America's National Parks at 100 (2016) - full transcript

It wasn't any one person's idea.

There was no grand master plan.

The national parks are all so different.

In some ways, they were visionary...

Beginning a movement that spread

around the world.

National parks are

amazing places for research,

and, most importantly, for exploration.

In other ways, they were flashpoints...

In the battle between

public land and private rights.

In every way, they reflected the country...

The good, the bad, and the bizarre.

It was a really bad idea.

Now the national park service

is 100 years old... and counting.

The last century is full of stories.

And the next century

is full of possibility.

Native Americans had many names for it.

"Land of the burning ground."

"Place of hot water."

And "many smoke."

Centuries later, white explorers

wrote of its wonders,

but were often dismissed as liars.

They called it "yellowstone."

In 1870, a group

including Montana official

Nathaniel P. Langford

set off to find it.

"We came suddenly upon a basin

of boiling sulphur springs,

throwing water and fearful volumes of vapor

higher than our heads."

Water smoked.

Mud bubbled.

Colors bled.

Congress heard

about the hot, spewing geysers

and figured the place was too rugged

to ever be farmed or homesteaded.

Economically, it appeared worthless.

So with little debate, they

passed a bill to protect it.

They had just created

the world's first national park,

and it was a whopper...

Over two million acres

splayed across three territories

that weren't even states yet.

Congress asked

Nathaniel P. Langford

to be yellowstone's first

superintendent, for no pay.

He accepted.

The earliest visitors to yellowstone,

who came to see these natural wonders

with their own eyes,

were a very hardy bunch.

Tourists roamed on their own,

hoping they wouldn't fall into

a cauldron and boil to death.

Several did.

Others came less for the scenery

and more for the spoils.

Outlaws robbed visiting coaches.

Vandals carved their names

on geyser formations.

Hunters slaughtered buffalo by the score,

often just for sport.

Now there are resurgent herds...

Protective boardwalks...

And well-rehearsed crowd control.

Nearly 3 million people come

to yellowstone every year.

The last century has been filled

with trial and error

of how to run a national park

like yellowstone.

But one thing really hasn't changed.

You still have to see it to believe it.

Not all the early parks

were western wonders.

Cutting through

Washington, D.C.,

is a natural waterway called rock creek.

During the civil war,

union soldiers felled

many of the surrounding trees

and laid them out as speedbumps

for invading confederate troops.

After the war, civic leaders

pushed to preserve

this natural wedge of green space.

It was made a park in 1890.

Washington residents

have enjoyed it ever since.

Rock creek national park

is right in the middle

of an urban area

that tops 6 million people.

People use it in so many different ways.

It's a park that connects neighborhoods,

makes D.C. what it is.

But there are still places

where the city seems to disappear.

When you look around

you don't see too much of

the D.C. that most people know,

this is a beautiful piece of woods.

Bill mcshea wanted to know

what lives in national parks...

Including one surrounded by a city.

For about three years,

we set cameras in different national parks,

and one of them was rock creek park,

to see what's here, when is it active,

how does it relate to the trail use

that people are using.

The animal census

program is called e-mammal,

and the backbone of the project

is the camera trap.

They have a heat motion sensor,

so it has to be a hot body

and it has to be moving

in front of the camera,

which will zoom in on whatever's moving

and take a picture of it.

Camera traps have been

deployed all over the world.

China, Malaysia, Burma, to African sites,

to north American sites.

And you catch the animal unawares.

Inside rock creek park,

they revealed the city's wild side.

It wouldn't surprise people

to hear we got a lot

of whitetail deer pictures.

What was surprising to me are wild turkeys.

I've never seen or heard anyone report

a wild turkey for this park,

but we had quite a number

of wild turkey images

in there during the day.

Are there coyotes?

Yes, the coyotes are here.

We got as many coyote images here

as we got in any of the other

parks we surveyed,

even the most rural parks.

At times, you think this is

primarily a people park,

but it's really an animal park, too.

