Join Renee and Dan on a brisk, intimate tour through the Northeast’s packed pockets of history and wildness: Acadia’s granite coasts and carriage roads, Saratoga’s decisive fields where a young nation proved itself, and Gettysburg’s haunted ridges where Lincoln reshaped a country in two minutes. The episode moves like a walk through layered time, from Wabanaki canoes to Gilded Age benefactors, battlefield drama, and the quiet power of memory.

With sharp storytelling and lived-in voices, the hosts reveal surprising twists — wealthy conservationists who saved the land, a hero who later became a traitor, and native stories finally being reclaimed — and ask what we choose to remember when we protect a place. Listen for sunrise on Cadillac Mountain, the creak of carriage roads, and the whispers that linger in fields where history was forged.

From horse-drawn carriages on Pennsylvania Avenue to locked museum gates in modern Washington, this episode traces the unlikely history of government shutdowns — a story that begins as procedural quibbles and becomes national crisis. We follow the 1884 Anti-Deficiency Act, the 1980 opinion that introduced “shutdowns,” and the dramatic standoffs of the 1990s, 2013, 2018–2019 and today, revealing how political brinkmanship turns into real hardship for federal workers, travelers, and small businesses.

Through vivid scenes, firsthand accounts, and sharp historical turns, the hosts unpack how a technical budget fight morphs into headlines, furloughs, and stalled research — and why the public often pays the price. Tuned to the lives of a furloughed park ranger, an air traffic controller, and scientists mid-experiment, this episode turns legislative procedure into intimate human stories, showing how each shutdown reverberates far beyond the Capitol’s closed doors.

Music. A river you can't hear has been carving a poem into stone for longer than human memory — and two hosts are perched a little too close to the rim to keep from making you feel the vertigo. In this first episode of a five-part series, Dan and Renee pull you into the origin story of America’s national parks: the watercolor pitch that sold Yellowstone to Congress, the messy reality that followed, and the unforgettable campfire where John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt sketched a new idea of public nature.

We move from cinematic beginnings to hard truths — the paradox of the Organic Act that promises both protection and public enjoyment, the Army patrolling geysers, grand lodges rising with the rails, and the displacements of Indigenous peoples whose lives were rewritten by park lines. The episode stitches together personalities, policy fights, and on-the-ground drama: poachers, dams, wolf reintroductions, Mission 66, and the legal tools that have acted as both brakes and accelerators for conservation.

By the end you’ll understand why parks are less monuments than living contracts between generations — fragile, imperfect, and fiercely worth defending. It’s history told like a trail story, full of tension, regret, awe, and a call to show up. Join us for the journey and bring your park story; these are places meant to be shared.