Wilderness News Online

National Parks are getting a lot of buzz these days.

Thanks to the promotion for and reaction to Ken Burns’ latest PBS series The National Parks:  America’s Best Idea, there’s hardly a media outlet that’s not talking about parks of one sort or another.

Minnesota Public Radio got in the act today with an in-depth piece on Voyageurs National Park.  You can read the MPR story or listen to the audio of it HERE.

Voyageurs, of course, is Minnesota’s only National Park.  As the MPR story notes, the 218,000 acre park on the Canadian border near International Falls was established in 1975, but has never drawn visitors in the numbers that most envisioned.

The original land procurement for the park and the lack of economic impact on area communities helped raise tension between park supporters and local leaders in the past.  As Wilderness News reported HERE in the spring of 2008, however, long-standing tensions between the park and locals have lessened in recent years as city, county, and park officials attempt to work together to draw visitors to Voyageurs.

Photo by Ed Lombard of the National Park Service.