, and without words we hoofed it back down toward the tents, where our partners awaited with the last of the hot cocoa.

Jon Waterman lives in Carbondale, Colorado, and is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and three grants from the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council. The second of three large atlases, Atlas of Wild America (National Geographic, October 3, 2023), which contains 251 maps or graphics and 310 photographs, follows the bestselling Atlas of the National Parks (2019). Atlas of Wild America is available to purchase .

Also by this author:

The 8 Most Endangered National Parks

For more information on backcountry travel:

The post A Former National Park Ranger Reveals His Favorite Wild Places in the U.S. appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

More than 40 years ago, Mardy Murie, best known as��grandmother of the conservation movement,��spoke to a gathering of park superintendents at her home in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. “I wonder,” she said about national parks, “if it is not the best idea the USA��ever gave the world.”

If Murie��were alive today, she would wonder anew��if the U.S. government has failed to protect the parks in these times of disastrous wildfires, drying rivers, and melting glaciers. The parks also contend with pollution issues, budget shortfalls, a scourge of invasive plant and animal species, and now��a global pandemic.

In a controversial move��made��during the spread of COVID-19, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt waived entrance fees at all national parks, which encouraged visitation in mid-March. (The Department of the Interior says the decision was intended to mitigate��the risk��of spreading germs��to��the public and National Park Service employees��from��collecting fees��and lessen the financial burden on American families who wanted��to get outside and social-distance at these areas.) By late March—as some park employees tested positive for the virus and rangers could no longer��enforce safe social-distancing practices on crowded overlooks and trails—Yosemite, Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, and other parks began closing their gates. Nearly half of the 62 national parks were fully or partially closed at the peak��of the pandemic, and��at least ten workers were reported sick, according to the digital news daily .

Then on Earth Day (April 22), President Trump announced that the parks would soon reopen. of many park employees and officials from around the country, reopenings began in early May, and now most parks are open.

During the closings and shelter-in-place orders, many parks reverted to the deep quiet of nature. Bobcats, bears, and coyotes roamed freely into empty tents and buildings in Yosemite. Denali, in Alaska—closed to climbers for the first time ever—was visited up high only by ravens digging into old food caches. At the bottom of the Grand Canyon, desert bighorn sheep and rattlesnakes plied the banks of the Colorado River, unseen by boaters��for a month.

As the parks reopen, humans will once again lead the��invasive-species list. Since 2015, a record 300 million-plus visitors��have streamed into the national parks��every year, and a surge of visitors is expected this summer. The consensus is that many of America’s “best ideas” are being loved to death, as people swarm into places that have their own��compromised immune systems. In 2019, for instance, 4.49 million visitors, or about 31 people per acre, visited Utah’s Zion National Park. Last year, North Carolina and Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park topped 12 million visitors, an unprecedented statistic. Despite the need to look after natural resources,��employees are often overwhelmed with traffic jams, crime, and overflowing trash bins.

As visitation has increased over the past decade, park costs have risen, yet budgets are seldom fully funded by Congress. Most parks are now run by an overworked, skeleton��staff. Meanwhile, the necessary upkeep of roads, trails, and other infrastructure has been neglected and unfunded for decades as the parks have aged. Known as the “,” this budget deficit for the parks grows every year and is currently approaching $12 billion. However, on June 17 the Senate passed the , which is now with the House to vote on and if approved would begin tackling these repairs.

Still, there are more serious challenges afoot. Climate change is wreaking havoc on 80 percent of the larger national park system, which, in addition to the , includes��419 monuments, battlefields, recreation areas, and other designations. In 2010, Jon Jarvis, former director of the Park Service—who factored climate change into planning, research, interpretation, and maintenance throughout the system—wrote in the Park Service’s��:��“I believe climate change is fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced.” He retired in January 2017.

Today’s interior secretary, Bernhardt—who runs the Park Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)—is a former energy lobbyist. During his time with the��Interior��Department, the agency��has offered oil and gas leases on , appointed like-minded lieutenants, to address climate change, and . “This is a systematic dismantling of a beloved institution,” in January 2020 for The Guardian, “like pulling blocks from a Jenga tower, until it collapses.”

