Renee and Dan take on a chilling REDACTED

It’s not just silence — it’s something older than sound. Stand on the rim of a mile-deep canyon as sunlight crawls across stone that remembers a time before life had legs, and climb into cliff rooms where hands shaped a life that still speaks. In this final episode of our series, Renee and Dan follow rivers through red rock, explore Mesa Verde’s ancient masonry, and listen to the people who’ve lived these places long before they were parks.

From Theodore Roosevelt’s proclamations to dam battles, from the removal and slow return of the Havasupai to the modern fights over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, this episode traces how beauty and politics collide in the Southwest. It’s a story about scale — geological, spiritual, historical — and about who gets to tell the land’s story. Tune in to Time Tellers for a journey through cliffs, controversy, and the echoes that bind past and future.

October 26, 1825: a packet boat slides out of Buffalo, Governor DeWitt Clinton pours Lake Erie into the Atlantic, and a ribbon of water reshapes a continent. This episode sails the Erie Canal’s dramatic voyage — from the feverish hand‑digging and deadly swamps to the politics that branded it “Clinton’s Folly” and the jubilant Wedding of the Waters that proved its power.

Along the towpath we meet the immigrants and farmers who dug the locks, hear the silenced voices of Indigenous nations whose lands were cut through, and follow the canal’s unintended legacy of disease, invasive species, and environmental upheaval. Two centuries on, the bicentennial voyage retraces that route, inviting listeners to witness how ingenuity and sacrifice can both forge and fracture a region — and why that living history still matters today.

Stand ankle-deep in a cypress swamp as mist rises and something moves in the reeds — this episode opens in the thick, humming heart of the Southeast and pulls you into a landscape that feels alive and full of secrets.

We hike the Great Smoky Mountains at sunrise, paddle the Everglades’ river of grass, creep along Congaree’s cathedral of trees, and visit the isolated ruins of Fort Jefferson. Along the way we meet Cherokee and Seminole histories, New Deal builders, displaced families, and the conservationists who fought to save these places — each story layered into the land like rings in a tree.

Listen as the parks reveal their contradictions: refuge and removal, healing and memory. By the episode’s end you won’t just know these places — you’ll feel their echoes, their resilience, and the quiet that keeps telling time.

Step into a vast, wind-carved landscape where geysers huff like old engines, glaciers whisper their slow retreat, and redwoods stand like stone columns holding fog in their branches. In Episode 3, hosts Renee and Dan lead you from Yellowstone’s boiling, bison-strewn plains through Glacier’s alpine drama and Olympic’s dripping rainforests to the cathedral hush of the redwoods, tracing each park’s breathtaking sights and the human stories tangled around them.

Beyond the postcard views are layered histories of displacement and resilience: the Tukadika and Blackfeet whose lives were erased, the cavalry who once policed Yellowstone, and the railway and logging interests that shaped Glacier and Olympic. Hear how the return of wolves rewove whole ecosystems, how climate change is carving away glaciers before our eyes, and how tribes, scientists, and visitors are insisting these places tell truer stories.

Listen for the textures of place — the snap of a glacier, the long shadow of a beeched fir, the distant howl that altered an ecosystem — and discover why wilderness is never just a backdrop but a living, contested, and evolving story of people and land.

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.