Tourism in the Early National Parks. With Nicolle Southwick and Josh Van Veldhuizen

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When the trail guides Hopum and Lopim led Frank Hutchings over the crest of a hill and within sight of the towering granite formations of Yosemite Valley, Hutchings stopped in his tracks: “as the scene opened in full view before us,” he wrote later, “we were almost speechless with wondering admiration, at its wild and…

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Here’s a great resource on U.S. national parks: shapefiles for park boundaries. Grab the .zip file if you want to work with the file in your own GIS environment. Image above: a quick overlay of the file over OCM landscape. Hop to it: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/national-park-boundariesf0a4c

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I’m part of a class project to create some new interpretive material for Fort Spokane and other sites around Lake Roosevelt. It can be a challenging space to research, because it brings together a lot of topics that don’t get very careful treatment in the written record: Native Americans children’s lives in the boarding school…

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In this snippet, Archie Camp talks about the challenges of farming in the Washington Territory. Listen to the rest of his oral history here. Music: Mariposa by Flavia & the Motonets, licensed under a CC-BY-NC license, and Squirrel Patrol by Phil Reavis, under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

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This morning I had the pleasure of riding an hour out of town with a crew from the archives, so we could all creep into a hot, low-ceilinged attic full of boxes we weren’t allowed to touch. The attic was a little-used archival collection for a national park, and though we didn’t have legal custody of the…

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