When reached for comment on Bernhardt and the department’s environmental record, a DOI spokesperson wrote: “Since the beginning of the Trump Administration, the Department of the Interior has improved scientific integrity by following the law, using the best available science and relying on the expertise of our professional career staff. Secretary Bernhardt has testified before Congress multiple times and stated publicly that he believes human beings are a contributing factor to our changing climate.” Meanwhile, the Senate has not confirmed acting National Park Service director David Vela, and top or deputy-director positions are either vacant or filled by acting and unconfirmed political appointees.

This comes at a time when a 2018 University of California at��Berkeley ��found that annual temperatures at the national parks have increased approximately 1.8 degrees over the past century. Particulate smog, ground-level ozone, and acid rain that pollutes water continue to plague parks from Maine’s Acadia��to California’s Sequoia. And if announced stand, pollution��levels will rise again. On March 26, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a ��during the pandemic to relax penalties and fines against air and water pollution, which already affects many of the parks listed below.

Even under more ideal political conditions, keeping these natural landscapes pristine would be a challenge. The following eight parks are��the most concerning examples of how the entire system could soon be endangered.

Rocky Mountain National Park

Northern Colorado

Established:��1915
Size: 265,807 acres

“Rocky” is a backyard mountain playground for tourists, hikers, and climbers from the Colorado Front Range��megalopolis. It’s the third most popular park, logging a record 4.7��million visitors in 2019, a 44 percent uptick in crowds since 2012.

According to spokeswoman Kyle Patterson, 2015 was a “tipping point” for the park.��“We’ve had road rage and parking-lot rage because of the congestion, and we couldn’t keep up with cleaning vault toilets or bathrooms,” she says.

Although parking lots are closed once full and the shuttle bus system has been improved, roads are still often jam-packed. Even the backcountry is thronged. Longs Peak, the park’s highest, deadliest mountain��(with a total of at least 60 fatalities)—not to mention the most��popular fourteener in Colorado—sees about 20,000 annual ascents.

One could argue that the roads—including the park’s sought-after Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous paved motorway on the continent—keep��most people contained on the asphalt. But nearly a million people who visit each July are drawn out of their cars and onto the fragile tundra above tree line to Instagram grazing elk, bighorn sheep, and pika, a small, furry mountain-dwelling creature��that whistles at intruders.

With a temperature increase in this area of 3.4 degrees over the past century, researchers are concerned about Rocky’s��heat-sensitive pika—an indicator species for climate change. Dependent upon snowfall for insulation in a place where the snowpack has been reduced by 41 percent over the past 30 years, the��cute-as-a-bunny pika (which has already vanished from a large section of the Sierra Nevada) may be in trouble here, too. Climate models for the century’s end show that without significant carbon-emissions reductions, pika numbers in the park will be reduced by more than 80 percent.

Thanks in part to the perfect storm of diseased trees, drought stress,�����Ի� heat, beetles have impacted 90 percent of the forests in the park.��Take a drive over the 12,183-foot summit of Trail Ridge Road and down into the west side of the park overlooking the Colorado River headwaters, and you’ll see conspicuously grayed and standing dead lodgepole pines, killed by voracious pine beetles. Exceptionally warm winters allowed the beetles to proliferate. On the east side of the park, the spruce beetle infestation has reached epidemic proportions.

In turn, tens of thousands of lifeless spruce and pine stand as giant matchsticks throughout the park. Patterson��believes that they’ll remove more than a million dead trees over the next two decades. Along with a startling growth of invasive cheatgrass that dries out and provides fuel to light up the trees, forest fires are hitting Rocky hard. In October 2012, a campfire blew up near Fern Lake, on the south side of the park, burning hot through January and��smoldering��into May. Fires have never burned so high and so late into winter here. “Rocky has had more fires in the last six years than in the last 90��years,” Patterson says.

Like conflagrations that have recently swept through Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, the suppression of fires in the past have left many old trees that have also contributed to the unprecedented size and intensity of modern wildfires. This has forced the parks to adopt new fire-management policies, such as controlled burns, or letting smaller lightning-caused fires run their course.

“The NPS as a whole is looking at science, mitigation, and adaptation,” says Patterson optimistically, like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up Longs Peak. “We’re adapting to climate change when we can by increasing the resiliency of the system.”

