The America's National Parks Podcast is brought to you by L. L. L. Bine is a proud partner of the National Park Foundation. L. L. Bine and N. P.S. Shera believed that every community should have the opportunity and resources to experience the joy of the outdoors together.

Through this partnership, they're not only helping people find their parks. They're helping protect, restore,

and improve parks across the US. If it's outside, L.L. Bean is all in.

Be an outsider with L.L. Bean. Mountains that tower over beaches.

Mountains that tower over beaches.

Temperate rainforests, ice fields, tidewater glaciers, and marine depths welcome the visitors that make the trek to this off the beaten path destination.

These habitats provide homes for mountain goats, moose, shorebirds, salmon, and bears.

But the easiest way to get around in this national park is not by foot.

Nearly 1,200 miles of shoreline curve around inlets and islands, and one endangered animal

has thrived in this environment, swimming here to feed for the summer, before returning

to the tropical waters near Mexico and Hawaii every winter.

I'm Jason Epperson and this week on America's National Parks,

the Humpback Whales of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The Scientists have been studying humpback whales in Alaska's Glacier Bay since 1985.

The humpback monitoring program is used to figure out how many whales there are in the park and where they spend their time.

Park researchers track the whale population over the years, and they've found that each year there are slightly more whales than the year before.

Telling individual whales apart is easier than it looks.

Humpback whale tails are dark gray with splotches of white color, and this pattern acts like a fingerprint.

As the whale surface, researchers can take photos of the underside of each tail and use the pattern to determine which whale it is.

They'll also take notes on which whales are eating and where they're spending the most of their time.

All this information is saved so that Park can follow individual whales year after year.

About 740 individual humpback whales have been identified in the park since 1973.

Some whales are seen every summer and one holds the record for being the longest documented

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