WEBCAM WILDERNESS

National Parks Offer E-Tours To Virtual Visitors

By Headwaters News, 3-14-06

Long gone are the days when families loaded up the wood-paneled station wagon and embarked on a week-long visit to one of West's national parks.

Now families who can afford it board jets to vacation homes or sandy foreign shores. Other, less-wealthy families take short trips, and with the advent of more mobile families, use their vacation time to travel cross-country to visit family members.

But there is another way to travel these days. An Associated Press story in the Boulder Daily Camera reports on efforts of national parks to use the World Wide Web to attract new virtual visitors, and perhaps recruit another generation of folks who appreciate the natural wonders within the nation's parks.

Yellowstone National Park has been offering eTrips through its Windows Into Wonderland program on its web site since 2001. The first etrip offers a history of national parks. Other trips look at fire ecology, grizzly bears and wolves, among other topics.

Glacier National Park's web site offers eHikes, and continues to offer photos and webcam videos to e-visitors.

Glacier is also experimenting with Podcasts that will allow people to carry in their pockets for use in the park as an interpretive guide.

Critics of the parks' virtual tours say that national parks need to be experienced firsthand, not via electronic images. But park officials say the e-tours allow people who may never be financially or physically able to hike the parks to see the natural beauty. And that those folks may join the ranks of supporters of national parks who believe their natural beauty is worth protecting.

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