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

North Carolina and Tennessee

Established: 1934
Size: 522,427 acres

Straddling the border of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, Great Smoky is easily the most biodiverse national park in the system. Its wide-ranging microclimates are watered by up to 85 inches of rain a year and are rich with Pleistocene-era refugees—animals, plants, and other organisms unique only to this park. In its��fragrant and fertile tangle of wildlands, researchers have discovered 19,000 different species, 1,000 of which haven’t been seen elsewhere in the world, with still more yet to be identified.��With 30 different salamander species, Great Smoky is known to biologists as the salamander capital of the world. To the general public, it’s mostly known for its ancient and smoky-looking mountain range.

The lack of entrance fees, along with the park’s accessibility from large metro areas, allows Smoky to keep winning the national popularity contest. Its 12.5 million visitors in 2019 (twice that of Grand Canyon, the second most popular park) beat the previous year’s record by over a million. On a busy summer day, it can take five hours to drive the traffic-jammed, 11-mile Cades Cove loop through the park’s historic section.

“Park staff numbers are declining as visitation grows, along with wildlife confrontations and collisions,” says Jeff Hunter, a North Carolina–based senior program manager with the ��(NPCA). There are roughly 1,500��black bears in Smoky, mingling with white-tailed deer and elk. Wildlife corridors affording��passage in and out of the park are surrounded by highways. ���ϳԹ��� its��northeast boundary, Interstate 40 is traversed by up to 26,000 cars a day.

In 2015 and 2016, park researchers collared 50 bears and found that the “wild” bears of Great Smoky depended upon a regular city fix: 93 percent of the bruins regularly left park grounds to find food. While garbage is properly contained within its boundaries, bear-proof trash and garbage containers are almost nonexistent in the surrounding towns.��To reach these free pickings, the bears must cross busy highways, and dozens are usually hit and killed on I-40 each year.

As the bears stalk out, ginseng poachers creep in. While the crime of removing these plants from the park is a misdemeanor, at least one repeat offender has served six months in jail. “Nature’s Viagra,” which has been picked since Daniel Boone entered this Appalachia trade more than 230 years ago, generally fetches $800 a pound. Joshua Albritton, a biological-science technician within the park’s resource management division, says he’s noticed that the ginseng “is getting poached out” earlier, before it berries, which is detrimental to the plant’s reproduction. “You used to be able to find plants up to your knees,” says Albritton, “but you just don’t see that any more.”

What you can still see are fantastic views—a big draw for most visitors. From one of 16 rocky summits poking above 6,000 feet, crisscrossed by over 850 miles of trails, hikers can gaze 5,000 feet down over Smoky’s namesake blue haze, caused by trees releasing volatile organic compounds. But the haze is not always natural. According to the recently updated , Great Smoky “experiences some of the highest measured air pollution of any national park in the U.S.”

Twelve streams on the Tennessee side of the park are listed as impaired, due to��high sulfide and nitrogen emissions caused by fossil-fuel burning. Jim Renfro, an air-quality specialist with the park, says that stream restoration would require a 60 percent reduction of the sulfur and nitrogen levels deposited from 2011 to 2014��by the year 2080. “The Clean Air Act is a remarkable success story,”��Renfro adds. “We’re measuring it with real improvements.”

Glacier National Park

Northern Montana

Established:��1910
Size: 1.01 million acres

Out of the seven national parks with an international border, Glacier is the only International Peace Park in the U.S., sharing its boundary with Canada’s . More than just a name, the Peace Park designation refers to collaborative relationships between the two countries to prohibit pollution or development that would affect the��parks on either side.

Glacier National Park was established through the lobbying clout of the Great Northern Railway, which planned to haul millions of tourists to Montana’s Lewis, Clark, and Livingston mountain ranges, known cumulatively as “America’s Switzerland.” But everything changed when national parks had to scramble��to accommodate automobile tourism. In Glacier, it took more than 20��years to design, engineer, and pave the steep 50-mile Going-to-the-Sun Road, with its hairpin turns��up and over the Continental Divide.

Nearly a century later, the exhilarating drive��alongside��huge drop-offs could explain why more than three million visitors traveled to the hinterlands of northern Montana in 2019. Or so could the chance to see one of 300 grizzlies known to roam the park. Then there are the lakes and glaciers. Or, rather, the vanishing glaciers.

