National Park Service

A new report shows that visitors to national parks spent a record amount in surrounding communities last year, providing a major economic boost to those areas.

Recent federal laws have provided hundreds of millions of dollars in extra funding for the National Park Service. Yet some members of Congress say the agency isn’t moving fast enough on construction projects and improvements for visitors.

Workers at Yellowstone National Park recently voted to unionize in a landslide vote. The organization hopes to improve working conditions, pay and general satisfaction.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit, recently released its annual rankings of the best places to work in the federal government. It found that working at a national park is no picnic.

The National Park Service released visitation statistics this week showing that five of the top 15 most-visited parks in 2022 are in the Mountain West. Big crowds can put pressure on national parks, though.

Black Americans used the Green Book in the mid-1900s to find safe places to travel. Now an organization in the Mountain West is highlighting many of these locations.

The National Park Service is behind on studying 28 potential sites to add to its system. Two of them are in the Mountain West.

The process of getting Amache under the National Park Service umbrella involved years of effort. It means more funding for preservation in the short term. But no matter who administers the site, everyone involved hopes the survivors – and their stories – stay front and center.

It started with a teacher who saw an opportunity to do a living history project and wound up volunteering to keep up the site at Amache for 30 years. Today, historians, survivors, and archaeologists are fighting to preserve the history there.

The advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Policy found that the number of permanent law enforcement officers has dropped 15% since 2005. Seasonal officers are down 30% in the same time period.