The America's National Parks Podcast is sponsored by L.L. Bean.

This year, L.L. Bean is joining up with the National Park Foundation,

the official non-profit partner of the National Park Service to help you find your happy place in an amazing system of more than 400 national parks including historic and cultural sites, monuments, preserves, lakeshores, and seashores

that dot the American landscape,

many of which you'll find just a short trip from home.

L.L. Bean is proud to be an official partner of the National Park Foundation.

Discover your perfect day in a park at find your park.com. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . .

Surely if you listen to this podcast,'ve heard the news America now boasts 61

national parks technically all of the 400 plus units in the National Park

Service are national parks but only 61 have the capital N, capital P designation

from Congress. Buried within a massive spending bill protecting public lands signed by the president on

February 15th was a provision that simply stated public law 89-761 is amended

by striking National Lakeshore, each place it appears and replacing it with National Park.

I'm Jason Epperson, and this is the America's National Parks

podcast. Today's episode, The New Indiana Dunes National Park, which like

many of our parks is named for one feature of a multifaceted ecosystem. I'm going to see. The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore was established as a unit of the National Park Service in 1966, but the fight to protect this special place on the southern tip of Lake Michigan

began at the turn of the 20th century.

Botanist Henry Cowles published an article entitled Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on

Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan in the Botanical Gazette that helped earn him the title Father of Plant Ecology, bringing international

attention to the intricate ecosystems existing on and around the massive sand dunes that formed on the shores.

But if you know anything about Northern Indiana,

...