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Roam School Family: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Erika
We're learning our way through America's wild spaces with our two kids, and this podcast is where we tell you the stories that didn't make it onto the visitor center signs. Why that lake is so blue it looks fake? Whose village got destroyed to make this a park? ...and why that matters. The woman who lived in a tree for two years to save it. The bacteria that thrive in boiling water. The 17-year fight to protect one forest. Every episode digs into one park's weird geology, real history, and the people who refused to give up when everyone said these places weren't worth saving. We explain things to kids without dumbing them down, because the kid who's asking "why?" seventeen times is the one who is asking exactly the right questions.New episodes drop when we visit new parks!
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- 4 days ago20 min
Yellowstone National Park | Is the supervolcano going to blow?
We read the report before we drove in. Swarms of earthquakes. The ground rising. Two hundred thousand people told to leave. A column of ash thirty miles high you could see from Denver. Then we parked the van in the middle of it.Here's the spoiler, so nobody in your back seat has to worry: no, Yellowstone is not going to erupt. But it is an active volcano, and there's no mountain anywhere, so this episode is about learning to see it. We call Dr. Kayla Iacovino, a volcanologist at the SETI Institute who makes magma in her lab with a machine she describes as a car jack on steroids — and who skipped earth science in school because she thought she was too smart for it. She tells us what's actually under the park: not a gooey pocket of lava, but a white-hot blob with the consistency of overcooked oatmeal, so stiff a spoon would stand up in it. That's why it can't go anywhere. It just breathes.Then we drive the 140-mile loop with new eyes. Mammoth, where hot water dissolves rock like sugar in tea and stacks it into a steaming white wedding cake. Lamar Valley, where we cut the engine and let a herd of 2,000-pound bison lean on the hood for warmth. Old Faithful, a kettle with the lid stuck on, and a thousand people clapping for water while Little wonders what future archaeologists will make of it. Grand Prismatic, where a ranger turns her laser thermometer around so a kid can read 160 degrees, and the rainbow turns out to be alive — a mood ring built by some of the oldest life on Earth. And Biscuit Basin, where the ground blew up two summers ago while people stood on the boardwalk, and nobody got hurt because they were standing where the sign said.By the end Big can answer the only question that matters: where's the volcano? Good for the Grand Loop between Mammoth and Old Faithful. One tip from us: don't try to do the loop in a day.LINKS: Plan your own Yellowstone trip: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/yellowstone/ All 63 parks, every episode, in one place: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/ Every destination we've visited: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/ Yellowstone Volcano Observatory monthly update — the ground-watchers from the close: https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvoThis episode features:Dr. Kayla Iacovino, experimental petrologist, SETI Institute, Carl Sagan Center for Research: https://www.seti.orgEpisodes we reference:[Detour] Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center — why you can't feed a bearLassen Volcanic National Park — Bumpass Hell
- 1 weeks ago17 min
[Detour] West Yellowstone Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center | Why can't you feed a bear?
For about fifteen years, Yellowstone built bleachers facing a garbage dump so families could watch grizzlies eat trash. The sign said Lunch Counter. For Bears Only.Twelve minutes out the west gate, Big and Little walk into a grizzly pen with a bucket of food and do the one thing you can never do inside the park. This is our Detour to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone — not a zoo, but a home for grizzlies and wolves from right around here that can't be wild anymore. Every one of them is here because a person made a mistake.Yellowstone's bear biologist Kerry Gunther tells the story: the hotel dumps, bears begging from horse-drawn wagons, and the bill — 138 bear-caused property damages and 48 injuries a year, for forty years. Then 1970: dumps closed, bear-proof lids on every can, the feeding rule finally enforced. It went wrong first (grizzlies listed as threatened in 1975), and then it worked — 138 conflicts a year down to two. Big figures out the twist before we do: none of the fixes were about bears. They fixed us.At the rail you'll meet Bo, who got into a cooler, a pickup, a tent, and finally climbed onto a car with people inside — and why this yard is the only reason he's alive. Coram, three strikes and a whole town's dog food. Then the kids go inside the actual pen, hide the food under rocks and branches so the bears have to work for it, and watch a grizzly flip a basketball-sized rock with one paw. And the job: this yard is one of only two places in the country where bear-resistant coolers and trash cans get tested — by these bears, one hour on the clock. Fewer than half pass. The sticker on your cooler came from a bear standing right about there. Odin closes with five bear-country rules for the rest of our trip, and not one of them asks the bear to do anything.Good for the drive between the Park and West Yellowstone and for any family about to sleep in bear country.LINKS: Plan your own Yellowstone trip: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/yellowstone/ All 63 parks, every episode, in one place: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/ Every destination we've visited: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/
- 2 weeks ago20 min
Grand Teton National Park | How do we find the way home?
