Monday, April 8, 2024, will be an epic day, when a total eclipse passes over North America. The moon will completely block out the sun, turning day to night across a wide swath of the United States from Texas to Maine. All of us in the nation, wherever we’re located, will experience at least a partial eclipse. If you’re in Southern California, the moon will blot out about half of the sun; in Washington State, about 30 percent; and in the mountains of North Carolina, roughly 80 percent.

Total Solar Eclipse 2024: The Path of Totality

If you’re situated directly beneath the celestial event, in the path of totality—which diagonals from Northern Mexico into Texas, up through to Maine, and out over Canada—you’ll get the full experience. See the here (use link to download NASA’s interactive map).

“A total eclipse is other-worldly,” says Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer and Dark Sky Ambassador for the National Park Service. “The sky will get dark, colors in the landscape will change. During totality, you’ll go from daytime to night, the brightest stars turn out, and the sun turns into a black hole in space. The heavens literally align above you.”

An annular eclipse passed over the western United States last October, and in 2017 some of us got to experience a total eclipse (my kids and I watched from a beach in South Carolina), but this impending eclipse will be even more dramatic, promising twice as large an area of totality as in 2017, because the moon is closer to earth and will cast a larger shadow.

Nordgren’s advice for choosing a spot to watch? “Go some place you actually want to visit, because if you get clouded out, you’re somewhere cool.

“Even with socked-in skies,” he adds, “you’ll notice things getting darker, and then it will be dark as night. You’ll experience a truly bizarre day.”

We’ve picked seven badass places with fun things to do to make the most of your viewing opportunity. Just don’t forget your protective eyewear.

How to See the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse in ���ϳԹ���-Worthy Ways

1. From a Ski Resort: Jay Peak, Vermont

For a party, look no further than Jay Peak and their , which will feature live music from Pink Talking Fish as they perform the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. You can expect about four minutes of total darkness during the peak of the event. The lifts will be running before the eclipse starts at 2 P.M., but will stop for the duration of the event. Scenic tram rides to the top of the mountain are booked solid, but to avoid crowds anyways, catch one of the last chairs and ski to a quiet spot on the mountain.

Jay isn’t the only resort stoked on the eclipse. Saddleback Mountain, in Maine, will roll its end-of-the-season festivities straight into a that day. Whiteface in upstate New York, also Stowe, Sugarbush, and Mad River in Vermont, and Loon and Cannon Mountains in New Hampshire are all planning watch parties, too.

2.���� From a Canoe: Buffalo National River, Arkansas

The Buffalo National River—the first ever designated in America—flows freely across the state of Arkansas for 135 miles, and the majority will be within the path of totality. You can expect roughly 3:30 minutes of total darkness within the park. The Buffalo National River is also a designated International Dark Sky Park, where in the days leading up to the eclipse rangers and astronomy experts will lead various interpretive night-sky programs with the chance to view constellations through telescopes.

For the event, we suggest you ditch the crowds by heading into the backcountry via canoe. The Upper Buffalo is the most scenic area of the river, with 200-500-foot bluffs rising directly from the water. The paddle is generally mellow, but some class I rapids keep things interesting. You can choose from a 10-mile day trip from the Ponca put-in to Kyles Landing, or do an overnight or multi-day, pulling off at gravel sandbars to set up . Or go crazy and try to knock out the entire 135 miles in a 10-day trip. Backcountry camping permits are free, and the has rentals (from $75 a day).

3. From Among Ancient Earthworks: Mounds State Park, Indiana

isn’t the most adventurous state park—it’s only 290 acres and most of the trails are crushed gravel and boardwalks—but it’s a cultural hotspot protecting 10 awe-inspiring earthworks along the White River built by the pre-Columbian Adena and Hopewell cultures. Historians believe that the largest of the mounds, the Great Mound, dates back to around 160 B.C. and that the mounds were used for community gatherings, religious ceremonies, and, yes, viewing astronomical alignments.

