Located in southeastern Nevada and northwestern Arizona, the Lake Mead National Recreation Area offers a remarkable contrast of desert and water, mountains and canyons. This popular park offers a full range of water-based recreational activities, as well as the opportunity for hiking and wilderness exploration. I hope these Lake Mead photos will inspire you to visit this outstanding park in the near future.

Park visitors can honor and remember the citizen-soldier past and present by being part of the Star-Spangled Banner Weekend at Maryland's Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine. The three-day event, from September 12 to 14, will feature parades, fireworks, a military encampment of over 100 War of 1812 reenactors, a symbolic ship-to-shore bombardment, noted authors, and a patriotic band concert. The Star-Spangled Banner Weekend commemorates Defenders’ Day, Baltimore’s oldest holiday, which honors the successful defense of the city from British attack and the writing of the National Anthem in 1814. It has been a state holiday since 1908.

In preparation for the upcoming tidepool season (October through June), California’s Cabrillo National Monument will hold an introductory orientation and training conference for new and returning Tidepool Protection, Education and Restoration Program (TPERP) volunteers on September 13 and 27. Field experts, monument staff and volunteers will introduce new volunteers to the fauna, flora, geology and ecology of the beautiful, wild coastal environment of Cabrillo's rocky intertidal, which has been called the best protected rocky intertial area on the Southern California mainland coast. Volunteers will learn to provide informal interpretation of tidepool resources to families, children and the general public. Contact the park for further information.

On this day in 1992, legislation was signed establishing the Marsh-Billings National Historical Park in Woodstock, VT. The 555-acre park was the boyhood home of George Perkins Marsh, the author of Man and Nature, an important mid-19th-century book that helped to inspire the early conservation movement. Renamed Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, it is Vermont’s only national park unit other than the section of the Appalachian Trail that passes through the state