Across the country, the National Park Service is hosting events on Thursday, Aug. 25 in celebration of the agency’s 100th anniversary, and national parks in the Moab area will be participating.
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President Woodrow Wilson had the same idea 100 years ago and created the National Park Service. The first 1,000 participants were allowed to keep their umbrellas and got T-shirts commemorating the event.
Today, the Park Service oversees 413 sites, including 59 major national parks, covering 84 million acres – from the Great Smoky Mountains, the most visited, to the Grand Canyon, to the Everglades.
Climate change was the focus of Secretary Jewell’s visit to Glacier, a focus strongly emphasized by Park Superintendent Jeff Mow.
The Cape Symphony Orchestra will perform a unique concert this evening as part of a daylong Centennial Celebration for the National Park Service at the Cape Cod National Seashore.
The closest national parks to Houston are the Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas (about a nine-hour drive) and Big Bend along the Rio Grande (eight and a half hours away). But what if you could see every national park in the continental United States on one trip?
FILE – In this June 21, 2005, file photo, a stream in Acadia National Park on Mt.
The park also celebrated with cake and a movie in the afternoon and many other places are doing the same.
The free-admission days are among 16 free days scheduled throughout the centennial year.
Even though national parks were technically recognized in the 1800s, no organization existed to protect and preserve the parks until August 25, 1916, when Stephen Mather, a wealthy conservationist and reporter, helped establish the National Parks Service, according to PBS. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park in Maryland offered free mule-drawn boat rides on Thursday.
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And with handsome weather predicted through the weekend, park rangers at Sandy Hook could find themselves turning away visitors for a time.
