National Natural Landmarks at 60: Highlights from 2022

This page summarizes the National Park Service's report on the National Natural Landmarks Program's 2022 year.

May 18, 2022, marked 60 years since Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall founded the National Natural Landmarks (NNL) Program in 1962. The program recognizes nationally significant natural areas, now more than 600 of them, and supports their conservation. That conservation depends on the hundreds of public and private owners and managers who look after the sites, and the anniversary year celebrated them.

"Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man." — Stewart Udall

Celebrating the anniversary

Landmark owners, managers and partners marked the milestone across the country. Indiana's Division of Nature Preserves spent a week in July featuring on Facebook the landmarks that are also state nature preserves, reminding people they can visit them. The Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area highlighted its four Connecticut landmarks (Bartholomew's Cobble, Beckley Bog, Bingham Pond Bog and Cathedral Pines), and the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area made a video about its work with Panola Mountain in Georgia.

There were events on the ground too. Audubon offered free admission to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in southern Florida, with its 2.25-mile boardwalk through old-growth bald cypress. The Central Indiana Land Trust led a free 1.2-mile hike through Meltzer Woods, an old-growth forest southeast of Indianapolis. Lynnfield, Massachusetts, marked both the program's 60th and Lynnfield Marsh's 50th year, and Illinois celebrated International Bog Day at Volo Bog.

When the program asked for video clips, owners and managers sent in more than 80, which the Park Service's Natural Resource Office of Communications turned into an anniversary video. It went out to all 70,000 Interior Department employees and more than 700 media outlets.

Science and conservation

North and South Rivers National Natural Landmark, Massachusetts. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Where salt marshes get their mud. Research at the North and South Rivers estuary in Massachusetts, by the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, found that the sediment New England salt marshes need to keep building above sea level comes mainly from the ocean, not from rivers as had generally been thought. That matters for managing marshes, which buffer erosion and floods, store carbon, filter pollution and shelter birds, invertebrates and fish, as sea level rises.

A crayfish thought lost. Shelta Cave in Alabama became a landmark in 1971 partly for its aquatic life, including the Shelta Cave crayfish. Once seen regularly, the crayfish vanished as the cave's aquatic community collapsed. Surveys by the University of Alabama in Huntsville from late 2018 to summer 2021 found one adult female and one adult male, the first sightings in 31 years. The species is still critically imperiled, and the team has recommended long-term monitoring.

Arrigetch Peaks, Gates of the Arctic National Park, Alaska. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Tracking wear in the wilderness. With program funding, backcountry rangers at Arrigetch Peaks, one of the most visited parts of Gates of the Arctic National Park, set up monitoring and repeat photography to measure impacts in heavily used areas and set a baseline for acceptable change.

Restoring forests. At Bartholomew's Cobble in Massachusetts, a restoration project funded by a natural resource damage settlement with General Electric controlled invasive plants and planted more than 1,700 floodplain tree saplings in 2011–2013; a full census in 2020 yielded lessons published in the Natural Areas Journal. Beside Meltzer Woods, the Central Indiana Land Trust planted around 23,000 native saplings on a 35-acre field in spring 2022, and plans to add Kentucky coffeetrees grown from local seed.

The renovated boardwalk at Beaverdam Creek Swamp, Alabama. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Better trails. At Beaverdam Creek Swamp, a tupelo gum swamp in Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge, Great American Outdoors Act funding rebuilt the half-mile boardwalk, which reopened on June 15, 2022. At Amboy Crater, a volcanic cinder cone on Bureau of Land Management land in southern California, an all-women California Conservation Crew added switchbacks and an accessible viewing pavilion and restored the old trail. In Vermont, crews began a three-year rebuild of the Burrows Trail up Camel's Hump, the state's highest undeveloped summit at 4,083 feet.

Trail restoration at Amboy Crater, before, during and after. Bureau of Land Management.

Collaborations

John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum in Philadelphia, where a quarter of the 1,000-acre refuge is a landmark as Pennsylvania's largest freshwater tidal wetland, received $900,000 from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to restore Henderson Marsh. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and partners plan to cut openings in a berm and dig 13,000 feet of tidal channels so migratory fish can reach the marsh again, easing flooding and opening it for kayaking and fishing.

In California, the nonprofit Audubon Canyon Ranch keeps protecting the landmark named for it in 1968, when it was the largest known nesting area for great blue herons and great egrets on the Pacific Coast. The birds moved across Bolinas Lagoon in 2013, and the ranch now tracks them with International Bird Rescue. For the sixth summer, landmarks also collected dragonfly larvae for the nationwide Dragonfly Mercury Project.

Site visits by program staff brought partners together. At Bingham Pond Bog, a cold northern spruce bog in Connecticut, the landowner, The Nature Conservancy and the heritage area met. At Round Top Butte in Oregon, burned end to end by the South Obenchain Fire in September 2020, the Bureau of Land Management, The Nature Conservancy, Park Service scientists, the Understory Initiative and Oregon State University agreed on next steps for restoring its grasslands and savanna.

Honors and additions

• Tionesta Scenic and Research Natural Area, Pennsylvania, joined the Old-Growth Forest Network, one of 185 network forests.
• Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Pennsylvania, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in April 2022 for its place in conservation and women's history.
• Garden of the Gods, Colorado, ranked ninth among Tripadvisor's top world attractions and second in the United States.
• Savage Gulf became part of Tennessee's newest state park, which covers more than 19,000 acres including the 2,600-acre landmark.
• Drought in Texas dried the Paluxy River at Dinosaur Valley State Park, exposing 113-million-year-old tracks of the theropod Acrocanthosaurus, which researchers mapped before rain covered them again.

Dinosaur tracks on the bed of the Paluxy River at Dinosaur Valley State Park, Texas. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Anniversaries

John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, America's first urban refuge, turned 50 on June 30, 2022, and the Orono Bog Boardwalk in Maine turned 20 on August 13. And 48 sites designated by Secretary of the Interior Rogers C. B. Morton in 1972 marked their 50th year, 23 of them named in late June and 25 in late November:

Celebrating the 50th anniversary at Tinicum Marsh. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Education and outreach

Camp Borrego, a three-day outdoor school for fifth graders from underserved schools at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, closed for safety upgrades in 2017; the Anza-Borrego Foundation and the park are working to build a permanent camp with six cabins. National Natural Landmarks were even a category on Jeopardy on December 23, 2021, and the answer to the Daily Double was California, the state with the most landmarks. Through 2022 the program released new artwork every 60 days, bringing its Illustrating America's Natural Heritage collection to 14 pieces.

National Natural Landmarks Program staff at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Program staff checked in on 57 landmarks in fiscal year 2022, and for the first time in three years met in person to plan their work, at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs in South Dakota, near Cathedral Spires and Limber Pine Natural Area and Wind Cave National Park.

Sources

• National Park Service, National Natural Landmarks Program, "Landmark Highlights 2022." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/landmark-highlights-2022.htm
• Studies cited by the report: Baranes et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface (2022), https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JF006478; Shelta Cave crayfish rediscovery, Subterranean Biology, https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/79993/; Bartholomew's Cobble restoration, Natural Areas Journal 42(4).
• The report says more than 85 acres of floodplain forest were restored at Bartholomew's Cobble, and later that the site now has 10 more acres of floodplain forest; this page gives neither figure. Images from partners' social media, event flyers, a journal, a television program and photographers credited by name only are not reproduced.