Tracking our Junior Ranger badge collection across the National Park Service
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NewPipestone National Monument protects the sacred red stone — catlinite — that Plains nations have quarried by hand for centuries to carve the bowls of their sacred pipes. It is the only place where that quarrying has never stopped, and it is where White Buffalo Woman is remembered...
NewWind Cave National Park holds about 95% of the world's known boxwork — and it is a cave that breathes, exhaling and inhaling through its one natural entrance as the pressure changes. To the Lakota it is Maka Oniye, the breathing earth, the door their people came through...
Yellowstone National Park sits atop one of the largest active volcanoes on Earth — a supervolcano whose last great eruption, 640,000 years ago, left a caldera 45 miles wide and 10,000 hydrothermal features still breathing today. Here's how we earned the Junior Ranger badge with the girls.
Big Bend National Park is named for the broad, sweeping bend of the Rio Grande as it carves the Texas–Mexico border — a fossil-and-volcano country of Chihuahuan Desert, sky-island Chisos Mountains, and a river that draws its own line. Here's how we returned with the girls two decades after our first visit and earned the Junior Ranger badge.
Guadalupe Mountains National Park tells the story of a 260-million-year-old Permian Sea, a fossil reef now standing as the highest peaks in Texas — and the last stronghold of Mescalero Apache freedom. Here's how we visited with the girls and earned the Junior Ranger badge.
It's not actually sand — White Sands sits on the world's largest gypsum dunefield, crystallized from an ancient inland sea. Here's how we finally made it at sunset, earned Junior Ranger badges, and why you shouldn't rush this one.
We are an expert van life family with kids and pets, sharing our love of nature through National Park Junior Ranger trips and unforeseen adventures at every turn.
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