Roam School Family

For about fifteen years, Yellowstone built bleachers facing a garbage dump so families could watch grizzlies eat trash. The sign said Lunch Counter. For Bears Only.

Twelve minutes out the west gate, Big and Little walk into a grizzly pen with a bucket of food and do the one thing you can never do inside the park. This is our Detour to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone — not a zoo, but a home for grizzlies and wolves from right around here that can't be wild anymore. Every one of them is here because a person made a mistake.

Yellowstone's bear biologist Kerry Gunther tells the story: the hotel dumps, bears begging from horse-drawn wagons, and the bill — 138 bear-caused property damages and 48 injuries a year, for forty years. Then 1970: dumps closed, bear-proof lids on every can, the feeding rule finally enforced. It went wrong first (grizzlies listed as threatened in 1975), and then it worked — 138 conflicts a year down to two. Big figures out the twist before we do: none of the fixes were about bears. They fixed us.

At the rail you'll meet Bo, who got into a cooler, a pickup, a tent, and finally climbed onto a car with people inside — and why this yard is the only reason he's alive. Coram, three strikes and a whole town's dog food. Then the kids go inside the actual pen, hide the food under rocks and branches so the bears have to work for it, and watch a grizzly flip a basketball-sized rock with one paw.

And the job: this yard is one of only two places in the country where bear-resistant coolers and trash cans get tested — by these bears, one hour on the clock. Fewer than half pass. The sticker on your cooler came from a bear standing right about there. Odin closes with five bear-country rules for the rest of our trip, and not one of them asks the bear to do anything.

Good for the drive between the Park and West Yellowstone and for any family about to sleep in bear country.

LINKS:

Plan your own Yellowstone trip: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/yellowstone/

All 63 parks, every episode, in one place: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/

Every destination we've visited: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/

Two nights ago we stayed in a hotel with real beds. At bedtime, both kids asked if they could go sleep in the van.

This episode is about why — and about a valley where everything is moving, and knows exactly where it's going.

We drive into Jackson Hole and the mountains look pasted on: a mile-high wall that tipped up along a fault ten million years ago, still growing a fingernail's width a decade, last jumped about when the pyramids were built. Out in the sage, pronghorn run 55 miles an hour because they were built to outrun a cheetah-like cat that's been extinct for ten thousand years. Every fall they walk a hundred miles south on a route with no road, the same one they've used for six thousand years — and a baby only learns it by walking it with her mother. The park is small. The migration is big. One fence with the bottom wire too low can stop a whole herd.

Then the people who moved with the animals: eleven thousand years of tipis that come down in an hour and go up a hundred miles away. The 1868 promise to the Shoshone and Bannock, and the reservation lines that broke it. The fur trappers who emptied the valley of beavers, the four hundred thousand wagons on the Oregon Trail, and the Mormon families who built the most photographed barn in America in a place where the ground thaws sixty days a year.

We tell the story of Grizzly 399, the bear who raised her cubs next to the highway because the thing she was actually afraid of wouldn't come near people — and who taught them to look both ways. And we meet Mardy Murie, who rode a dogsled four hundred miles at fifteen, became the first woman to graduate college in Alaska, spent her honeymoon following caribou, drove a camper van to Alaska at sixty-five, and told Congress at seventy-five that beauty is a resource. Seven of Alaska's eight national parks are on our list because of her.

The day ends in a room at the Rockefeller Preserve built for sound, where Little sat criss-cross in the middle of the floor for ten minutes and just listened. Big left when the thunder got loud. Leaving is allowed.

LINKS:

• Plan your own Grand Teton trip: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/grand-teton/
• All 63 parks, every episode, in one place: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/
• Every destination we've visited: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/

This episode references:

• Pico Iyer's talk "Where Is Home?": https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home
• The Murie Ranch at Moose, Wyoming, now part of Teton Science Schools: https://www.tetonscience.org
• Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, Grand Teton National Park: https://www.nps.gov/grte/planyourvisit/lsr.htm

Hear this park from the people whose valley it is:

• Eastern Shoshone Tribe: https://easternshoshone.org
• Shoshone-Bannock Tribes: https://www.sbtribes.com

We drove into Glacier National Park under an orange sky, and the first thing Odin asked was how smoke from fires in Oregon and Washington got all the way to Montana.

It took the whole episode to answer him.

We start at Lake McDonald, ten miles of lake we can't see across, and pull rocks out of the water that are red, green, and purple — ancient mud that rusted in the sun a billion and a half years ago, before any dinosaur existed. We sit in on a ranger talk and learn how every animal here solved the same problem: a winter that lasts most of the year. Bears sleep through it (and don't pee for six months). Mountain goats wear it. Pikas store it — and steal from each other. A moose grows a pound of bone out of his head every day, then drops it in the dirt.

Then the rain washes the smoke out of the sky, and we drive Going-to-the-Sun Road: fifty miles, one road across the park, blasted out of a cliff by men hanging from ropes with half a million pounds of dynamite.

