We are still a nation that looks forward, and our parks are continually threatened. In today's world an unprotected wilderness is doomed. Few living things can survive unless their total world is maintained.

The size of parks is important. They were seldom established with the needs of nature in mind. The elk of Yellowstone migrated down to Grand Teton each autumn, straight into hunters' gunfire, until the parks' borders were expanded to include the migration route. In Redwood, giant trees were toppling because logging just outside the park had created floods that undermined their roots. The park now includes a buffer zone.

In 1981 almost 44 million acres of Alaskan land became national parks, doubling the size of the system. Whole mountain ranges and river basins were preserved so that great herds of caribou could migrate unmolested, and grizzlies could prowl vast territories, as is their wont. Few people may visit these new parks in the near future, but that was true of Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon once.

Dreams and Memories
The national parks are an American triumph, a realized dream that has helped give us greatness. Though we may never see it, there will come a day when our children will remember a park they visited on a long-ago family trip. The memory will haunt them until they return. When they do, the cycle will be renewed; they will bring their children, perhaps even their grandchildren, to share the land.

For many of us, the memories span the continent and cross the years. Our minds are filled with snapshot images: a clear, sharp dawn from atop Acadia's Cadillac Mountain, the rising sun burnishing the Atlantic…the brooding mountains of Big Bend, lonely and silent in midwinter…the miracle of Crater Lake's blue, pure beyond reality…the endless sawgrass prairies of Everglades, and a huge alligator lying squarely across the trail…white plumes of beargrass against the turquoise of Glacier's Grinnell Lake, and a barefoot run across snowbanks on a hot July afternoon.

Different people hold different images: huge chunks of ice calving from glaciers, plunging deep into the leaden seawater of Glacier Bay…the Grand Canyon's immensity under a winter moon, even greater than by day…dawn in Grand Teton on the Fourth of July, the peaks lit by the rising sun…Newfound Gap on a gray February evening, the Great Smoky Mountains ahead coated with rime…the blue Pacific pounding itself into white spray against Hawaii Volcanoes' coastline of jagged black lava…a Rocky Mountain dawn, with sunlight filtering through the golden petals of countless alpine sunflowers…yellow lady's slippers on Shenandoah's Stony Man Mountain…great columns of steam billowing into Yellowstone's sharp morning air, mixing the pungence of hydrogen sulfide with the fragrance of spruce…Yosemite's sparkling waters and immutable granite, transcendent in purest light.

All our yesterdays and tomorrows are nourished by such subtleties and such grandeur. These are our national parks, a celebration of America. The dreams and memories they contain are in our care today; tomorrow's generations depend on us to keep them whole.

Table of Contents

• The Story of the US National Parks
• The Story of the US National Parks - Eastward Ho!
• The Story of the US National Parks - New Challenges
• The Story of the US National Parks - Saving the Wilderness