Word has gotten out��that if you want to see a real glacier before it’s gone, go now to Glacier.��Ask why they’re shrinking, and even guarded USGS glaciologists who monitor this ice write about human-caused warming as the cause, concluding in a carefully worded that��“the timing of that [land ice] loss��depends on the future trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.”

According to a of ice loss, certain glaciers will disappear as early as 2030. Since 1966, the glaciers have diminished in size by as much as 85 percent, averaging a 39 percent reduction overall. In 1850, there were 150 glaciers that bulldozed down the valleys here, but since greenhouse gases cranked the temperature up by 2.4 degrees in the park over the past 170 years, today only 26 remain.

Restoration biologist Dawn LaFleur, who arrived in Glacier in 1992, told me that in the nineties��she saw the heavy winter snowpack melting off in late April or May. In summer��it would still snow up high, and the innumerable streams of Glacier roared until winter. But now the snowpack is melting in March, and by August, traditional water sources dry up and the streams go silent.��LaFleur also pulls, mows, or sprays 18 different non-native invasive species��(out of a total 127 invasives in the park) identified in her noxious-weed program. The goal is to maintain native plant communities.

Glacier is also trying to rescue the white bark pine, a keystone species that many plants and animals depend on for food (pine nuts), shelter, and nesting. Usually found at the edge of the tree line, most of the several-hundred-year-old trees have turned white and skeletal. “About 90 percent of the white bark pine in the park are dead,” LaFleur says.��They were killed by blister rust,��a Eurasian fungus that arrived in contaminated soils in the early 20th century on boats coming to North America.

LaFleur exemplifies the thousands of dedicated park employees who roll up their sleeves and toil to save natural resources. During the winter, she writes grants to raise funds for restoration. In the spring and summer—when not out pulling, mowing, or spraying—she and her colleagues are busy propagating 260 native species in a nursery, including white bark pine that are genetically resistant to blister rust. Since 2000, she has planted 20,000 white bark seedlings, and some of the trees are now seven feet tall. Only one has succumbed to the fungus.

“Another thing that we’re seeing is increased fire activity,” LaFleur says. “Since white bark pine��likes recently burned areas, we plant the seedlings there.”��In a park that “has become the poster child for shrinking glaciers,” she says, she expects that generations ahead of her will carry on with the work of maintaining native plants. “Hopefully we’re not getting to the point where they’ll be functionally lost.”

Indiana Dunes National Park

Northern Indiana

Established: 2019
Size: 15,000 acres

On the southern shore of Lake Michigan, this park boasts wetlands, prairies, rivers, and forests, but it’s best known for its giant dunes and surfable waves. For generations, midwesterners from nearby Chicago or South Bend, Indiana, have escaped from the burdens of the steel belt to bask in this protected landscape, watch over 350 species of migrating birds, swim, windsurf, camp, snowshoe, hike 50 miles of trails, or enjoy seeing more than 1,100 different species of plants. The “singing dunes”—under the weight of footsteps, the sand grains vibrate and musically sound off—were first set aside in the system as a national lakeshore in 1966 and became one of the newest national parks in 2019.

At first glance, the southern Lake Michigan beachfront—surrounded by oil refineries, chemical plants, and the Port of Indiana—doesn’t fit the portraiture of America’s best idea. Yet Indiana Dunes is one of several��showing the national park ideal applied to an urban landscape. Its 23 square miles are��now visited by 2.1 million��people a year.

While ornamental invasives were initially planted to beautify areas��outside the park, they have increased in multitudes, killing off native species. The abnormal species include��phragmites, multiflora rose, bush honeysuckle, garlic mustard, and, worst of all, Asiatic bittersweet, a climber that can choke out trees. In many parks, resource management only has the budget to keep up with a fraction of the acreage. In the past, the Park Service here burned off the invaders, sprayed them with chemicals, or dug them out with tractors. More recently, —a lone grazer can devour 300 square feet of invasive buckthorn per day.

But the more pressing problem is industrial pollution. In August 2019, the steel company ��into the Little Calumet River, adjacent to Indiana Dunes. This would eventually kill approximately 3,000 fish, leaving them belly up in Burns Harbor. In December, environmental groups filed a against the company for alleged violations under the Clean Water Act as well as repeated violations of the legislation over the past five years. ArcelorMittal for the spill and, as by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM), has sent water samples tested for cyanide and ammonia to��IDEM since August, according to a��. The company did not comment on the pending litigation to�����ϳԹ���.

