I got my bags packed on a roll heading out there and I'm ready to go looking real good

in my passport photo.

Amateur Traveler episode 652. Today the Amateur Traveler talks about

mountains and sand dunes and glaciers, brown bears and fjords, and a copper mine as we go to the national parks of Alaska.

Welcome to the amateur traveler. I'm your host Chris Christensen. Let's talk about Alaska.

I'd like to welcome back to the show Gary Art from everything dash everywhere

dot com the most frequent amateur traveler guest I am pretty sure this is we believe

Gary's 15th episode the last one being the liberation route and I won't try and name

them all anymore we're no longer just doing the small places which Gary and I

did for the longest time in fact you come to talk to us about the largest state in the United States.

Yeah, we're going to talk about Alaska's national parks.

And in particular, the eight sites of the 24 sites in the state of Alaska that have a national park designation.

And just to make sure that that makes sense to people within the National Park Service there is national parks, which is what we're going to talk about, national monuments, national historic

sites, national historic parks, national seashores, national grasslands, etc.

Yeah, and sometimes the difference between one of those things and another is very small, like

Grand Canyon National Park used to be Grand Canyon National Monument.

I didn't know that. Oh yeah, a lot of them

work that way because National Monument status can be conferred by the president and

then it later gets changed into a park by Congress.

So that recently happened just last week when Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore got upgraded

to Indiana Dunes National Park by an act of Congress.

Okay, and last year was the Pinnacles National Monument turned into Pinnacles National Park, or maybe it was two years ago.

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