On the dry side, things get fast. The buffalo, gone in about fifteen years. The Blackfeet, who called these mountains the Backbone of the World, pressured into selling them for gold that was never there. A railroad man named Louis Hill who wanted a national park because a national park sells train tickets — and built the Many Glacier Hotel out of logs with the bark still on.

Then we meet Lisa McKeon, a USGS scientist who hikes to the glaciers every August holding a hundred-year-old photograph, looking for the exact rock the photographer stood on. We hear about the scientist who put 111 baby bull trout in a backpack with an oxygen tank and carried them five miles up a mountain to a lake cold enough to save them. And we learn the one thing a kid can do about the smoke: drown, stir, drown, feel.

Ages: roughly 6–12, and the adults in the front seat. Includes an honest, kid-level conversation about climate change and wildfire — no doom, no dodging.

LINKS:

Plan your own Glacier trip: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/glacier/

All 63 parks, every episode, in one place: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/

Every destination we've visited: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/

This episode features tape from:

• Headwaters, the podcast produced by Glacier National Park with support from the Glacier National Park Conservancy, hosted by Andrew Smith and Michael Faist: https://go.nps.gov/headwaters
• Glacier National Park Conservancy: https://glacier.org

Hear this park from the people whose mountains they are:

• Sun Tours — Blackfeet-owned interpretive tours on Going-to-the-Sun Road: https://www.suntours.co
• Native America Speaks — the Park Service's program of talks by Blackfeet, Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai speakers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/historyculture/native-america-speaks.htm

You can close your eyes. There is no such thing as an earlid.

This episode is about the quietest square inch in the United States, and what it has to teach a kid whose ears take in too much. We talk with Matt Mikkelsen of Quiet Parks International about One Square Inch of Silence — the spot 3.2 miles up the Hoh River Trail that Gordon Hempton marked with a small red stone on Earth Day 2005 — and about why a quiet place and a silent place are not the same thing.

We explain how the Olympic Mountains are made entirely of uplifted ocean floor with no volcano anywhere in the story, why no road crosses the middle of this park, and how trees in the Hoh grow new roots out of their own branches to drink from the soil in the canopy. We stand at Cape Flattery, the farthest northwest you can get in the continental U.S. without a boat, and go to Ozette, where a mudslide five hundred years ago buried a village so fast that the baskets kept their shape. We find out what 75 mph winds and thirty to fifty feet of snow do to a wildflower's schedule on Hurricane Ridge, and meet a marmot that lives here and nowhere else on Earth.

And we get to what the episode is really about: your body is telling you the truth about a room, and you're allowed to believe it. Leaving is always allowed.

Do the listening experiment in the first two minutes with us. You'll understand why by the end.

Park guide: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/olympic/

All episodes: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/

Quiet Parks International: https://quietparks.org

North Cascades has more glaciers than any other national park in the lower 48... and almost nobody goes.

This episode is about the strangest, most tangled national park in the country, and the question underneath all of it: when people have already rearranged a wild place, what do we owe it now?

We stand in Newhalem and feel Seattle's electricity humming in our teeth and visit three dams on the Skagit River that have been running since 1917 and still supply about 20% of the city's power. We explain the 1968 compromise that made this place a national park and a recreation area at the same time, which is why the road you drive in on isn't technically in the park at all. We tell the extremely weird story of J.D. Ross, the dam-builder who lit a waterfall in colored floodlights, hauled tropical plants indoors by hand every winter, and put actual monkeys on an island in the middle of a reservoir. We look down at Diablo Lake and explain glacial flour: why the water is that impossible chalk-blue, and what happens to the color when the glaciers finish shrinking. We find out why nobody built a fish ladder here (Ross Dam is 540 feet tall, taller than the observation deck on the Space Needle) and what they do instead: they drive the salmon upriver in a truck. Every year. Forever.

Then Dad cuts the boat motor on Ross Lake to explain plate tectonics: why these mountains aren't volcanoes like most of the ones we've visited, but a pile-up of ocean floor and drowned islands that rode in from far out in the Pacific and slammed into North America. That's why you can find seashell fossils on top of the peaks.

At Washington Pass we get into the mountain goats: why they lick the salt off your backpack straps, why human pee wrecks alpine plants that take decades to grow back, and how about 325 goats got blindfolded, slung under helicopters, and flown here from Olympic National Park. And we talk about the grizzlies, who were approved to come home in 2024, still not here, with no date, no money, and real disagreement between tribal nations on the same river about what it means to bring back an animal that eats already-struggling salmon.

The kids end up in an argument, and neither can we: if Diablo Lake shouldn't be there, but it's the most beautiful thing we saw all day...do you drain it?

Best listened to: on Highway 20 between Marblemount and Winthrop, or anywhere you've got a kid in the back seat who wants to prep for the ranger station.

In this episode, we interview Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, who has stood on top of Mount Everest fifteen times and who in 2003 climbed it faster than any human being ever had. He now runs a small restaurant a mile from the park gate because he wanted his kids to have the schooling he never got.