It is a biosphere, a historic site,

and a city park...

All within a slice of woods

no wider than a mile.

Rock creek park is an ongoing

experiment in the urban wild.

This is as good a piece of woods

as you'll find anywhere,

and we're in the middle of a city.

The earliest

national parks preserved nature.

Now they preserve much more.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was the site

of the deadliest battle in the civil war.

About 50,000 soldiers

were killed or wounded

in just three days.

I don't know if we really can truly imagine

what it must have been like

to have a battle or a war

unfolding literally in your backyard.

Every house and building became a hospital.

Every garden and field became a graveyard.

After the battle, residents

and veterans from both sides

became concerned about the poor condition

of scattered, shallow graves.

They advocated for a permanent cemetery.

Abraham Lincoln dedicated that graveyard

with the gettysburg address.

By 1895 the government declared

it a national military park,

overseen by the war department.

There was not yet a national park service.

Today, the land is preserved

not just for ceremony

and reflection, but protection.

There are still stories to unearth

from the civil war's

hallowed battlegrounds.

This skull fragment was found

more than a century after guns fell silent

on the battlefields of antietam.

It was found by some individuals

that were using metal detectors,

and they picked up this burial.

It reveals one moment among millions

that defined the civil war.

When I am dealing with human remains

from military parks

and they are men that died

on that battlefield,

that is the reality of the war.

I mean, that type of fighting,

that type of fighting

is unbelievable fighting.

Doug owsley and kari bruwelheide

can unravel the mystery of unknown remains.

Any bone that comes into our lab

we think of as an individual.

We know that each bone has a story to tell.

It's a human life.

The life of this soldier remains a mystery,

but his death is quite clear.

This piece of bone

is from the antietam battlefield.

It is a piece of the cranium

that is from the back of the head.

It's called the occipital bone,

and it covers almost

the entire back portion.

Now what's special with this bone

is that it has a defect right here

that is indicative of a gunshot wound exit.

And I can tell that because the margins

on the outside surface

of the bone are beveled.

And it's beveled

because the force

of the traveling projectile

will fracture the bone outward.

So when this individual was shot,

the bullet was traveling

from the front of the person

and exited out the back of the head.

These are soft lead low velocity bullets,

and as they hit, they'll often deform,

they'll tumble, and they'll

leave little particles,

and so in the X-ray, you can see

a good bullet fragment

that's still embedded in the bone.

The rest of the soldier's bones

were re-buried with full military honors.

The Smithsonian keeps this fragment

for preservation and education.

Telling that story

makes the event, the history

so much more, not just tangible,

but so much more personal.

Even today, more than a century later,

human remains are still being found

on civil war battlefields.

And if they weren't protected,

those things might be destroyed.

They serve as a reminder

to the sacrifice of our ancestors

to build this nation,

the nation that it is today.

After the civil war,

one soldier who lost his arm in battle

led one of the greatest river adventures

in American history.

In may of 1869, a team set off

to navigate the surging Colorado river

through unknown territory,

including a canyon

that was mostly just a rumor.

Leading the expedition

was John Wesley Powell...

A one-armed civil war veteran

and geology professor.

He left in a company of ten men

in four wooden boats.

Along the way, one boat was wrecked.

Four men quit out of fear.

Three of them hiked away

and were never seen again.

But six men, including Powell,

made it through...

The first known white men

to traverse the Grand Canyon.

But the Grand Canyon

was the home place of American Indians.

This is where people lived

for centuries upon centuries

and where their kin are buried,

and they are sacred places.

Native Americans still

live inside the Grand Canyon,

amid ancestral petroglyphs

that pre-date Powell's excursion

by 6,000 years.

The 20th century saw

great changes for the canyon.

Tourism exploded.

Some came for the view from the rim;

others came for the trek to the bottom.

Now some want to build

another tourist development

on the south rim

and a tramway to the canyon floor.