Savor that history by showing up to witness 3:42 seconds of total darkness as the eclipse passes over the park in the afternoon. You can watch from beside the Great Mound or by one of the other earthworks, or hike trail #5, a 2.5-mile loop that weaves around the park, past various mounds and along the banks of the White River. Bring your fishing gear, or grab what you need from nearby , and be prepared to cast, as the trail accesses the river in several points; the White is known for its smallmouth bass fishing.

4. From a National Forest: Garden of the Gods, Illinois

The whole 289,000-acre Shawnee National Forest sits within the path of totality, but the most dramatic spot for viewing has to be , a swath of sandstone outcroppings and cliffs that may be 320 million years old, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The .25-mile Observation Trail wanders through the heart of the Garden of the Gods outcroppings and to the top of tall bluffs with long-range views of the Shawnee Hills. These bluffs make a perfect perch for viewing the eclipse, which will hover over the area for 3:27 minutes of total darkness.

Pharaoh Campground has 12 first-come, first-served sites ($10 a night), but you better show up a few days early to snag a site before everyone else does. If you want more solitude, wander into Garden of the Gods Wilderness via the , which forms a 1.6-mile lollipop loop through a pine forest with bluff-top overlooks, caves, and rock formations.

5. From a Tube: Garner State Park, Texas

Not only did a chunk of Texas experience the path of totality during the annular eclipse in October but the state will score it again. Moreover, among all the U.S. states in April’s eclipse path, this one has the for prime viewing. Weather data from the last 28 years predicts just a 30 percent chance of cloud cover.

, in Texas Hill Country, sits in the path of totality and will experience 4:30 minutes of complete darkness. The park itself protects 1,774 acres of hills, forest, and bluffs as well as 2.9 miles of the aptly named Frio River. (Yes, that means “cold”.) You’ll find plenty of trails to hike, but the real gem of this park is tubing the Frio as it winds around the campgrounds and below the tan sandstone cliffs (the rents tubes for $10 each, per day). Tubing the stretch through the park takes a few hours, with a number of small rapids and the occasional swimming hole. Put in by noon (totality will start at 1:30 P.M.) and take your time.

6. From an Olympic Site: Adirondack Park, New York

At six million acres, upstate New York’s Adirondack Park is the largest publicly protected landscape in the lower 48. And most of that park will be within the path of totality. While the region is typically cloudy in April, on Nordgren’s advice, we’re sending you here as a beautiful, adventurous place, whatever the weather. You can see the eclipse from a variety of vantage points inside the park, and Lake Placid is hosting a watch party at the Olympic Center. They’re opening the speed-skating oval with views of the famous Olympic ski jumps and the Adirondacks’ High Peaks Wilderness Area. (An earlier version of this article suggested a mountain hike, but area groups are asking visitors to avoid the backcountry out of caution over potential winter conditions in April and given that mud season can lead to ecological damage from hiking. See other options

7. From a Surfboard:��Mazatlan, Mexico

The moon will cast a shadow over Mexico and the eastern edge of Canada as well as the U.S. While the chances of clear skies lessen as the eclipse moves north and into Canada, Mexico in early April presents the best chance for clear skies along the entire path of totality, with an 80 percent chance of sun during the day of the eclipse. But keep in mind the U.S. government has issued a for Mazatlan because of the presence of drug cartels in the area. It’s the same level of advisory (more information here) that the government has issued for Mexico City, Puerto Vallarta, and Baja.

Check out Mazatlan, a colonial-era beach town north of the popular Puerto Vallarta that is actually the first location in North America where you can view the total eclipse. It’s a legitimate surf destination with beaches facing multiple directions, picking up solid swells year round. Rucos, north of town, offers reliable surf spread across four miles of beach, though you’ll need a 4×4 vehicle to reach it. Or, to keep things simple, walk from Mazatlan’s Centro Historico, a revamped historic district in the heart of town, to Playa Olas Altas to surf a beginner-friendly beach break. has lessons (from $50 a person) and rentals ($25 per day).

Now that we’ve given you the best places to see the solar eclipse in 2024, plot out your adventure and make the most of this celestial event. The next total eclipse won’t cross the lower 48 for 20 years.