A year earlier, the Surfrider Foundation and the city of Chicago intervened in the against another neighboring industrial giant, U.S. Steel. In April 2017, the company spilled about��300 pounds of the toxic carcinogen hexavalent chromium (made famous by the Erin Brockovich story in the 1990s) into��Lake Michigan via the Burns Waterway. This was nearly 600 times the discharge allowed under U.S. Steel’s permit. The NPCA filed a in December 2019 protesting the proposed $1.2 million court settlement against U.S. Steel.��Since the company’s earnings could easily pay the fine, the NPCA believed greater constraints were needed to prevent future spills and enforce restoration. The between the U.S. government and U.S. Steel is currently pending before the northernmost district court of Indiana. When reached for comment about the litigation, U.S. Steel directed ���ϳԹ��� to its on the incident, which outlines the company’s response to the spill.

According to Sarah Damron, regional manager of Surfrider, its members , such as skin rashes and urinary-tract infections, after riding at Indiana Dunes.��“Essentially, these spills represent a deterrent from getting in the water,” says��Damron. “No one likes to think that they’re going to cause themselves harm if they get in the water because of what these companies are doing.”

Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve

Northern Alaska

Established: 1980
Size: 8.4 million acres��

While national parks in Alaska offer some of the most vast and mind-blowing ecosystems, Gates of the Arctic is the ultimate pristine wilderness. Established through the sweeping Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve is the northernmost park in the U.S., with permafrost, rarely climbed mountains, and six Wild and Scenic Rivers.��It’s also the��nation’s second largest park�����Ի� mainly accessed by bush plane and��more rarely by hiking in. Combined with the adjoining Noatak National Preserve and Kobuk Valley National Park, this protected land canvases more than 16��million acres.��In 2019, only 10,518 people came to Gates—the least visitation of any national park—to be surrounded by its enormous open spaces and a caribou migration that numbers over 200,000.

It’s not widely known that the parks in northwest Alaska face what Jim Adams, regional director for the state’s NPCA, calls enormous climate-change challenges. The Arctic has warmed faster than any region on earth.��“The tree line is moving north, permafrost is melting, fires are increasing, and ice is preventing the caribou from reaching lichen,”��its food source, Adams says. “The western Arctic caribou herd drives the entire system with a domino effect.”

A keystone species that Adams calls “the heart of the park,” the migratory herd selectively grazes as it passes through, trailed by innumerable predators attacking young or sick members. Yet as warming winters bring abnormal rain, caribou grazing areas are being coated by an impenetrable armor of ice, altering their migration patterns. Lose the caribou—which the poet John Haines called “grey shepherds of the tundra”—and the soul of the region will be irrevocably altered. Nunamiut and Koyukon villagers, wolves, wolverines, foxes, and bears would also face starvation without the herd as a food source. The tundra would become empty.

The park itself is already changing. Rising temperatures lengthen��the growing season for plant life vital to wildlife but also bring��in animals, like landscape-altering beavers,��that��until now��have never inhabited the far north.

Of greater concern, the underlying permafrost, which stretches across 40 million acres of Park Service lands in Alaska, is thawing. As it thins and collapses beneath the surface, trees slump over in what scientists call “drunken forests,” and plant life is often washed away. “Melting permafrost can catastrophically drain shallow lakes, impacting fish, vegetation, bird habitats, and more,” says Kyle Joly, a wildlife biologist at Gates of the Arctic. “It is a big deal that potentially affects many, many things.”

From 2006 to 2009, satellite imaging across the Park Service’s��five Arctic units (Gates, Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Cape Krusenstern National Monument, Kobuk Valley National Park, and the Noatak National Preserve) nearly 3,000 permafrost anomalies, mostly in Gates and Noatak. Seen from an aircraft, these thermokarst slumps—hollowed-out land produced by melting permafrost—make the tundra appear stripped of its skin,��exposing the white icy bones of our planet as if an autopsy were being performed. One of these slumps in northwestern Gates stretches for 22 acres.

