Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve
The rolling grasses and soft morning mist of Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, one of the rarest landscapes remaining in North America. The preserve protects a small surviving piece of the vast tallgrass prairie that once stretched across millions of acres from Texas north into Canada. Today, less than four percent of that original prairie ecosystem still exists.
The Flint Hills became one of the last refuges of the tallgrass prairie because the rocky limestone beneath the soil made large-scale farming difficult. While most of the prairie across the Midwest was plowed under for agriculture, these hills remained largely intact, preserving a glimpse of what early travelers and settlers once encountered as they moved westward across America.
Recognizing the rarity and importance of this disappearing landscape, Congress established Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in 1996 as part of the National Park system. Today, the preserve protects this unique ecosystem as well as a vanishing piece of the natural and cultural history of the American heartland.
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Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore
Some of America’s most remarkable landscapes were not shaped by rivers or mountains, but by ice. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore preserves one of the finest examples of how glaciers transformed the Great Lakes region, creating a landscape where towering dunes, forests, inland lakes, islands, and miles of Lake Michigan shoreline exist side by side. […]
Ozark National Scenic Riverways
Traveling into the Ozarks of Missouri, I came to the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, a place defined not by mountains or monuments, but my water. Here the landscape is shaped by two rivers: The Current River and the Jacks Fork River, both fed by some of the largest natural springs in the country. The water is clear, […]
Indiana Dunes National Park
On our cross-country family road trip in 1995, we stopped at the Indiana Dunes National Park. The massive sand dunes stretch along the southern shore of Lake Michigan and they are interwoven with wetlands and beaches. The dunes were formed over thousands of years as glaciers retreated in the wind and water shaped the sand into ridges […]