It has been explored, exploited,

and exalted

as one of the great wonders of the world.

But it's not the only place

to attract adventure.

In 1870, a 15-year-old boy

from Kansas ate his lunch

while reading the newspaper

it was wrapped in.

He was captivated by a story

of a mysterious lake in Oregon...

And he vowed to go there someday.

15 years later, he journeyed

west by rail, then stagecoach.

He went the last 20 miles on foot.

Finally, William steel arrived

at crater lake.

Its waters are nothing more

than rain and snowmelt.

No rivers lead in or out of it.

It is one of the clearest lakes

in the world...

And one of the deepest,

at almost 2,000 feet.

The allure of crater lake

never let William steel go.

He worked for 17 years

to persuade his government to preserve it.

By 1902, it was a national park.

Other parks in the pacific northwest

reveal different sides of nature...

And different ways to create

and manage a park.

Mount rainier is an active

volcano in Washington state.

In the 19th century,

local mountaineering groups,

newspaper editors, college professors

and Seattle businessmen

all voiced support to protect it.

In 1899, it became

just the fifth national park.

North cascades national park,

also in Washington,

had a longer, windier road.

It was first designated

a forest reserve in 1897,

but it didn't become

a national park until 1968.

In between were 70 years

of local and congressional

debate over who would benefit

and which federal agency should manage it.

Rarely is a park's history

as clear and simple as a mountain stream.

During the gold rush in 1851,

a band of armed men

came through Yosemite valley

to chase away Indians.

They may have been ready for a fight,

but not ready for the sight.

The scenery of Yosemite brought

one of those horsemen to tears.

The earliest white visitors

wandered and photographed

and flashed occasional moments of joy.

Just imagine, you know,

coming into the park

and seeing half dome or El capitan,

these rock formations

that are like nothing

you could ever imagine.

The landscape has long evoked wonder

and spurred scientific theories.

For decades, scientists thought

an earthquake had created

the steep valleys of Yosemite

in a violent spasm.

John muir was the first to propose

they were carved more slowly...

By glaciers.

His theory proved correct.

In 1903, he camped for three nights

with president Teddy Roosevelt

and bent his ear about

better preserving Yosemite.

Roosevelt agreed,

taking a patchwork

of state and federal lands

and proposing one cohesive national park.

But there was still not yet

a national park service.

So who was protecting these parks?

You know, I think

it was kind of a free-for-all.

It was a very dangerous place

and, you know, very much,

you know, sort of the wild west.

Early parks were hard to police.

Park boundaries were invisible

if not ignored.

The idea of preservation

didn't always trickle down

to individual citizens.

So the government sent the cavalry...

United States army units on horseback...

To protect western parks from

looters, poachers, and scammers.

Upon arriving at Yosemite,

one soldier wrote:

"It is the cavalryman's paradise...

Food and drink

for his horse everywhere."

Among those sent west

were the military's first

African American units...

The buffalo soldiers.

There was discomfort around the idea

of African Americans policing whites.

The military sent them

out to western parks,

where there were fewer people to police.

The contingent that went to sequoia

was headed up by captain Charles young.

Captain young,

only the third African American

to graduate from west point,

did not seem to mind the assignment.

"A journey through this park

will convince even the least thoughtful man

of the needfulness of preserving

these mountains

just as they are."

Buffalo soldiers built the first trail

to the top of mount Whitney

and evicted timber thieves...

Despite being issued the worst horses

and oldest equipment.

In a promotion that would be

hard to imagine back east,

Charles young was put in charge

of sequoia national park

as acting superintendent.

By 1906, there were

just six national parks.

Most were simply big, gorgeous spaces.

But there was a new movement to

save smaller, historic places.

They were called national monuments,

and they changed the course

of American conservation.

That was really the first formal attempt

to preserve what they might

have called at the time

"works of man."

At ancient native American sites

like chaco canyon in new Mexico

and mesa verde in Colorado,

poachers called "pot-hunters"

were stealing cultural treasures

to sell to the highest bidder.

