The podcast we record driving
Fifteen to twenty-five minutes, usually about the park behind us. Every episode starts with a question one of the kids asked in the back seat, and the answer is never only about the park.
- Mount Rainier National Park | Who carries the load?
The people who carry you up your mountain rarely mention it: a man refills your water glass and never tells you he has stood on top of Everest fifteen times.
- Crater Lake National Park | How do you save a lake — twice?
Civic action is one letter at a time: a man wrote a thousand of them for a lake, and Little worked a diner in Bend table by table for a newt that lives in one place on earth.
- Lassen Volcanic National Park | How many rules can one park break?
Everybody draws the same volcano, but Lassen keeps four kinds that look nothing like it, and the day we went, the trail everyone comes for was closed.
- [Detour] The Wave | We won the permit lottery. Now what?
Throw your hat over the wall: commit before you know how you'll get there, and keep your own doubt off a kid who is still deciding what he can do.
- Redwood National and State Parks | How do the world’s tallest trees hold each other up?
You don't have to be the tallest, you just have to hold on to your friends: a tree the height of a 35-story building stays up because its roots are gripping the neighbors'.
- [Detour] LIGO | If two black holes collide in the universe, do they make a sound?
Asking a question nobody can answer yet: Einstein got fact-checked, the reviewer was right, and it took a hundred years and a desert full of lasers to settle it.
- Joshua Tree National Park | How does anything survive in a desert this dry?
In a desert, water is a relationship and not a resource: two peoples shared one spring for generations, and one legal signature in 1875 took it from both of them.
