PODCAST · history
Parks Are Calling Podcast
by Henry Wilder
Every park had to be argued for. Somebody noticed it, somebody fought for it, and it is open today because that fight was won.Each episode takes one park and tells the sourced story of why it exists, what that fight left behind, and why you would go stand in it. All 63 national parks, then the state parks people ask about most.Hosted by Henry Wilder of Miles of Quiet, out of Bend, Oregon. When he has been somewhere, he will tell you. When he has not, he says so.Presented by Verdant Traveler (verdanttraveler.com).
Episodes
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Death Valley National Park: The Borax Company Wanted a Park
Death Valley National Park straddles the California–Nevada border, east of the Sierra Nevada, and it holds the lowest point in North America and the world-record high air temperature, 134°F, recorded at Furnace Creek. Lost emigrants named it in 1849, and the borax business is why it's a park....
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Congaree National Park: The Newspaperman and the Record Stumps
Congaree National Park, about 20 miles southeast of Columbia, South Carolina, protects a floodplain forest that floods about 10 times a year and holds the highest concentration of champion-sized trees in North America. A Chicago lumber family logged the biggest cypress there and then stopped. In...
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Cuyahoga Valley National Park: The Park Washington Said Didn't Qualify
Cuyahoga Valley National Park sits in northeast Ohio between Cleveland and Akron, and it's the only national park in the state. In June of 1969, a few miles north of what's now the park, the Cuyahoga River caught fire, and it had burned more than 10 times in the century before. Around then, a...
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Pinnacles National Park: The Rocks That Rode North
Pinnacles National Park sits in the Gabilan Mountains of central California, about five miles east of Soledad and 80 miles southeast of San Jose, and its rocks are what's left of a volcano that erupted 23 million years ago near Lancaster, in Southern California. The San Andreas Fault split it…
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Canyonlands National Park: Why Stop With the Needles
Canyonlands National Park is the largest national park in Utah, on the high desert of the Colorado Plateau in the southeast of the state, 36.6 miles in a straight line from Arches. Bates Wilson, the superintendent at Arches, thought one corner of this country, the Needles, deserved to be a…
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Saguaro National Park: The Forest That Was Supposed to Die
Saguaro National Park sits on both sides of Tucson, in southern Arizona, and today it counts about 2 million saguaros, nearly double what its census found 30 years ago. Herbert Hoover proclaimed Saguaro National Monument in 1933, and within a few years the people looking after it were sure the...
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Joshua Tree National Park: The Desert Nobody Thought Was Outstanding
Joshua Tree National Park sits in southern California, about 140 miles east of Los Angeles, where two deserts meet, and an estimated 870,000 Joshua trees grow inside it. About 100 years ago, people were digging those trees up and setting them on fire. Minerva Hoyt, a South Pasadena garden-club...
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North Cascades National Park: The Park You Drive Right Past
North Cascades National Park sits in the far north of Washington State, about 100 miles northeast of Seattle, and in one recent year it counted about 16,500 visitors while the recreation area next to it counted close to a million. That's because the North Cascades Highway, Diablo Lake and the…
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White Sands National Park: The Sand Nobody Could Sell
White Sands National Park is in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico, with its visitor center about 15 miles west of Alamogordo, and its dunes are part of the largest gypsum dunefield in the world. In the early 1900s people tried to mine those white dunes, more than once, and none of it...
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Redwood National Park: The Tallest Tree, the Worm, and a Park Surrounded by Stumps
Redwood National Park sits on the northern California coast just below the Oregon border, in the stretch from Crescent City to south of Orick, and the tallest known tree, 379 feet, grows in its Redwood Creek watershed. Of the original old-growth coast redwoods, 96% have been logged. In 1963, in…
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Olympic National Park: The Elk, the Schoolhouse Sign, and the Park That Was Cut in Half
Olympic National Park sits on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, west of Puget Sound and reached from Port Angeles or Forks, and it protects the largest fully wild herd of Roosevelt elk in the Pacific Northwest. Around the turn of the last century it was fashionable for men to wear elk teeth on…
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Arches National Park: The Prospector, the Railroad, and the Name That Moved
Arches National Park sits five miles north of Moab in southeast Utah, and it has the densest concentration of natural stone arches in the world, over 2,000 of them. It starts on Christmas Eve, 1922, when a prospector named Alex Ringhoffer went looking for copper and silver and found a field of…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Every park had to be argued for. Somebody noticed it, somebody fought for it, and it is open today because that fight was won.Each episode takes one park and tells the sourced story of why it exists, what that fight left behind, and why you would go stand in it. All 63 national parks, then the state parks people ask about most.Hosted by Henry Wilder of Miles of Quiet, out of Bend, Oregon. When he has been somewhere, he will tell you. When he has not, he says so.Presented by Verdant Traveler (verdanttraveler.com).
HOSTED BY
Henry Wilder
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Parks Are Calling Podcast have?
Parks Are Calling Podcast currently has 12 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Parks Are Calling Podcast about?
Every park had to be argued for. Somebody noticed it, somebody fought for it, and it is open today because that fight was won.Each episode takes one park and tells the sourced story of why it exists, what that fight left behind, and why you would go stand in it. All 63 national parks, then the...
How often does Parks Are Calling Podcast release new episodes?
Parks Are Calling Podcast has 12 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Parks Are Calling Podcast?
You can listen to Parks Are Calling Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Parks Are Calling Podcast?
Parks Are Calling Podcast is created and hosted by Henry Wilder.
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