Date: April 16, 2015
Contact: Bruce Rowe, 219-395-1609
National Park Week 2015 Encourages Everyone To Find Your Park
INDIANA DUNES NATIONAL LAKESHORE – Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore joins other national parks and their partners across the country to encourage everyone to find their park and share their park stories online at FindYourPark.com. Launched by the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation, Find Your Park is a public awareness and education campaign celebrating the 100th 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.
“Find Your Park” is also the theme for this year’s National Park Week, April 18 – 26. The week gets started at the national lakeshore with a Stewardship Day at the Heron Rookery on April 18, from 9:00 am – noon. Volunteer to help remove invasive plants along the trail. Following the morning of work, enjoy a ranger-led hike along the same trail at 1:00 pm and see one of the best spring wildflower displays in the area. On April 19, there will be a ranger-led hike on the West Beach Dune Succession Trail on from 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm and then a Cowles Bog Geocache Hike from 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm. National Park Week wraps up with the annual Green Gary Celebration on April 25, from 10:00 am – 3:00 pm. This free, family-oriented event takes place at the national lakeshore’s Paul H. Douglas Center and features hikes, kid’s activities and guest speakers throughout the day. Commenting on National Park Week, national lakeshore superintendent Paul Labovitz said, “Consider visiting both Indiana Dunes and our newest national park, Pullman National Monument in Chicago, and enjoy your National Parks.”
Visit www.NationalParkWeek.org to learn more about how you can join parks, programs, and partners in celebrating National Park Week across the country. For more information about programs at the national lakeshore, contact the visitor center’s information desk at 219-395-1882.
www.nps.gov/indu
Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is part of the National Park Service. More than 20,000 National Park Service employees care for America’s 407 national parks and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities. Learn more at www.nps.gov.
