Smarty Pants Podcast

Go Tell It on the Mountain

A tribute to our protected wilderness

By Stephanie Bastek | June 22, 2018
Cheryl Himmelstein
Cheryl Himmelstein

For more than 100 years now, we’ve been blessed with National Parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872; Pinnacles, created in 2013, is the 59th and most recent National Park to join the list. Other kinds of natural national treasures exist, though—protected monuments and seashores and recreation areas, plus an abundance of state parks and lands. This week, we’re revisiting our interview with Terry Tempest Williams, who marked the centennial of the National Park Service with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. From the Grand Tetons to the Gulf Islands, Alcatraz to the Arctic, each place is imbued, in Williams’s telling, with the depth of history, a sense of longing, and her indelible, close observation of the peaks and twigs around her.



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