Smithsonian's Jesse Walter fewkes

was trying to catalog the antiquities

as they were disappearing.

"If this destruction goes on,

these unique dwellings

will be practically destroyed."

In 1906, congress passed a bill

called the antiquities act.

It allowed the president

to set aside national monuments

by executive order

without the approval of congress.

One presidential signature

could now provide instant protection

for any, quote, "historic

or scientific interest."

Armed with the law's vague language,

president Teddy Roosevelt

jumped right to it.

He quickly protected

chaco canyon and mesa verde.

Then he added devil's tower in Wyoming...

The Grand Canyon in Arizona...

And mount Olympus in Washington,

among others.

Roosevelt created 18 national monuments

in less than three years.

Many would later become national parks.

One of his signatures protected

a weird, rugged place

that looks like ruins on another planet.

National parks

don't just preserve geography.

They invite discovery.

In 1853, an expedition came through

what looked like a desert graveyard.

One wrote in his journal:

"Passed today immense masses

of petrified wood.

Whole trees, with very long bases,

lying on the ground

in a complete state

of petrification."

When these trees were alive,

Arizona's petrified forest

looked a lot different.

To see it as it was,

you have to know where to dig.

It looks like badlands,

but for us it's good lands.

It's a place where we can go hunting

and actually find things.

Kay behrensmeyer is a paleobiologist,

which includes the art of fossil hunting.

Her team brought blocks of ancient stone

from the petrified forest

to the Smithsonian's museum

of natural history.

And then in the fossil lab

under a microscope

the volunteers excavate very, very slowly

around these tiny pieces.

And they find all kinds of things that way

that we could never find

if we were just trying

to do this in the field.

In a series of blocks

that add up to just one square meter,

they uncovered more than 900 fossils...

Each belonging to an animal

that lived in a vastly different landscape.

200 million years ago or more

it looked like a swamp in a forest.

There were various kinds of strange plants.

There were strange animals

in the waterways.

So national parks don't just protect space,

but time.

It's just an incredible opportunity

to see this long view.

It's deep time.

We can see the trajectory of this planet

and of life on this planet,

and it's just a wonderful, wonderful story.

By 1916, you did have

all these different national parks

that had been established

in different places

and for different reasons,

and they were being managed

in different ways.

Finally, 44 years

after the government created

the first national park,

it created the national park service.

Now there was a chance

for a coherent strategy

of how to protect the parks

and connect them to the public.

That strategy is still evolving.

Most visitors go to parks

and are not aware at all

of the active science that's going on.

There's sort of been this gap,

and it's really neat to see

sort of those light bulb moments

when the park visitors get excited

about seeing their public lands

as like a laboratory.

Louise Allen

and her husband nickolay hristov

are biologists who spend a lot of time

in the dark expanses of

new Mexico's carlsbad caverns.

Carlsbad is massive.

It's, it's enormous.

Carlsbad doesn't disappoint.

They have developed

a way to see the unseen...

Though at first the process

seems very low tech.

They look like sputniks,

little foam spheres

with little barbecue skewers

stuck into them.

And what we're gonna do

is put them at different

sections of the cave,

and then when we do the scanning,

the scanner will pick up the balls,

every time it touches,

it reflects the light.

I'm scanner two...

With laser scanners and reference spheres,

they light up the dark.

Many of the caverns

have yet to be explored,

and fewer still have been mapped in 3D.

We simply have

never illuminated these spaces

in the way that the laser can do it.

And you can look

at the volume of that space,

you can do cross sections,

you can do pretty much

any measures that you want.

It's accurate to millimeters.

The carlsbad caverns

are a world-famous home for bats.

For years Nick and Louise have studied them

and seen a reversal of their reputation.

They turned from these creepy,

scary, blood-sucking creatures

into these really mystic and attractive

and endlessly interesting creatures.

Now that people

are more curious about bats,

they're more curious about bat science.

