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. As we release this episode, the longest government shutdown in American history is still

underway and 800,000 government workers are on furlough, including Rangers and other protectors of our

wildlife and national treasures. Those that remain on the job, mainly law enforcement Rangers, are working without paychecks,

and are facing protecting federal lands that remain open to visitors with very little support.

We thought this was an appropriate time to again highlight those Rangers and other federal

employees in the Interior Department.

We begin with a cow hand turned wildlife champion.

Here's Abigail Trape you. For many years Mark Heraldson lived as an old Western cowboy, writing a horse across the rugged landscape of Wyoming and Montana,

but instead of wrangling cattle, he tracked and captured grizzly bears.

What started as a work study job when he was 20 years old developed into a lifelong career

of studying grizzlies.

It's been a dream of mine as far as I can remember, he said.

Since he first started working with Grizzly Bears in 1976,

Mark has served as a field biologist for the US Geological Survey,

responsible for the handling and capture of bears throughout Yellowstone National Park.

He currently spearheads the interagency grizzly bear team, a group of scientists responsible

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