National Parks

When Seth Zaharias learned that the federal government’s partial shutdown would affect services at Joshua Tree National Park, he knew just what he needed to do. “On day one, I drove straight to Walmart and bought a hundred dollars’ worth of toilet paper,” he says. “Then I started making calls...

In the early 1860s, a handful of Mormon pioneers in Utah settled near the mouth of a deep, dark canyon carved by the Virgin River. The Paiute people who’d inhabited the area for generations called the canyon Mukuntuweap, which may have meant “straight canyon,” given its sheer walls. The Mormon...

What do you see when you look at a desert? An empty space? A forbidding wasteland? For some, the sun is too bright, the air too dry, and the cactus too thorny. Others might find the desert a nice place to visit, but no place to live.

But for some people—desert people—the space and the...

Martin Luther King Jr. was once just a kid—a bright, studious boy, but not too serious to chase his sisters around the backyard of the family home, a tidy Victorian at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. Before he became a leader of the civil rights movement, he shared a bedroom with his younger...