Night after night

I would set up these computers

with big colorful screens and

live thermal images of the bats.

Every night we'd have a good line of people

asking us what's going on.

Nick and Louise saw an opportunity

to make new connections

between the park and the public.

There was really a need

to bring the park rangers

up to date on the current science.

So they started a program called iswoop,

which stands for

interpreters and scientists

working on our parks.

Rangers get closer

to the cutting-edge research

and make it part of the visitor experience.

Instead of outdated talking points,

rangers can bring up

the open-ended questions

of science in progress...

Less lecture, more discussion.

It's a far cry from the scripted

ranger talks of yesteryear.

You can walk into a national park,

and you're in the middle

of somebody's experiment.

There's active science going on

in almost every park.

And it's pretty exciting.

The national park service

has set up long-range plans

for the preservation

and enjoyment of the parks,

and the coming of the conservation corps

put these plans into action.

In the 1930s,

the great depression

put millions out of work.

In response, the government

employed thousands of men

in the civilian conservation corps.

They worked on infrastructure projects

all across the country,

including national parks.

There was a lot of work

that needed to be done

and could be done on public lands.

They were paid around $30 a month,

but the government required them

to send most of it back home

to keep local economies afloat.

Many of the roads

and trails and campgrounds

and other facilities that people are using

in national parks today

were built by the ccc.

That truly transformed

the national park experience.

In Virginia's shenandoah,

they helped give skyline drive better views

and cut sections of the appalachian trail.

They crisscrossed the desolate

landscape of death valley

to run telephone lines, build campgrounds,

and make trails.

In glacier national park,

they fought fires,

cleared campsites, and graded roads.

The men of the ccc

endured army-like conditions...

Government-issued uniforms...

Crowded camp living...

And bad grub.

But the tradeoff was the pride

of a hard day's work

and having their eyes opened

to the wonders of their own country.

Many had never been away from home

or spent any time in the wilderness.

The experience put many Americans in touch

with their national parks

for the very first time.

The ccc was not the only stamp

that Franklin Roosevelt left

on the park service.

What fdr did was bring together parks

that were being managed

by other federal agencies

into the national park system.

The park service was now in charge

of the statue of Liberty,

the national mall

in Washington, D.C.,

Abraham Lincoln's birthplace in Kentucky,

and mount rushmore in south Dakota,

among many others.

Preservation was beginning to pivot

from wild and natural

to manmade and historic.

In 1938, these islands were set aside

not just for their beauty,

but their remarkable story

of human ingenuity.

Nestled off the coast of California,

channel islands national park

is one of the most isolated

sites in the park system.

They seem remote, but they turn out to be

a busy intersection of human history

and natural evolution.

There's really

no place I can think of on earth

that's quite like them.

You know, we often call them

the north American galapagos.

They're that special.

Surrounding seas act as a barrier

to give the islands a unique story.

Like the galapagos, the channel islands

are a grand experiment in local evolution.

Animals like the island fox

and the scrub-Jay

are only found here.

Despite low foot traffic

by modern visitors,

these islands have a long human history...

Surprisingly, longer than any

other coast on the continent.

Native Americans,

the chumash and the tongva people

who lived on the channel islands,

they were very much coastally focused

and maritime-focused people.

They were also a pioneering people.

Excavations reveal a startling theory...

They were the first seafaring

culture in the Americas,

dating back 13,000 years.

Shell beads.

Abalone.

Small stone spears and hooks.

These are just some of the artifacts

used by the early people

of the channel islands.

From deep within the Smithsonian archives,

torben Rick continues to piece together

this cultural puzzle.

One revealing artifact

is a miniature canoe.

We interpret these as being either toys

or what we call heuristic

or learning devices, you know,

so you can imagine these

teaching people about their culture,

about who they are,

about important parts of their life.

And this prepares them then

to be making their own boats maybe,

or going out in those boats

for fishing or trade or exchange.

