Endangered Species

Below Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, the world’s fourth-longest cave system extends in a maze of passageways filled with boxwork, frostwork and popcorn formations that occupy more than 135 miles. Above ground, a sea of grass gives way to vanilla-scented ponderosa pines.

Near the tip of the “little finger” on the Michigan mitt, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore offers sweeping views of Lake Michigan, the famous Dune Climb and nesting sites for the endangered Great Lakes population of piping plovers. At the southern tip of Lake Michigan, prickly pear cactuses grow beside Arctic bearberry along the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

Positioned along the Atlantic migratory flyway, Fire Island National Seashore is prime birding territory in the spring and fall along the 32-mile-long barrier island. The piping plover and the endangered roseate tern breed here every year.

In Washington, the largest unmanaged herd of Roosevelt elk in the nation roams the impossibly green Hoh and Quinault rain forests of Olympic National Park, where annual precipitation can be 12 to 14 feet. Record-setting Sitka spruce and western red cedar are standouts in a forest of giants; when toppled, they can be swept out to sea along the peninsula’s 10 major rivers and then washed ashore as gargantuan pieces of driftwood.

With its million-plus acres of nearly pristine wilderness, Glacier National Park is a haven for grazing ungulates: moose and elk, bighorn sheep and mountain goats. Rarely seen gray wolves furtively hunt their prey. Tourists have a better chance of spotting one of the park’s roughly 300 grizzly bears from the Many Glacier Valley or Logan Pass trails.

Everglades National Park, the largest remaining subtropical wilderness in the United States, is actually a patchwork of habitats extending from the outskirts of suburban Miami to Florida’s Gulf Coast. With a half-million acres underwater, the park claims the biggest protected mangrove forest in the Western Hemisphere. Combining history with wildlife, the Natchez Trace National Parkway wends its way across 444 miles and three state lines: an 800-foot-wide ribbon of green with a roadway running through it from the foothills of the Appalachians in Tennessee to the bluffs of Natchez, Miss.