As if Gates isn’t already challenged enough, development continues to come��to the Arctic. Directly south of the park, the Ambler mining district holds some of the richest copper deposits in the world. When Congress created the park, the attached included an easement through the park for a road to access Ambler. After the BLM took public comments, at the end of March it released a final , suggesting a route for a 211-mile gravel road that��would cross over more than a hundred streams—including two Wild and Scenic Rivers—and bisect the caribou migration route, potentially diverting the herd. Acid mine drainage potentially��could run into the Kobuk River. “Common now in Alaska are these hurry-up-and-get-it-done permitting processes,” says��Adams.

Reflecting a minority position in the pro-development state, he hopes that the road and mines will ultimately not be built. Adams calls this untrammeled park “a tremendous opportunity for the people of America to hold on to something that has been lost elsewhere in the country.”

Saguaro National Park

Southern Arizona

Established: 1994
Size: 91,445��acres

Named for its towering cacti, Saguaro lies in the Santa Cruz Valley, 60 miles from the Mexican border, surrounded��by the Sonoran Desert and the burgeoning metropolis of Tucson. The park’s land��is also known for 8,000-year-old anthropological sites and may be the oldest continuously occupied region in North America.

Since the park’s establishment, Tucson��has grown by over 100,000 people. The two separate park districts, called Tucson and Rincon, are attached to the city like earlobes�����Ի� are affected by noise and light pollution. Still, Tucsonites are as proud of their saguaro as Northern California is of its redwood. The park forest contains 1.9 million saguaros that can grow up to 70 feet high and are featured as humans��in the creation myths of the local Tohono O’odham Native Americans.

As both a symbol of the desert Southwest and a keystone species that provides shade, nesting sites, and water for numerous plants and animals, the saguaro is now running up against the gauntlet of climate change. Decades of research have shown scientists that the health of this particular forest has waxed and waned throughout wet weather, drought, mining, grazing, and even saguaro poaching.��But , drought and unprecedented heat adversely affected the region, and new saguaro growth drastically slowed.

Around��this time, a��drought-tolerant and noxious weed from Africa called buffel grass took off. Introduced to the region by cattle grazers, buffel grass is one of 11 non-native headaches��for Saguaro National Park managers. The drought-loving grass is so pervasive that it has the potential to change the diverse desert plant life in Saguaro to a monoculture grassland, so��the park has begun spraying and pulling out the invader—but buffel grass is persistent.

It takes the practiced eye of a naturalist or scientist to understand the choke hold that urbanization, climate change, and invasive species have placed on Saguaro. “If we don’t take action now, 50��years from now we’ll be calling it Buffel Grass instead of Saguaro National Park,”��says Kevin Dahl, a local ethnobiologist and the NPCA senior program manager in Arizona. Dahl compares the park’s situation to the life cycle of the saguaro cactus. “Even when they’re dead, they remain upright and look OK. It takes many years for it to change color, die, and fall over.”

Everglades National Park

Southern Florida

Established: 1947
Size: 1.5 million acres

Everglades was the first national park created mainly��for its biodiversity. The “River of Grass” is the only place in the world where crocodiles hang with alligators alongside one of the greatest collections of wading birds on the continent, all set in the largest subtropical wilderness in the U.S.��The Everglades has a stunning mosaic of nine different habitats, from islands surrounded by mangroves to pine-forested land.

Despite this rich biodiversity, Everglades��is now the most endangered national park of them all. The cause? A lack of fresh water coupled with climate change.

To understand its��problems, it helps to visualize this area as a giant plumbing system. Before modern-day settlements and agriculture arrived, a 60-mile-wide by 100-mile-long river flowed out of the Lake Okeechobee region in central Florida. It ran south, both above and below the state’s��limestone foundation. Over the past 5,000 years, peat accumulated on top of the limestone, which became the springboard for approximately 1,000 plant species, sheltering and feeding more than 360 types of birds, 17 different amphibians, nearly 300 species of fish, about 40 mammals (from panthers to manatees), and only God knows how many insects.

The river that once defined the Everglades used to be held in check—crawling at a quarter-mile per day—by��back pressure from the Atlantic, creating briny estuaries where the ocean,��Gulf of Mexico, and freshwater river met and mingled. But as unprecedented population growth happened along Florida’s coasts, the life-giving river was channelized for flood control. Meanwhile, sugar plantations filled in the marshlands. Storm surges and a rise in ocean waters lapped up and over the Everglades’ mangrove skein, and the diminished river was repeatedly pushed back. “During dry season,” says Steve Davis, a senior ecologist with the Everglades Foundation, “there are often months where there is no freshwater head pushing against the tide.”