These artifacts signify a community

that had long-distance transportation...

A bartering system...

Even art.

Now the national parks

provide a place to discover

these and other

ancient and diverse cultures.

But the park service hasn't always been

so culturally sensitive.

For decades, they shared

america's struggle with stereotypes.

African Americans in particular,

and I think other minorities as well,

were presented, in many instances,

in less than a human way.

And it does make you cringe

when you think about it today.

Interpreting

the history of different peoples

is central to the modern mission

of the park service.

America is one of the busiest

cultural intersections

on the planet.

Many sites reveal

the surprisingly global history

of the country.

Florida was part of the Spanish empire

when construction began on

castillo de San Marcos in 1672.

It's the oldest masonry fort

in the continental U.S.

As late as the 19th century,

parts of Alaska were colonies of Russia.

This house in sitka once housed the bishop

assigned to spread

the Russian orthodox faith

among Alaska natives.

In northeastern Minnesota,

this quiet lakeside fort

was once a bustling

18th century commercial hub

for Europeans, French Canadians,

and local ojibwe.

Beaver pelts from the pacific northwest

made it all the way back to Moscow.

But there are also historic sites

that commemorate difficult

chapters of American history.

Parks have been established

that are reflecting some

of our more shameful moments

in our history...

Japanese internment,

for example, or slavery.

The park service has the responsibility

to research, preserve and interpret history

where history occurred.

And it is important that we,

as the national park service,

reflect the full range

of human experiences.

National parks

have distinguishing features.

They're making an important contribution

to the health and happiness

of millions now living

and still more millions of the future.

After world war two,

Americans could collectively exhale.

With good jobs, spare time,

and new cars, they hit the road.

So with the advent

of the interstate system,

visitors to the national parks

increased substantially.

In fact, visitor numbers doubled

in just five years.

98% of them arrived by car.

Even the improvements made by the ccc

were not enough to support

the avalanche of new visitors.

Where there wasn't a road,

people were making a road.

"The people," said one park official,

"are wearing out the scenery."

And so began a mission to make upgrades

in time for the park service's

50th anniversary in 1966.

It was called "mission 66."

It was an effort to really improve

the visitor experience in parks.

One idea to control crowds

was to centralize their arrival

and educate them on what they

should and shouldn't do.

The visitor center was born.

By the time the park service turned 50,

the parks had undergone quite a facelift.

National parks were now at the top

of many families' summer vacation plans.

Armed with station wagons

and movie cameras,

Americans gobbled it up.

I was definitely that kid.

That's what we did as a family

was visit national parks.

These were such special places,

and those those memories

really stick with me today.

In the 1960s,

america's pollution problem

gained national attention.

Water pollution was

especially easy to see...

And smell.

In a burst of action,

the government tried to preserve

sea and lake shores.

Some thought it wise;

Others thought it intrusive.

Many shorelines were already

privately owned.

These areas were already inhabited

with established cities and

towns and people living there.

So the government tried to buy them out

and turn mostly private land into public.

The first example...

Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Raucous local debates delayed the effort.

But by 1961,

congress had created

the Cape Cod national seashore.

In the next decade, the trend continued,

both on the east coast and the west coast.

But the Great Lakes rival any sea.

In the 1960s, conservationists

nicknamed their shores

"the third coast."

The apostle islands in lake superior

include 21 islands,

many with a historic lighthouse.

In Michigan, sleeping bear dunes

was created

only after another battle with locals

over turning private land into public.

Coastal parks do have

restrictions for people.

But they also create habitat for animals.

After more than 60 days under the sand,

a new hatchling instinctively

rushes toward the sea...

Its very first race...

With its life at stake.

Predators are never far.

If the baby loggerhead turtle

makes it through its first few minutes,

it could have a long life ahead...

More than 50 years.

Future generations...

Both reptile and human...

Could benefit from the preservation

of the Gulf islands

of Mississippi and Florida.

Wildlife management

hasn't always been so successful

for the park service.

