Archive All Issues August 2016

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

The National Park Service manages and protects more than 84 million acres in parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites, preserves, seashores, lakeshores and more all across the United States. Here in Arizona, we have 22 national parks, extending from Coronado National Memorial in the extreme south to Pipe Spring National Monument way up north.

Featured in the August 2016 Issue of Arizona Highways

BY: Kathy Montgomery

It was artist George Catlin who first imagined a “nation’s park” — a place to protect “man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty.” It took a while, but, eventually, the National Park Service was established. And this month, it turns 100. To mark that milestone, we interviewed rangers at each of the parks in Arizona. We wanted to hear, from the people on the ground, what makes the parks in our state unique and worthy of protection. Because there is some jurisdictional crossover in the management of the parks, we included only those units managed by the National Park Service. Therefore, you won’t see Agua Fria, Ironwood Forest, Sonoran Desert or Vermilion Cliffs national monuments, which are managed by the Bureau of Land Management; or Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area, which is managed by a nonprofit group. Also, we left out Hohokam Pima National Monument, a Park Service unit that’s closed to the public.