Graham Averill is ���ϳԹ��� magazine’s national parks columnist. He can never remember the names of the constellations in the sky, but loves a good eclipse and has fond memories of the 2017 event, which he watched with his family during a beach vacation.��

For more by Graham Averill:

The 6 Most Adventurous Train Trips in North America

The 10 Best Backpacking Trails in Our National Parks

The Worst National Park Reviews of the Year

The post 7 Most Adventurous Ways to See the Total Eclipse��of 2024 appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

63 Parks Traveler started with a simple goal: to visit every U.S. national park. Avid backpacker and public-lands nerd saved up, built out a tiny van to travel and live in, and hit the road, practicing COVID-19 best safety protocols along the way. The parks as we know them are rapidly changing, and she wanted to see them before it’s too late. Indiana Dunes is her 47th park visit.

When I arrived at the park in mid-October, the changing of the seasons was already in full swing, a fierce autumn wind throwing my hair around and numbing my fingertips. The temperate forest was bursting with flamboyant, fiery colors, littering the dunes with a confetti of red, orange, and golden leaves. The water wasn’t any warmer.

The dunes themselves, like much of northern Indiana, are mostly covered in brushy woodlands and lakeside grasses. Hiking up and down the nearly 200-foot-tall hills of sand can feel a lot more like a shady slog than an extravagantly view-filled jaunt in a national park.

Though a walk in this park might not have the granite domes of Yosemite or the rust-hued rocks of Zion, there’s a quieter, more intricate ecosystem at play. One full of biodiverse marshlands, a variety of small mammals, and over 350 species of birds (making it one of the top five parks for birding). Historically, the Potawatomi and Miami peoples lived near the dunes through the late 1600s, after which French traders moved in.

More recently, industry has threatened the protection of these lands. , a botanist from the University of Chicago, published an article about the area’s ecology, trying to have it designated as a national park as early as 1916. As World War I raged on, development became more of a priority than preservation, and the largest of the dunes, , was carted away to make glass fruit jars.

Unfortunately, economic advancement has often been prioritized, and the park is . Both were planned and opened before Indiana Dunes became a national lakeshore in 1966 and before the area received national park status in 2019.

I wandered up the five-mile , past marshes whispering with insects and down to the lake itself. As I hiked, I tried to view the park through a magnifying lens, imagining how the various plants and fungi worked together to create a unique and diverse ecosystem not found elsewhere. Unseen birds warbled in the high branches, and my heartbeat raced as I climbed the steep, unforgiving sand.

When I got to Lake Michigan, afternoon sunshine warmed my face, and several couples with dogs were playing in the water. A smoke stack loomed large to my left like the towering city of Oz. I took off my shoes, curled my toes into sand, and dipped my feet in the icy freshwater.

The park left me feeling conflicted. Crestfallen that industry has affected��a place of such simple beauty and grateful that people who cared had managed to save what they could.

63 Parks Traveler Indiana Dunes Info

Size: 15,349 acres

Location: Northwestern Indiana, 40 miles from Chicago

Created In: 1966 (national lakeshore), 2019 (national park)

Best For: Short hikes, birding, fishing, kayaking

When to Go: If you’re interested in water play, summer (59 to 82 degrees) is the prime season. Spring (31 to 69 degrees) and fall (35 to 75 degrees) are also mild. Lake Michigan is famous for its storms in winter, when the park’s temperatures typically hover at 20 to 38 degrees.

Where to Stay: The national park operates a campground a short drive from the lakeshore called , while the adjacent state park has a�� nearby. I stayed at Dunewood and appreciated its quiet, shady lanes, clean bathrooms, and hot showers.

Mini ���ϳԹ���: Hike the . At 4.7 miles, it’s one of the longest in the park, and also one of the most ecologically diverse. Saunter through dappled sunlight in the forest searching for rare birds in unique marshlands, and, finally, get spit out onto the park’s namesake grassy dunes that line the shore of Lake Michigan.

Mega ���ϳԹ���: Tack on a visit to adjoining . Not only is the park pet-friendly, but some of the best beaches and dune access lies just inside its borders. Play in Lake Michigan, paddle the area’s many waterways, or convince your friends to tackle the , a leg burn-inducing 1.5-mile loop with 552 feet of vertical gain on steep sand.

