National Parks

This Terrifying Glass Deck Lets You Walk Off a Cliff

This is the Glacier Skywalk, a newly-finished observation deck in Canada’s Jasper National Park, smack dab in the middle of the Rockies of the Great White North. It makes you feel almost like you’re walking on air. The Glacier Skywalk is the brainchild of Brewster Travel Canada, Sturgess Architecture, and Read Jones Christofferson Engineering. It…

Drones Ordered Out of Yosemite by the National Park Service

The National Park Service issued a stern message on Friday to quadcopter-equipped Ansel Adamses: Drones are illegal in national parks, so keep them out of Yosemite’s air space. According to the NPS, drones are being used to film just about everything in the park, from capturing scenic aerial footage to documenting the progress of climbers.…

A toxic and deadly week in landscape reads. We learn how, remarkably, tourist poop is flown by helicopter out of national parks, how Silicon Valley exports toxic waste all over the country, how poison lurks in our old televisions, and how the land can just fall away in the form of Washington’s deadly mudslide. A…

Time to grab some tea and watch this breathtaking Yosemite time-lapse

Colin Delehanty and Sheldon Neill recently hiked over 200 miles through Yosemite National Park with their backpacks filled mostly with camera gear. The effort was worth it based on the spectacular time lapse video they just uploaded to Vimeo. Check out more photos and footage of Delehanty and Neill’s journey at their website. SPLOID is…

Stolen Ferrets, Fluorescent Fish, and the Upside of Cold

What a weird week for weather, huh? On earth, it was so cold that Canada got frostquakes. In space, a massive solar flare sent so many particles hurtling toward us that northern lights were visible outside of the Arctic circle. Here are some landscape reads for this week, taking you under the sea and deep…

A rare event turns the Grand Canyon into Cloud City

Over the weekend, rare atmospheric conditions gave rise to an even rarer scene: The Grand Canyon – that vast, gaping wonder of the natural world – filled to the brim with cold, dense, roiling fog. National Park officials have called the sight a “once in a lifetime” event. Looking at these photos, it’s not hard…

You Can Visit 44 National Parks From the Comfort of Google Street View

Want to see Old Faithful in all its glory but don’t have the time to actually get there? You can at least visit from the safety and convenience of your own computer because Google has mapped more than 44 different U.S. and Canadian National Parks and monuments. You’ve already been able to gaze at the…

Gorgeous Maps Let You Decorate With the Grandeur of Our National Parks

As tools, maps are strictly pragmatic, meant to familiarize us with terra incognita. As artifacts, they help us understand the history of a place. But as art, they highlight the beauty of our surroundings—as shown by these posters highlighting the wild splendor of U.S. National Parks. https://gizmodo.com/18-subway-maps-that-trace-nycs-transit-history-1242514280 Muir Way, founded by an outdoorsman and named…

This is the American National Park (Subway) System

If the United States’ national parks were connected via a 5-line metro system, it would look a little something like this. Not exactly like this, of course. It is “so incredibly not to scale and also fictional” (in case you weren’t sure), according to the folks at the Sierra Club who created the map. Still,…

Would You Visit Atomic Bomb National Park?

Maybe you’ve seen the buffalo at Yellowstone, hiked Half Dome at Yosemite, and gotten one last look before everything melts at Glacier. So what’s next? If lawmakers have their way, it could be splitting the atom at Atomic Bomb Park. Recently the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would allocate $21 million to…

26 National Parks That Are No Longer National Parks

The US National Park Service extends from the Badlands of South Dakota to Biscayne Bay, Florida. But did you know it used to cover more? “Six percent of all the national parks that have ever been created have been dropped,” Geographer Bob Janiskee told National Geographic. “During the sixties, seventies, and eighties, there was a…

The Most Beautiful National Parks as Seen From Space

Wired has a gorgeous piece this morning that combines the best of space porn and national park porn. It has twenty breath-taking images and I highly recommend clicking over and checking it out. Here’s a tiny taste. [Wired Science] Yellowstone above. Looking all hot and bothered. (click here for full sized image) Grand Teton. Very…

The Most Dangerous Threat to U.S. National Parks: Idiots Armed with the Latest Gadgets

July was an alarming, record-setting month for injuries at the Yellowstone National Park. It’s not the park that’s getting more dangerous, however—it’s the technology that ignorant, inexperienced visitors are bringing in with them that’s to blame: But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers – July was…