Two nights ago we stayed in a hotel with real beds. At bedtime, both kids asked if they could go sleep in the van.This episode is about why — and about a valley where everything is moving, and knows exactly where it's going.We drive into Jackson Hole and the mountains look pasted on: a mile-high wall that tipped up along a fault ten million years ago, still growing a fingernail's width a decade, last jumped about when the pyramids were built. Out in the sage, pronghorn run 55 miles an hour because they were built to outrun a cheetah-like cat that's been extinct for ten thousand years. Every fall they walk a hundred miles south on a route with no road, the same one they've used for six thousand years — and a baby only learns it by walking it with her mother. The park is small. The migration is big. One fence with the bottom wire too low can stop a whole herd.Then the people who moved with the animals: eleven thousand years of tipis that come down in an hour and go up a hundred miles away. The 1868 promise to the Shoshone and Bannock, and the reservation lines that broke it. The fur trappers who emptied the valley of beavers, the four hundred thousand wagons on the Oregon Trail, and the Mormon families who built the most photographed barn in America in a place where the ground thaws sixty days a year.We tell the story of Grizzly 399, the bear who raised her cubs next to the highway because the thing she was actually afraid of wouldn't come near people — and who taught them to look both ways. And we meet Mardy Murie, who rode a dogsled four hundred miles at fifteen, became the first woman to graduate college in Alaska, spent her honeymoon following caribou, drove a camper van to Alaska at sixty-five, and told Congress at seventy-five that beauty is a resource. Seven of Alaska's eight national parks are on our list because of her.The day ends in a room at the Rockefeller Preserve built for sound, where Little sat criss-cross in the middle of the floor for ten minutes and just listened. Big left when the thunder got loud. Leaving is allowed.LINKS: Plan your own Grand Teton trip: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/grand-teton/All 63 parks, every episode, in one place: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/ Every destination we've visited: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/ This episode references:Pico Iyer's talk "Where Is Home?": https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_homeThe Murie Ranch at Moose, Wyoming, now part of Teton Science Schools: https://www.tetonscience.orgLaurance S. Rockefeller Preserve, Grand Teton National Park: https://www.nps.gov/grte/planyourvisit/lsr.htmHear this park from the people whose valley it is:Eastern Shoshone Tribe: https://easternshoshone.orgShoshone-Bannock Tribes: https://www.sbtribes.com
- 3 weeks ago25 min
Glacier National Park | Where did all the glaciers go?