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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,��and 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��and 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��and 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,��and 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,��and 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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For eight years, Joe Anderson drove by McDoel Baptist Church on his commute from the center of Bloomington, Indiana, to the bland exurban warehouse that housed Hoosier Heights, one of several climbing gyms he owns across the Midwest. He’d always admired the old church—its limestone exterior, its historic charm. When he saw it was for sale in 2016, he had a crazy thought: Business was growing at the Bloomington gym, and he wanted to move it to a more central spot. Why not turn the church into ?

McDoel’s congregation hated to lose its��building, which had anchored McDoel Gardens, a neighborhood of blue-collar bungalows, since it opened in 1925. In the 1960s, the church added a second sanctuary with a capacity of around 250. “We would fill the whole place,” remembers longtime parishioner Pat Suits, 83, who still lives one house down from the old building. “We had so many kids going there, a new youth group.”

But like so many churches across the country, McDoel’s membership declined in the following decades as the congregation aged and shrank. According to the , conducted by the nonpartisan research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, 2018 when Americans who didn’t attend church outnumbered those who go every week or nearly every week. At McDoel, instead of a new generation of kids, the regulars consisted of elderly people like Suits, and their historic building was now causing them headaches—the only bathrooms, for example, were down a long flight of stairs. Eventually, the congregation decided to sell the��church and move into a smaller space nearby.

A climbing gym might seem like a weird and worldly replacement, but a few have popped up in churches across the Rust Belt, including , and . It’s a match that makes sense (sanctuaries have high ceilings) but often brings distinct difficulties (sanctuaries can be too narrow for belaying). “I’ve looked at quite a few churches,” says Adam Koberna, president of U.S. operations for Walltopia, one of the world’s leading climbing-wall companies. “And they rarely work out.”

The physical structure is only part of the problem. In Cleveland, Chick Holtkamp and Niki Zmij tried to convert that was built in 1885. “It was a big space,” Holtkamp says, “but more than that, it was an interesting space.” They toured dozens of gyms, hired architects, gave enthusiastic interviews—only to watch the church they’d hoped to save . In the end, residents were too worried about the extra traffic that a commercial property would bring. “Honestly, it was politics,” Holtkamp says. “The people who didn’t want it had a more powerful voice.”

There can also be issues with historical-preservation requirements��and with securing the financing required to rehab a quirky old building. In Cincinnati, Chris Wiedeman and his brother, Joe, have put tens of thousands of dollars over the past year��into stabilizing a beautiful, abandoned 1870s church that they hope to turn into a gym called . “The church has been exceedingly neglected,” Chris says. “There were holes in the floor.” The construction of the ambitious design, which highlights��the building’s arched windows and architectural details, is proving tricky enough, though it’s made more feasible by the fact that Chris himself works as a general contractor. The fundraising is even trickier. “That’s where we’re running into the most trouble,” he says.

In Bloomington, Joe Anderson understood the potential problems��but decided to give the renovation a shot anyway. “Doing a gym like this is a labor of love,” he says. “It was not a purely economic decision.” And it did not go smoothly at first. “There were literally bats in our belfry,” he says, and that wasn’t the only hiccup. Working with Walltopia to design and build the gym, he had to consider the limitations of the old structure while finding a way to support enormous freestanding climbing walls.

To pull it off, he wound up adding a second building for top roping. But, Anderson says, “It was important to me that you still walk in and say, Whoa, this feels like a church.”��So pews became seats for changing into climbing shoes. Carabiners clipped the sanctuary’s vintage pendant lights to the sloped ceiling, creating more clearance for the bouldering wall. The church’s kitchen became the spot to clean the holds, with its giant hood sucking up the vinegary smells. And the choir loft morphed into a secluded spot for advanced climbers to train on MoonBoards.

In 2018, after more than a year of construction, the facility opened with 16,000 square feet of climbing. The location, just off Bloomington’s popular , allows many climbers to walk or bike to the gym. That’s been especially helpful in luring students from the city’s Indiana University; for the first time in a while, young people are filling up McDoel.

