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Be an outsider.

I suppose by now people think of me as a bit of a nature guy. It wasn't always the case. In fact, it's fairly recent.

Before moving my family into an RV and hitting the road full time five years ago, I worked 60 plus hours a week in a big city with little vacation and I hardly left a three block radius.

Exploring these wonderful places has taught me how important it is to protect them

and how far we've come from the time America saw our wild lands as only

repositories of resources to be harvested.

I'm Jason Epperson and this week on America's national parks, a great mountain of the west

and conservation lessons learned over the course of a century.

The National Park Service celebrated its 100 year anniversary in 2016 with a big celebration that drew

a lot of attention to parks. It might have worked too well. Before COVID, the parks were already seeing an explosion in visitors, and now there's even more focus on getting outdoors and away from it all.

Some of our parks are overrun with visitors and we need to find new ways to manage the wild lands that need to be protected, at the same time keeping them accessible to all Americans.

What will our parks look like in another 100 years? Only time will tell. But to find

out about how we got here today, I want to take you to Mount Rainier.

Towering over Seattle, it's probably my favorite park that I've never been to.

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