Salt water has now overrun freshwater marshes, causing peat soil to collapse,��by one estimate releasing the amount of carbon emitted by 35,000 cars��a year. In the once rich waters of Florida Bay in the southern Everglades, the ocean water has repeatedly turned hypersaline, causing a massive die-off of seagrass��in 2015.

The disintegration of the Everglades continues despite the��$10 billion, 30-year n that Congress signed into law in 2000. The idea was to replenish missing fresh water to support resilience to climate change. An essential part of this plan was to build the $1.7 billion Everglades Reservoir between the park and Lake Okeechobee to store and filter fresh water for the Everglades during dry seasons. But over��the past 20 years, the federal government has not anted up. The work has been tied up in red tape, prolonged studies, and delayed permits. The new estimate has pinned the total cost��at $13.5 billion, with a 50-year completion. In the meantime, saltwater intrusion and peat collapse continue��as a rising ocean and storms breach the coast.��Over the past couple of decades, hurricanes have destroyed two park visitor centers, and the underfunded Park Service is only beginning to rebuild.

There are also invasive species, like Brazilian pepper trees and thousands of voracious Burmese pythons, which displace and gorge upon native plant and animal communities. “Those kinds of things can distract from the overall mission of Everglades restoration,” says Davis. “It’s all about water—getting the right quantity and quality of water back in. And if we can sustain funding, we’re confident that within a decade we can see substantial improvement across the Everglades ecosystem.”

Joshua Tree National Park

Southern California

Established:��1994
Size: 792,623 acres

Joshua Tree is known for sheltering 800 species of plants. Bigger than Rhode Island, the park shares portions of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts. It’s also a Southern California mecca for winter rock climbers, with three-story��granite boulders set amid��a landscape of dunes, low basins, and high mountains pocketed by stands of yuccas mistaken for trees. Named by emigrating Mormons, the branches of these plants appear to be reaching out to the sky, like the biblical Joshua beseeching the Lord.

In the 1920s, when conservationist and noted gardener Minerva Hoyt first started lobbying Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt to protect this region, she wanted to call it Desert Plants Park. Hoyt was dismayed by��roads being built nearby and the theft of cacti and other plants poached for Los Angeles lawns.

Today, Joshua Tree’s namesake species may soon fall under the climate-change ax. In the past 40 years, nighttime temperatures have risen by nearly eight degrees,��increasing evaporation and pulling water from the plants.

Twenty-seven micro plots were set up throughout the park in 2014 so that researchers could advise park managers of the most vulnerable species to the heat. Joining the beleaguered list are the yucca night lizard, which lives��under the branches of the tree,��pinion pine,��manzanita,��bighorn sheep,�����Ի� the desert tortoise.

What might be the fate of these vulnerable species 50 years from now? “I’d like to be optimistic,” says University of California at Riverside plant ecologist Lynn Sweet, one of the lead researchers working with the park. “If we do nothing and reduce no carbons, we’ll see no Joshua trees in the park. As a planet, if we lower emissions as per IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] standards, maybe we’ll save 20 percent of the���󲹲����ٲ���.”

Rising temperatures aren’t the only challenge. Joshua Tree is one of several California national parks suffering from some of��the , which deposits��nitrogen that fertilizes invasive, drought-tolerant species that outcompete native plants already adapted to low-nitrogen soils. The western edge of the park has now exceeded what scientists refer to as a “critical load” of nitrogen.

For vulnerable park wildlife, the loss of native plants will equal a loss of shelter, nesting sites, and food. As for visitors, when the hot days cause the worst pollution, expect the normal 100-mile views to be cut in half. The air is already unhealthly to breathe here two months of the year, but��if provisions that protect parks—such as the Regional Haze Rule—within the Clean Air Act are rolled back, consider keeping those COVID-19 masks on year-round.

How You Can Help��

1. Avoid traveling to the most crowded parks at peak times in the summer: Great Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain, Zion, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Acadia, Grand Teton, Olympic,�����Ի� Glacier.
2. Support the parks by donating to the .
3. Contact your congressional representatives and ask them to fully fund the annual national park budget that would increase staffing and resource protection.

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