As for the McDoel congregation, it��still gathers on Sunday��in a rented office building in the same neighborhood. The��service��usually draws about 20 worshippers, and Pat Suits notes how thankful everyone is that the bathrooms are located on the main level. “It’s all just right there,” she says.

Two blocks away, Hoosier Heights opens on Sundays at 9 A.M. Anderson is happy that the gym has boosted the neighborhood and that saving an old building has proven economically and environmentally sustainable. But most of all, he’s thrilled to see so many people using the space, whether it’s the neighborhood association hosting its annual Christmas cookie swap, just like it did at the church, or climbers reaching for their next hold as sunlight filters through the stained glass. The gym captures the sense of community��and wonder��that has defined the��building for close to a century. “We took over a place designed for positive community gatherings,” says Anderson, “and we’re trying to still be that.”

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Indiana Dunes is��no stranger to homemade signs. Folks along the south shore of Lake Michigan have been hoisting Save the Dunes��placards��. But last Friday, a new sign was made.��It was cardboard, with Park��written in Sharpie. A ranger held it for a photo at the entrance to��the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, so that it read Indiana Dunes National Park. It was the end of a century-long battle that, in true Midwest fashion, concluded modestly. No big to-do, just a few smiling faces and that sign.

The dunes climb��200 feet above freshwater beaches��and descend��into swales and pine forests filled with hundreds of bird species��and endangered prairie. The park’s 1,100 native plants make it the fourth most diverse in plant life within the entire National Park System. The Great Marsh restoration has brought back migratory birds��like sandhill cranes. But the most unique area of the park is its oak savannahs—where mature black oaks grow scattered among Midwestern wildflowers—which once spread across 50 million acres from Michigan to Nebraska.

Just 50 miles from Chicago, the park saw 2.1 million visitors in 2017; its��new designation makes it the 14th most visited national park in the country. The preserve��protects 15 miles of shoreline, and within its 15,000 acres are 50 miles of hiking trails��with equestrian and cross-country-ski routes. Kayakers can enjoy paddling on the lake or join canoers inland on the newly restored Little Calumet River waterway.

Those looking for something more relaxing can watch the sun ease behind the Chicago skyline from one of the park’s eight beaches. The eastern ones��are dog friendly, as are most of the park’s trails. Its campground is��just a quarter-mile from the South Shore electric train��(running between Chicago and South Bend)��and has 66 campsites��with gas and convenience stores nearby.

The redesignation as a national park was written into��,��a controversial spending bill signed by President Donald Trump that increased border-security funding and threatened to shut down the government.��The inclusion is odd—the Trump administration ��making the area a national park last summer—but it marks the end of��an effort started in 1916 by , the first director of the National Park Service.

In a hearing Mather held two months after the National Park Service��was created, he advocated for the creation of Sand Dunes National Park along the Indiana shore. Industrial interests spent the next four decades fighting for a larger port in the area instead. They met their match in 1952, when Dorothy Buell’s aggressively organized for federal protection. Eventually, Illinois senator Paul H. Douglas joined the protection��cause, and in 1966 the Indiana Dunes ��managed by the National Park Service.

As a national park, the Indiana Dunes aren’t expecting increased attendance, according to Indiana Dunes��public information officer Bruce Rowe,��who cited��the fact that Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Valley saw no major increase in visitors when it went from a natural recreation area to a national park in 2000.��Rowe says��the only change will be renaming a trail after Senator Douglas, which will join��the existing Dorothy Buell Visitor Center to honor their efforts in protecting the park.

Rowe hopes the new name will pull people beyond the beach. “While the beach and sand dunes will always be our primary draw for the public, we want visitors to get a chance to experience more of this great national park,” he says.

Sometime in the near future, the national park will get a new (formal) sign. Officials say��they don’t have anything planned to celebrate yet, but in the meantime, visitors to��Indiana Dunes can continue to find the same things they always have: lots of sand, waterfront views, and an experience in nature unique to the Hoosier State.