Mount Rainier is a volcano wearing a coat of ice. This episode explains what a lahar is and why kids in the valleys below this mountain practice lahar drills. We explain how a mountain gets big enough to make its own weather, what's hidden inside the summit (miles of steam-melted ice caves and the highest lake in North America, buried under 160 feet of ice), and why the Coast Salish nations call it Tahoma: mother of waters. And we talk about what's happening right now: the glaciers on this mountain are melting six times faster than their historic rate, which means the mountain my kids climb as adults will not be the one we climbed this week.

Also, Ada tries to walk six miles. She has never walked anything close to six miles. Wish us luck.

This episode explains how Mount Mazama collapsed into the bluest water in the world, and the native origin story of the lake. Then we tell the story of William Gladstone Steel: a fifteen-year-old kid in Kansas who read about a mysterious blue lake on his sandwich wrapper, spent fifteen years just trying to find it, and then spent seventeen more fighting to protect it — a thousand letters, one book mailed to every member of Congress, six dead bills, and finally a president willing to lean on the Speaker of the House. And we ride the trolley along Rim Drive to see what all that stubbornness bought: a lake saved, wild and beautiful, just as it was, for all future generations.

Sign the kids' petition to Save the Mazama Newt: https://www.change.org/p/director-nesvik-list-the-mazama-newt-as-endangered-before-it-s-gone/

Thanks to Mac Savage (https://www.youtube.com/@MacSavage503/) a documentary filmmaker and his mother Barbara Alatorre who worked for over 40 years, writing stories and preserving the history of the Klamath tribe. We are grateful for their permission to share and amplify this history. You can hear the full oral history in this video: Klamath Tribal History & Legends Part I (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHIYWCxlfM

Learn more about the Klamath Tribes — the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin, whose homeland this has always been — at http://klamathtribes.org.

Find every episode, our travel maps, and more at http://roamschoolfamily.com.

Lassen gets a fraction of the visitors Yosemite does, and we think that's because nobody knows what to make of it. This park is a rule breaker and in this episode we catch it bending five rules of science, one at a time. Keep a tally with us.

We explain how all four types of volcano on Earth ended up inside a single park. We stand at a lake that looks like it's boiling but is ice cold, and climb a 300-ton boulder that an avalanche carried five miles. We meet Kendall Bumpass, the cowboy who discovered and lost a leg to the hydrothermal basin that bears his name. We tell the story of Benjamin Loomis, who walked toward an erupting volcano with a box camera, and whose six photographs helped turn Lassen into a national park in 1916.

And we end by talking about how life thrives in boiling acid and howNASA scientists (and actual high school students) come to this park to study life's potential in the farthest reaches of our solar system -- Jupiter and Saturn's moons.

It's an odd park but we had fun. We hope you'll join us.

There are 64 permits available per day to get to The Wave. During peak season, 300 people compete for them. We won! …and then we realized we had an 8-year-old who had never hiked 6.5 miles in his life, a 90º & sunny weather forecast, no trail and no shade.

This episode explains the geology of The Wave: Jurassic sand dunes, 200 million years old, turned to stone but caught mid-motion. We're guided by Jaron Tylock from Dreamland Safari Tours, who spent years taking people into the desert wilderness. UCLA PhD student Alana Archbold helps explain the stripes and the Moqui Marbles. We stand on actual dinosaur footprints. And we find out why geologists fly to southern Utah to study Mars — and what it means that two worlds billions of miles apart ended up looking remarkably similar.

And we talk about what it actually feels like to be one of 64 people allowed into a place on a given day — and whether it lives up to the hype.

Keywords: the wave, arizona, vermilion cliffs, coyote buttes, national parks, homeschool, worldschool, geology, desert, hiking, science, family travel, permit lottery

Redwood trees have roots only ten feet deep. For a tree that grows as tall as the statue of liberty, that should be a problem…This episode is about why it isn't.

We explain how redwoods manufacture the fog that feeds them, what a banana slug actually does for a forest, and what the Yurok people understood about these trees long before anyone else was paying attention. And we tell the story of four women — Laura Mahan, Lady Bird Johnson, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Amy Cordalis — who have spent the last century making sure these forests survived.

This episode explains how scientists built a machine so sensitive that your heartbeat standing next to it would ruin the experiment...and why they put it in the middle of the Washington desert. We walk through the control room where gravitational wave detections happen, with a working LIGO scientist as our guide. We explain what it means that space itself can stretch and squeeze, and why the signal they caught in 2015 had been traveling for 1.3 billion years before anyone caught it. We talk about Einstein getting fact-checked by a journal reviewer, refusing to believe it, and eventually being proven right sixty years after he died. And we look at what's coming next: a detector in space with arms two and a half million kilometers long that might — just might!!!— let us hear the echo of the Big Bang.

Joshua Tree isn't just about weird trees and cool rocks.

This episode tells you why those "trees" are not actually trees and what a rain shadow actually does to a landscape. We explain why the Oasis of Mara—the place where Serrano and Chemehuevi people had lived peacefully for generations—got claimed by the state of California in 1875 and sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad without their consent. We meet Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, the wealthy socialite who shipped seven freight cars of desert plants across the country to convince people this place was worth saving. And we talk about what's happening right now: animals so desperate for water they're showing up in people's backyards, and what that means for the future of the desert.