We drove into Glacier National Park under an orange sky, and the first thing Odin asked was how smoke from fires in Oregon and Washington got all the way to Montana.It took the whole episode to answer him.We start at Lake McDonald, ten miles of lake we can't see across, and pull rocks out of the water that are red, green, and purple — ancient mud that rusted in the sun a billion and a half years ago, before any dinosaur existed. We sit in on a ranger talk and learn how every animal here solved the same problem: a winter that lasts most of the year. Bears sleep through it (and don't pee for six months). Mountain goats wear it. Pikas store it — and steal from each other. A moose grows a pound of bone out of his head every day, then drops it in the dirt.Then the rain washes the smoke out of the sky, and we drive Going-to-the-Sun Road: fifty miles, one road across the park, blasted out of a cliff by men hanging from ropes with half a million pounds of dynamite. On the dry side, things get fast. The buffalo, gone in about fifteen years. The Blackfeet, who called these mountains the Backbone of the World, pressured into selling them for gold that was never there. A railroad man named Louis Hill who wanted a national park because a national park sells train tickets — and built the Many Glacier Hotel out of logs with the bark still on.Then we meet Lisa McKeon, a USGS scientist who hikes to the glaciers every August holding a hundred-year-old photograph, looking for the exact rock the photographer stood on. We hear about the scientist who put 111 baby bull trout in a backpack with an oxygen tank and carried them five miles up a mountain to a lake cold enough to save them. And we learn the one thing a kid can do about the smoke: drown, stir, drown, feel.Ages: roughly 6–12, and the adults in the front seat. Includes an honest, kid-level conversation about climate change and wildfire — no doom, no dodging.LINKS:Plan your own Glacier trip: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/glacier/All 63 parks, every episode, in one place: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/Every destination we've visited: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/This episode features tape from:Headwaters, the podcast produced by Glacier National Park with support from the Glacier National Park Conservancy, hosted by Andrew Smith and Michael Faist: https://go.nps.gov/headwatersGlacier National Park Conservancy: https://glacier.orgHear this park from the people whose mountains they are:Sun Tours — Blackfeet-owned interpretive tours on Going-to-the-Sun Road: https://www.suntours.coNative America Speaks — the Park Service's program of talks by Blackfeet, Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai speakers: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/historyculture/native-america-speaks.htm
- Sep 13, 202629 min
Olympic National Park | Why is quiet so hard to find?
You can close your eyes. There is no such thing as an earlid.This episode is about the quietest square inch in the United States, and what it has to teach a kid whose ears take in too much. We talk with Matt Mikkelsen of Quiet Parks International about One Square Inch of Silence — the spot 3.2 miles up the Hoh River Trail that Gordon Hempton marked with a small red stone on Earth Day 2005 — and about why a quiet place and a silent place are not the same thing. We explain how the Olympic Mountains are made entirely of uplifted ocean floor with no volcano anywhere in the story, why no road crosses the middle of this park, and how trees in the Hoh grow new roots out of their own branches to drink from the soil in the canopy. We stand at Cape Flattery, the farthest northwest you can get in the continental U.S. without a boat, and go to Ozette, where a mudslide five hundred years ago buried a village so fast that the baskets kept their shape. We find out what 75 mph winds and thirty to fifty feet of snow do to a wildflower's schedule on Hurricane Ridge, and meet a marmot that lives here and nowhere else on Earth. And we get to what the episode is really about: your body is telling you the truth about a room, and you're allowed to believe it. Leaving is always allowed.Do the listening experiment in the first two minutes with us. You'll understand why by the end.Park guide: https://roamschoolfamily.com/destinations/olympic/ All episodes: https://roamschoolfamily.com/learn/podcast/ Quiet Parks International: https://quietparks.org
- Sep 1, 202619 min
North Cascades National Park | Monkeys in the mountains?!