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Journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis judges people by whether they love dogs. He has, however, struggled to accept that dogs can love people back. Compelled to understand the canine-human bond, Denizet-Lewis and his yellow Labrador, Casey, jumped in an RV and drove around the country to meet various dogs and their humans. The result? : A funny and insightful survey of the highs and lows of dog life.

���ϳԹ��� caught up with Denizet-Lewis to hear him reflect on the journey, the novel, and the state of his relationship with Casey.

OUTSIDE: What were you most interested in regarding the state of America’s relationship with its dogs?
DENIZET-LEWIS: I have been a dog lover my whole life, and I was interested in the different kinds of relationships that people have with their dogs. For example, the relationship a homeless person in Seattle has with his dog; is that relationship different from that of a rancher in Colorado who relies on his border collies to move cattle? Is that different from a debutante in L.A. who scoots her dog around in a baby stroller?

Also, I was interested in exploring the incredible variety of roles that dogs play in American life. I mean, they help our cops, they fight our wars, they help our sick get better, they help our injured live their lives and get around, they help lonely people living by themselves feel some connection to something.��

You’ve always worried that Casey doesn’t really like you. Why’d you think an RV trip might help you deal with that?��
I wondered whether I was the right fit for my dog. I worried that I wasn’t giving my dog everything that he deserved or should have for a happy life. I wanted to get on the road and have almost four months devoted entirely to getting to know my dog in a real way.

How did Casey come into your life?
I’m 39 now, and Casey’s 11. When I was 28, I wanted a dog, but I really didn’t know anything about dogs. I was living in the city at the time, and I saw this ad in the paper for puppies for sale at a house in the suburbs. I later realized that Casey was very likely a puppy mill dog; I’d read in the paper that some dogs got sick at the house. Thankfully,��Casey turned out to be fine.��

You spent time rescuing strays and touring animal shelters. Did that make you take a critical look at what it means to buy versus adopt pets?��
Yes. I saw so many stray dogs roaming every corner of this country; I would never buy a dog again. I’m not one of those people who’s going to make people feel guilty if they choose to get a purebred dog. But personally, I urge my friends to go to shelters, to rescue dogs off shelter kill lists, to volunteer at shelters. It was just astonishing to me how many stray dogs there are languishing in shelters.��

Where was the problem of stray or unwanted dogs most visible?
I spent a few days in East St. Louis, Missouri, which is the most dangerous neighborhood in America. I spent a few days on this trip rescuing dogs with dog rescuer Randy Grim in a ghetto there. Seeing these dogs injured and roaming in these forgotten, core parts of our country … I saw the same thing on Indian reservations.��

For people dealing with extraordinary poverty and hardship, taking care of dogs is not high on the list of priorities. And so you have hundreds of thousands of dogs that just roam, and very few of them live past four or five because they die of preventable illnesses.

What’s something about these dogs’ lives that surprised you?
Randy, the dog rescuer in East St. Louis, talked about how he won’t rescue some dogs because he’s convinced they’re happier living out with their pack than they would be in a home. We have a lot of misconceptions around what dogs need and what dogs want. People might see a homeless person and his or her dog and call Animal Control and say, ‘Oh, that poor dog is living on the street.’ Well, I found that homeless dogs are actually some of the most well-adjusted and happiest around, as long as they can get medical care. They are pretty much always outside, and always with their owner. What better life for a dog?��

You adopted a rescue mid-trip. What was that like?��
I’ve never felt more alive than when I’m rescuing a dog. I even joked with Randy that I wanted to quit my job as a writer and just rescue dogs with him. There’s such an amazing feeling of helping a dog that’s injured or badly neglected.��

The dogs we found included skinny pit bulls that weren’t getting fed. When we found them, they came up to us and were just the sweetest things; they desperately wanted a new chance at life. I also rescued dogs that had been beaten or injured and dogs that had been involved in dog fighting. We saw so many, but you can’t rescue all of them. That’s the hardest part.��

How did you and Randy decide which dogs to save?��
Randy has to figure out if he has space in the shelter, if he’ll be able to find a foster home, if he has enough vets to deal with these dogs. He ends up having to make these really difficult decisions. You look at these dogs and you say ‘Okay, do I take this one because it’ll only survive a few more weeks if I don’t find him again…’��You almost have to try to read their minds.

