We exist to protect America's public lands.

The short version

It started with a camera and a question

We're Will and Jim Pattiz. We've spent our entire adult lives exploring and showcasing America's public lands, and we built More Than Just Parks to make sure they're still here, still wild, and better off than we found them.

In 2014 we packed up a camera, drove west, and started filming America's national parks, wondering what would happen if people could actually see what they were losing. We slept in our car. We filmed at dawn. We froze our hands off in places most people will never visit.

The films went viral. Millions of views, congressional screenings, partnerships with the National Park Service. The kind of reach we never expected.

The decade since has given us many lifetimes' worth of these places. Seasons of fieldwork in every corner of the system, and close working relationships with virtually every federal land management agency in the country. We spearheaded Your Forests Your Future, a national awareness campaign for the U.S. Forest Service. We know these places intimately. Which means we know exactly what the stakes are.

But views don't save land. So we built the most detailed national park resource on the internet and a weekly dispatch that now reaches 26,000+ readers.

The advocacy work is newer. As the threats to these places turned real, we built the Threatened Public Lands Map and the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard to track every active threat and every vote. When the places we love come under attack, we don't look away.

And we're both dads now. That changes the math on everything. Leaving these places better off than we found them isn't a mission statement anymore. It's what we owe our kids.