For decades, it allowed people

to approach and feed bears.

Rangers even encouraged it.

They used to put out bait, you know,

in yellowstone and places

to attract the bears,

because that's what people wanted to see.

They allowed garbage

dumps to become bear bait...

Even setting up bleachers

for people to watch.

It brought in the crowds,

but ruined the bears.

They became dumpster divers

and camp invaders.

In yellowstone alone, bears

injured almost 50 people a year.

In 1970, the parks reversed course,

trying to return bears

to their natural habits.

They prohibited feeding,

cleaned up the dumps,

and installed bear-proof garbage cans.

In time, encounters between

people and bears plummeted.

Policy changes also spelled

the end of a questionable custom

that used to dazzle crowds

in Yosemite valley.

On summer nights, there was

a hundred-year-old tradition

to build a bonfire

at the top of glacier point.

Then at 9 P.M. sharp,

it was pushed over the edge,

creating a spectacular firefall

that plunged over a half mile

to the valley floor.

It must have been

a visually stunning thing to watch,

but also a really bad idea.

In 1968, this spectacle didn't fit

the park service's evolving mindset.

Director George hartzog

finally put a stop to it.

"It was about as appropriate

for the silent tranquility

and beauty of that great valley

as horns on a rabbit."

Yosemite, along with other national parks,

was reflecting america's evolution.

The environmental movement of the 1960s

seemed to vindicate the preservation ideal

that began a century earlier.

More people were visiting parks

than ever before.

But in one case, they wouldn't leave.

In the summer of 1970,

one meadow in Yosemite

became a hub for the counter culture.

Getting back to nature was now in vogue.

But they were not just passing through.

They stayed, camped

without permits, and partied.

The meadow did not look so natural anymore.

Rangers debated the situation

with the students.

You look out here, it's become a lawn.

National parks are not set aside

to be big rustic fun farms.

Now it's an ecological stretcher case.

The park service tried to find the line

between use and abuse...

Between enjoyment by the public

and enforcement of the rules.

Why would you want

a confrontation in the meadow?

On July 4th, park officials announced

they were going to clear the meadow.

You can hear the reaction of the crowd.

This meadow is to be

cleared at 7 o'clock...

Because of excessive quantities

of litter, noise, et cetera.

Like many other scenes from the 1960s,

it soon got ugly.

Get this action, man.

They're wrecking people.

The horse ran over someone, knocked down.

There are people who are hurt,

a lot of people are hurt,

there are clubs and sticks.

It's now a wholesale riot.

The mace is burning in my eyes.

It's burning in everybody's eyes.

The park service

learned a lesson that day...

And applied it to the future.

The stuff that went on

in the meadows in Yosemite

was what led to the development

of the park service law enforcement ranger.

Later in the 1970s,

the battle between public lands

and private rights moved north.

Alaska became ground zero.

Alaska is on a scale all its own.

Some say it also has a mindset of its own.

In 1978 Jimmy Carter

used the antiquities act

to try to create 17 new

national monuments in Alaska.

I don't think it went over very well.

I think there was great concern

about what this meant.

Alaskans, who have always been

fiercely independent,

challenged the move.

Many considered it federal overreach...

A threat to their way of life.

The legal dust settled by 1980.

Carter's move stood,

with a unique compromise

on how the lands could be used.

It did make provision for hunting

and subsistence and fishing

that would not be allowable

in the lower 48.

The legislation turned

more than 73,000 square miles

into public land...

Virtually doubling the size

of park service properties.

It was the single largest stroke

of conservation

in world history.

Mount McKinley national park

officially reverted back

to its native Alaskan name...

Denali, meaning "the great one"...

And the park service land

around it tripled.

But it still doesn't approach the size

of the biggest national park of them all.

When I was a little kid

my dad took me on my first airplane ride.

I was probably, what, 7 years old maybe?

And I never have forgotten that.