I didn’t intend to rescue a dog from an Indian reservation. I just pulled over for gas and a Milky Way. There was this pack of four strays, one of which stayed close to me and really seemed like she belonged there the least. It was difficult to leave the other three behind, but it was a risk even to take the one. She was very timid at first, but she turned out to be just an amazing dog. I named her Rezzy—not very original, I know, but continues the tradition of naming rescue dogs by where you found them. There are a lot of dogs called Freeway.

After learning about all the reasons it’s tough to be an American dog, did you feel that maybe you weren’t screwing up Casey’s life?
Yes, I think that’s true. But I even struggled when I picked up Rezzy. Part of me was like, who am I to just come in here and decide that this dog is unhappy? Does this dog even want to go in an RV with me for the next three months, or is she part of this pack?��

I don’t necessarily believe that any dog that’s living outside in a pack is miserable. But I do know the stats on these dogs: they tend not to live long. I found out later when I took Rezzy to the vet that she had a pyometra, which would have been fatal in about two weeks. So it was fortunate.

What made you think Casey didn’t love you?
Casey is really good at looking, well, sort of miserable. He’s really good at sighing. He likes to sigh a lot if he’s not being walked or fed or played with. And he gets more excited sometimes about seeing my friends than he does about seeing me. He’s also not a very physical dog in the sense that, while he likes roughhousing, he’s not the dog that’s gonna cuddle up against you in bed.

For a lot of people, a dog is the one being in life that is happy to be with you, right? I mean, that’s why dogs are so popular— they don’t talk back, and they stick around. That said, it was interesting to see that I certainly wasn’t the only one whose dog brought out insecurities—although I was the only one who worried about not giving my dog the best life possible.

Did you meet anyone whose approach to dogs didn’t make any sense to you?
I was fascinated by several women I met who claimed that the quality of their love for their dog was the same as the quality of their love for human children. I would ask: ‘Well what if your human child died? Would that be the same as if your dog died?’ and they insisted that, yes, it would be. As much as I love my dog, I know that I would mourn a family member or human friend differently than I would a dog.

What about people who don’t, or can’t, have that close relationship with their dog?
I was interested in people who have dogs that are supposed to work—on farms, as sled dogs. These are dogs that cannot be spoiled as much. A lot of humans really struggle with keeping that boundary.

In theory a working dog is happiest when it has a very clear job. These dogs know they’re not house dogs and don’t need constant human connection or attention, but people still struggle with that. They’re like, ‘Yeah, I sneak ’em food when I’m not supposed to,’ or ‘I let ’em sleep in the bed sometimes.’

We love dogs at ���ϳԹ���, especially when we’re exercising with them. Can you tell us about about your and Casey’s collective fitness exploits along the way?
We were constantly in nature, hiking along the Appalachian Trail and in Colorado. We also went dock jumping. Casey was not a natural at that at all. I had to cannonball into the water hoping that I would show him that it was safe, but he was scared by the drop into the pool. I also did yoga on the beach with my dog—something called Doga.��

How healthy is our relationship with dogs in this country?��
On one hand, we spoil our dogs and treat them like family members. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of dogs are returned to shelters every day, dumped, given up on, mistreated, neglected. So I wanted the book to be realistic about that and not just be a story about how wonderful our dogs are, and how great their lives are, because that’s not true for every dog.

If I meet someone and they love dogs, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt and just assume from the beginning that they’re a kind, nice, generous person. And then, you know, people can still prove you wrong. There are some people who love dogs that aren’t pleasant to other humans.

How did your relationship with Casey change because of the road trip?
Let’s put it this way: I’m aware now that it’s not Casey’s job to care for my emotional needs. As I start to sense myself projecting onto him, or being sad that he’s not a certain way, I catch myself and I rarely feel bad about it anymore.

So now, in the time we have left—he’s 11 and starting to slow down—my goal is just to appreciate him for the funny, goofy, friendly dog that he is and not put any more expectations on him. Some days he wants to cuddle, other days he doesn’t, and you know, that’s fine.

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