Find Your Park!

National Park Week 2015 Encourages Everyone To Find Your Park

San Juan Island National Historical Park joins parks, programs and partners across the country to encourage everyone to find their park and share their stories online at FindYourPark.com. Launched March 30 by the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation, Find Your Park is a public awareness and education campaign celebrating the milestone centennial anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016 and setting the stage for its second century of service.

Find Your Park invites the public to see that a national park can be more than a place — it can be a feeling, a state of mind, or a sense of American pride. Beyond vast landscapes, the campaign highlights historical, urban, and cultural parks, as well as the National Park Service programs that protect, preserve and share nature, culture, and history in communities nationwide.

“Find Your Park” is also the theme for this year’s National Park Week, April 18 – 26. 

A BioBlitz is a unique combination of taxonomic inventory, public outreach, and science education. At its core, the BioBlitz is species inventory in which teams of volunteers, each led by an expert scientist, find, identify, and photograph as many species as possible within a 24-hour period. This snapshot view helps us look at many different habitats over the same time period, and better understand what lives in the park. This year’s focus will be on amphibians and pollinators, though the event is open to any taxonomic interest. “We hope our island neighbors and visitors will join us for this exciting new event in the park,” said Lee Taylor, park superintendent. “In fact, we’re counting on it.”

The park, in conjunction with the San Juan County Land Bank and in celebration of National Poetry Month, will host a “Poetry Trail” on the 2.5-mile South Beach trail loop at American Camp. Ten poems that reflect the beauty and broader meanings of the park will be posted on signs at key spots along the prairie and rocky coastline. Highlight of the month will be a guided poetry walk featuring celebrated Seattle poet, Paul Nelson, author of The Time Before Slaughter, an epic poem that explores the conflict between American Indians and European settlers in Puget Sound in the 1850s. Nelson is currently working on a similar poem about the Pig War and will share some of what he has learned over the years through verse along the trail. Nelson’s walk is scheduled for 1:00 pm, Saturday April 11, meeting in the American Camp visitor center.

Visit www.NationalParkWeek.org to learn more about how you can join parks, programs, and partners in celebrating National Park Week across the country.

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