Winter can feel like the season when nature takes a break. It isn't. Under the snow, mice and voles are tunneling through a hidden world that stays close to freezing even when the air above is far colder. Inside the leaf litter, a wood frog has frozen solid and will thaw out in spring and hop away. At the tip of every bare branch, next year's leaves are already folded up inside a bud, waiting. As a biology teacher, I love winter for exactly that reason. It's the season that m

Some places in Yellowstone you drive to. Heart Lake you earn. The trail begins quietly off the South Entrance Road, a route the Park Service describes as a moderate 17.4-mile one-way trail that leads "past thermal areas and to Heart Lake." The lake itself sits about 7.2 miles in from the north trailhead — close enough to reach in a long day, far enough that most people never do. That distance is the whole point. It filters the crowd down to almost no one. I hiked in with a pe

Right now, in the last days of September, the grizzly bears of Glacier National Park are eating with an urgency they won't match at any other point in the year. Biologists call it hyperphagia — the fall feeding frenzy when a bear's body shifts into overdrive to lay down fat before winter. During these weeks, a grizzly may take in 20,000 calories a day or more, and sleep only three or four hours between meals. Everything about the animal is tuned to one task: get fat, or don't

I set my alarm for an ungodly hour to stand at Oxbow Bend before the light arrived. In the dark, the Snake River doesn't look like a river at all. It looks like a held breath. Oxbow Bend is a calm stretch of the Snake, and the calm is the whole point. An oxbow forms when a looping meander gets cut off from the main current, leaving a quiet backwater — a pond, really, that the river has moved on from. The main channel keeps rushing toward Jackson Hole; this pocket stays behind

When people learn I've spent time in Yellowstone, the first question is almost always the same: "Is the volcano going to blow?" So when the U.S. Geological Survey posts its monthly Yellowstone update, I read it — and this month's is a good excuse to talk about what's really happening under the park. The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory's September 1 update keeps the volcano alert level at NORMAL and the aviation color code at GREEN, where they've sat for years. In August, inst

Some trees announce autumn quietly. The alpine larch does it in gold. I hiked up into Larch Valley on a cold, bright morning in late September, and the whole basin seemed to be on fire — not with red maples, but with conifers turning yellow. If that sounds like a contradiction, it's a lovely one. The alpine larch (Larix lyallii) is a deciduous conifer: a needle-bearing tree that, unlike its evergreen cousins, drops its needles every fall. Through the summer those needles are

More than a decade after crews began dismantling two aging dams on Washington's Elwha River, the question biologists keep asking isn't "did it work?" — it's "how long will recovery take?" A NOAA assessment published last year offers the clearest answer yet, and it's a patient one: the river is healing, but on the ecosystem's timeline, not ours. The backstory The Elwha Dam and Glines Canyon Dam went up in the early 1900s, cutting sea-run fish off from the upper river for rough

Some trails you remember for the summit. The Highline is one I remember for the walking itself. I started at Logan Pass just after the visitor center lot filled, which in Glacier means early. The pass sits at 6,646 feet, the highest point on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, right on the Continental Divide — the spine of the continent, where a raindrop landing on one side eventually drains toward the Pacific and on the other toward the Atlantic. The Highline Trail leaves from across

If you've stood on the sagebrush flats below the Teton Range on a September morning, you may have watched a pronghorn do the thing it does better than any animal on the continent: run, tan and white against the gray-green brush, seemingly for the joy of it. I did, on my trip to Grand Teton this year, and I've been thinking about those animals ever since — because the ground under their hooves just changed. On June 26, 2026, Wyoming designated its first-ever state-protected pr

There's a particular kind of quiet at Upper Grinnell Lake. I hiked up on a cool morning, boots crunching over rock that ice had laid down, and when the trail finally opened onto the basin, the water was that impossible milky turquoise you only get from glacial silt — rock ground so fine it hangs in the water and scatters the light. That lake is young. Upper Grinnell Lake wasn't always there. It formed as Grinnell Glacier retreated, meltwater pooling in the bowl the ice carved

The world's largest wildlife crossing is almost finished, and I can't stop thinking about a Canadian highway. Just north of Los Angeles, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is being built over ten lanes of the US-101 freeway. The State of California expects it to be completed in fall 2026, and the project team calls it the world's largest wildlife crossing — the span over the freeway alone is about 250 feet long and 174 feet wide, now being planted with native shrubs so an

I pulled off Highway 101 near Forks and drove the Upper Hoh Road to where it ends at the trailhead. Then I stepped into the Hoh Rain Forest, and the light changed. It comes down green here, filtered through so many layers of leaf and moss that even a bright afternoon feels a little like being underwater. I came for the Hall of Mosses Trail, a short loop — just eight-tenths of a mile — that folds you into old-growth forest fast. What holds you there is harder to leave behind.

If Glacier National Park is on your list, the biggest planning news for 2026 is also the simplest: you no longer need a vehicle reservation to get in. The National Park Service has confirmed that vehicle reservations will not be required to drive Going-to-the-Sun Road or the park's other roads this year. For anyone who has spent a winter morning refreshing a booking page at 8 a.m. sharp, that's a real change. The catch: Logan Pass There is one catch worth knowing before you g

The shuttle boat drops you on the far shore of Jenny Lake, and within minutes the trail tips upward into Cascade Canyon. In summer that boat trims about four miles off the round trip, which is how I found myself at the mouth of the canyon before the day's crowds had thinned the quiet. I came for the peaks. I stayed for a small brown animal in the rocks. Above me stood the Grand itself — 13,775 feet, the highest point in the Teton Range and the second-highest in Wyoming after

There's a version of Moraine Lake that most people never see: the one before the shuttles arrive, when the water is dead calm and the Valley of the Ten Peaks is doubled perfectly on its surface. I stood on the rockpile in the cold blue dark, watched the first light hit the highest peak, and understood why people set alarms for 4 a.m. to be here. The color is the thing you can't quite believe, even standing in front of it. It isn't teal paint or a filter. Moraine Lake sits at

That black, bumpy dirt on a desert trail is alive. Here's what biological soil crust is, how it forms, and why a single footstep can undo decades of growth.

The Galápagos is worth every dollar and every ounce of planning.

Rappelling into a pothole I've stood at the rim of a Utah canyon and watched a tourist glance at it for four seconds, snap a photo, and walk back to the car. And I've stood in the exact same spot and felt like I could stay for hours — not because I'm more patient, but because I could read what I was looking at. That's the quiet superpower of understanding basic ecology. It doesn't require a degree. It requires a handful of simple concepts that, once they click, turn every lan

Zion National Park Everyone knows The Narrows. Everyone knows Angels Landing. And on any given Saturday between April and October, it can feel like everyone is standing on them at the same time. But Zion National Park covers 147,000 acres of sculpted sandstone, and the routes that fill your Instagram feed represent a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. After ten years of exploring Utah's canyon country — and teaching biology to teenagers who ask brilliant questions ab