The great American road trip is in peril

A climate journalist recounts a 9,000-mile family road trip through 14 national parks that repeatedly collided with wildfires, including the Cottonwood Fire that burned 94,000 acres in Utah and the Babylon Fire that grew from 300 to 16,000 acres overnight near Canyonlands. The family rerouted repeatedly using the Watch Duty tracking app and carried N-95 masks.

The piece notes billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. have climbed from an average of 3.3 per year in the 1980s to about 19 per year over the last decade, with 23 such disasters in 2025 alone and 12 more already recorded by mid-2026.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.