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There are nearly 400 parks, preserves, historical parks and battlefields, monuments, historic sites, memorials and other units that are part of the National Park Service of the United States in 2009. They attracted about 275 million visitors in 2008.
During the past seven years, University of Miami journalism students have prepared a series of more than 350 pages of feature articles, photographs, and multimedia content about the activities, environment, scenic rivers and recreation areas, the unusual places, monuments, historical sites, cultural heritage, museums, nearby places, and the people of Our National Parks. We hope you will find them interesting and worth reading. This fall, we visited Yosemite National Park in Northern California. Our stories, photographs, video, slideshows, and other content will be posted here by mid December. |
We will also continue our on-going work focusing on our home region parks of South Florida, including Everglades, Dry Tortugas, and Biscayne national parks. We expect to prepare nearly three dozen new story, photographs, and graphics packages.
We will also prepare a series of 16 new stories this fall focusing on issues and problems currently facing the U.S. national parks system. The new stories will appear on the site at the end of this year. We published a similar series of stories in 2008 and 2007 for our readers.
Our Spring project, completed last May, looks at the most popular parks and historic sites of the San Francisco Bay area, and several of the leading sites in the New York City area.
This was our second group visit to San Francisco in two spring semesters. Our work is now posted on the site.
The name of our site comes from the ground-breaking 1901 book by naturalist John Muir, Our National Parks. It is in the spirit of Muir's life-long effort to preserve some of America's most remarkable wilderness spaces that we have developed this journalistic work.
We remind our readers that the information in these articles was current when it was posted, but information may have changed as time passes. Each article that we prepare has a posting date at the top right of the page. Conditions in the parks change. Always check for changes in fees, hours of operation, dates, and other information before traveling.
Photos by Bruce Garrison and Vincent Daniello.