North Cascades has more glaciers than any other national park in the lower 48... and almost nobody goes.This episode is about the strangest, most tangled national park in the country, and the question underneath all of it: when people have already rearranged a wild place, what do we owe it now?We stand in Newhalem and feel Seattle's electricity humming in our teeth and visit three dams on the Skagit River that have been running since 1917 and still supply about 20% of the city's power. We explain the 1968 compromise that made this place a national park and a recreation area at the same time, which is why the road you drive in on isn't technically in the park at all. We tell the extremely weird story of J.D. Ross, the dam-builder who lit a waterfall in colored floodlights, hauled tropical plants indoors by hand every winter, and put actual monkeys on an island in the middle of a reservoir. We look down at Diablo Lake and explain glacial flour: why the water is that impossible chalk-blue, and what happens to the color when the glaciers finish shrinking. We find out why nobody built a fish ladder here (Ross Dam is 540 feet tall, taller than the observation deck on the Space Needle) and what they do instead: they drive the salmon upriver in a truck. Every year. Forever.Then Dad cuts the boat motor on Ross Lake to explain plate tectonics: why these mountains aren't volcanoes like most of the ones we've visited, but a pile-up of ocean floor and drowned islands that rode in from far out in the Pacific and slammed into North America. That's why you can find seashell fossils on top of the peaks.At Washington Pass we get into the mountain goats: why they lick the salt off your backpack straps, why human pee wrecks alpine plants that take decades to grow back, and how about 325 goats got blindfolded, slung under helicopters, and flown here from Olympic National Park. And we talk about the grizzlies, who were approved to come home in 2024, still not here, with no date, no money, and real disagreement between tribal nations on the same river about what it means to bring back an animal that eats already-struggling salmon.The kids end up in an argument, and neither can we: if Diablo Lake shouldn't be there, but it's the most beautiful thing we saw all day...do you drain it?Best listened to: on Highway 20 between Marblemount and Winthrop, or anywhere you've got a kid in the back seat who wants to prep for the ranger station.
- Aug 6, 202626 min
Mount Rainier National Park | Who carries the load?
In this episode, we interview Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, who has stood on top of Mount Everest fifteen times and who in 2003 climbed it faster than any human being ever had. He now runs a small restaurant a mile from the park gate because he wanted his kids to have the schooling he never got.Mount Rainier is a volcano wearing a coat of ice. This episode explains what a lahar is and why kids in the valleys below this mountain practice lahar drills. We explain how a mountain gets big enough to make its own weather, what's hidden inside the summit (miles of steam-melted ice caves and the highest lake in North America, buried under 160 feet of ice), and why the Coast Salish nations call it Tahoma: mother of waters. And we talk about what's happening right now: the glaciers on this mountain are melting six times faster than their historic rate, which means the mountain my kids climb as adults will not be the one we climbed this week.Also, Ada tries to walk six miles. She has never walked anything close to six miles. Wish us luck.
- Jul 24, 202621 min
Crater Lake National Park | How do you save a lake — twice?
This episode explains how Mount Mazama collapsed into the bluest water in the world, and the native origin story of the lake. Then we tell the story of William Gladstone Steel: a fifteen-year-old kid in Kansas who read about a mysterious blue lake on his sandwich wrapper, spent fifteen years just trying to find it, and then spent seventeen more fighting to protect it — a thousand letters, one book mailed to every member of Congress, six dead bills, and finally a president willing to lean on the Speaker of the House. And we ride the trolley along Rim Drive to see what all that stubbornness bought: a lake saved, wild and beautiful, just as it was, for all future generations.Sign the kids' petition to Save the Mazama Newt: https://www.change.org/p/director-nesvik-list-the-mazama-newt-as-endangered-before-it-s-gone/Thanks to Mac Savage (https://www.youtube.com/@MacSavage503/) a documentary filmmaker and his mother Barbara Alatorre who worked for over 40 years, writing stories and preserving the history of the Klamath tribe. We are grateful for their permission to share and amplify this history. You can hear the full oral history in this video: Klamath Tribal History & Legends Part I (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHIYWCxlfMLearn more about the Klamath Tribes — the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin, whose homeland this has always been — at klamathtribes.org.Find every episode, our travel maps, and more at roamschoolfamily.com.
About Roam School Family
We're learning our way through America's wild spaces with our two kids, and this podcast is where we tell you the stories that didn't make it onto the visitor center signs. Why that lake is so blue it looks fake? Whose village got destroyed to make this a park? ...and why that matters. The woman who lived in a tree for two years to save it. The bacteria that thrive in boiling water. The 17-year fight to protect one forest. Every episode digs into one park's weird geology, real history, and the people who refused to give up when everyone said these places weren't worth saving. We explain things to kids without dumbing them down, because the kid who's asking "why?" seventeen times is the one who is asking exactly the right questions.New episodes drop when we visit new parks!
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