Lynn Ellis is

a second generation bush pilot

in Wrangell-St. Elias

national park.

He flies search and rescue missions,

shuttles rangers in and out,

and conducts wildlife surveys.

So much freedom here and so much beauty.

And it never gets old.

It's just awesome.

Spreading over an entire corner of Alaska,

Wrangell-St. Elias

is beyond big.

It's the size of Yosemite,

yellowstone, and Switzerland...

Combined.

Just one of its glaciers

would easily cover

the entirety of Delaware.

For visitors, it's a taste

of unspoiled wilderness.

However, there aren't that many visitors.

Wrangell-St. Elias

is one of the most remote parks

in the entire system.

Only about 75,000 people

make the trek each year.

But millions of Americans come

to this park every year.

It's hidden inside america's biggest city.

When I say that I'm working

in a national park,

they're like where, like,

how do you get there?

I'm like I take the 2 train.

I work in Brooklyn,

there's a national park right here.

Gateway is a patchwork

of green spaces and shorelines

in greater New York City...

A place not often associated

with peace and quiet.

Gateway is a bit off the grid

for most new yorkers.

We tend to live and walk on solid ground,

on concrete, on sidewalks.

We follow sort of gridlike

patterns most days of our lives.

And gateway really has

that kind of outback feel.

Everything is still.

You just feel the breeze,

you see the trees,

you see, like, the butterflies

and birds flying around,

but there aren't, like, cars honking

and the subway screeching,

so for me, it's like a place

where you can breathe.

Neil is one of the

many young interns at gateway.

We have people

from, like, India and Russia,

myself from Guyana, Ecuador,

all over the world.

The mission was really

to bring the national park

experience closer

for people who couldn't necessarily travel.

I think for some people,

especially newcomers to this country,

the idea of going and

sleeping out under the trees

is stretching the comfort zone

a little bit.

The park service is trying to serve

a broader cross section

of Americans than ever before.

Gateway is meant to be

an introduction, an entree

into the national park experience.

Small parks close to big cities

may be a new focus of the park service.

But there's still room in their

portfolio for big landscapes.

Right outside the neon glow of Las Vegas

lies a brand new park.

Tule springs fossil beds national monument

was created by President Obama in 2014.

So we're at the edge of a city

that has 2.5 million people.

Just 30 minutes from

the craziness of Las Vegas

is a place that you can almost feel

like you're a long ways away

from Las Vegas.

Jon burpee is the superintendent.

For now, he's the only employee.

He oversees more than 35 square miles.

Most of it is classic desert.

But tucked into this landscape are washes

that are like time tunnels

back to the last two ice ages.

These represent discrete moments

in earth's past.

And so being able to interpret these,

this is looking at the history

of one spot through time.

Locals can still hike in tule springs,

but more destructive activity is banned.

That's because right where kids

used to ride dirt bikes

are fossils that could end up

in their textbooks.

The rock stars out here,

as far as the fossils go,

are the columbian mammoths.

Usually every single time we're out here

we find some bits and pieces

of these animals

which would have stood

18 foot tall at the shoulder at the most.

The record tusk is about 18 feet long.

Tule springs is writing new chapters

of Nevada's surprising past...

Which was more wild and more wet.

During the last ice age

we would have actually been

sitting underwater right now.

So this would have been

one of these active springs.

The whole story of tule springs unfolds.

The story of tule springs

will continue to unfold.

We don't have a visitor center yet,

we don't have marked trails.

All that will come in the near future.

But what you have is a national park

that's just been born.

We're in the perpetuity business

in the national park service.

That's what we do.

Parks like tule springs

are an opportunity for us

to make sure that we get it right.

100 years of lessons learned.

400 sites and growing.

The park service has a busy century ahead.

What will tule springs become?

What will the national parks become?

What stories will they tell?

They're reserves for the imagination.

And they're places where everyone can feel

that they are explorers.

National parks are places to teach us

how we respect each other.

The national parks are us...

You, me... they're us.