A Light in the Dark

When researching park stories, Danielle LaRock doesn’t just look for the highlights, she said. She wants the “highlights, lowlights and everything in between.” This philosophy has guided LaRock and her bestie, Cassie Yahnian, through more than 315 episodes of their popular podcast, “National Park After Dark,” which celebrates the obscure, macabre and paranormal. “Enjoy the view,” they say with every sign-off, “but watch your back.”

The podcast origin story goes back to 2016, when the women were working as veterinary technicians at a practice in New Hampshire. They started adventuring in the nearby White Mountains and, while hiking, discovered a mutual interest in the history of their surroundings — the darker the better. The more they learned about the places they were exploring, LaRock said, “the richer our experience was when we were there.” They took note of the odd and interesting nuggets they happened across on their travels, whether those came from dedication plaques, gift store offerings or park staff. “Every single time we go to a national park,” Yahnian said, “we go to the visitor center, and we stop at the information desk and just talk to the rangers.”

Around Halloween 2020, when the women were living on opposite coasts, LaRock floated an idea by her friend. They’d been swapping spooky and startling outdoor tales by text for months, she said, why not turn their conversations into a podcast? So that January, with no real experience to speak of, that’s exactly what they did.

“We bought $25 microphones and plugged them into our computer and hoped for the best,” Yahnian recalled. They wanted the podcast to feel “like friends around a campfire telling each other stories,” she said, so they settled on a format with one person narrating and the other reacting in real time. Then they started mining books, park materials, newspapers, magazines (including National Parks) and library archives for inspiration. Within a few months, after featuring a double murder in Shenandoah, a climbing disaster in Denali and mummies in Mammoth Cave, they branched out, covering anything they deemed “dark,” from mysteries to mutinies.

Over the years, the friends, both 34, have transported their listeners to public lands around the world on journeys brimming with discovery — and, yes, death. They’ve covered World War II plane crashes in the wilds of Alaska, ghostly haunts in Harpers Ferry, the mauling of a marathon runner in Valles Caldera, the torturing of women suffragettes at a prison in Virginia, and the unfortunate demise of trailblazer Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to receive a pilot’s license. And while it’s usually just the two of them trading tales and banter, they do host the occasional guest, from National Park Service personnel to survivors of wilderness ordeals.

“National Park After Dark” isn’t the only park-focused podcast on the air these days. Listeners can tune in to any number of newsy, travel-based, science-forward and true-crime park pods, including NPCA’s own award-winning production, “The Secret Lives of Parks.” At first blush, the niche carved out by Yahnian and LaRock might seem, well, niche, but the friends’ quirky content and natural camaraderie has fostered a surprisingly broad fan base. By the end of the first year, their circle of listeners had grown so steadily that they were able to transition out of their full-time jobs and devote themselves to developing the podcast. “We’re really happy that our little weird interest that we thought was kind of just exclusively shared between us is not obscure at all,” LaRock said. (It is, in fact, shared by their 600,000 or so subscribers.)

Despite the sometimes graphic, often sensitive content matter, the duo has an unexpectedly wholesome aim. “We want to educate people on the outdoors and give them new appreciation for the places that they recreate in and the wildlife that they share spaces with and the people that came before them,” LaRock said.

In the case of one of their more popular stories, a two-parter about the night in 1967 when a pair of Glacier National Park grizzly bears killed two people in unrelated incidents, Yahnian said the intent behind their retelling was to add context and help listeners understand, viscerally, the importance of bear safety. You can get the backcountry safety spiel so many times as to be inured to it, Yahnian said. “But when you hear about why it’s bad to feed the bears because these two people were mauled,” she continued, “then you retain the information.”

The friends’ deft handling of the sensational is one of the things that convinced author Randi Minetor to sit down for an episode last September entitled “Death She Wrote.” Minetor’s series of books cataloging the various ways people have expired in parks frequently serves as a jumping-off point for the podcasters. Indeed, LaRock leaned on Minetor’s “Death in Acadia” book for the part of the inaugural episode that detailed the 1977 unsolved murder of Leslie Spellman. (The young woman had set out from Vermont with the intention of hitchhiking to Bar Harbor and was found bludgeoned to death a day later, steps from the Maine park.) “They really want to tell a good story, but they want to tell an accurate one,” Minetor said.

Over the years, LaRock and Yahnian’s willingness to shine a light into shadowy corners has led them to dabble in some polemical waters, from the recent gutting of the Park Service workforce to the preponderance of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Though a few listeners have bristled at what one described as “woke nonsense,” the majority of fans have remained faithful to the pair. “Ride or die for these women,” wrote one reviewer, who went on to praise “National Park After Dark” for uplifting “voices that have been silenced throughout history.”

In 2023, the podcast partners decided to take the host-listener relationship to the next level. They teased a custom park trip to Alaska, complete with local guides, curated adventures in Denali and Kenai Fjords national parks, and the company of Yahnian and LaRock themselves. Spots for the weeklong adventure were snapped up in about four minutes. “The first time it happened, we were blown away,” Yahnian said.

The now-regular trips have taken them and their fans sandboarding in Great Sand Dunes National Park, hiking through Incan archaeological sites in Peru, jouncing along on a safari in South Africa and more. This November, around 10 lucky souls will be headed to Hawaii to explore a 500-year-old lava tube at Hawai‛i Volcanoes National Park, snorkel in Honaunau Bay and sample local brews at a coffee farm. Aside from the obvious perk of touring amazing places, LaRock and Yahnian love how the trips help them connect with their fans. “We’re always talking at people, and they know so much about us,” LaRock said. “We want to know about them and their experiences, and so we do a lot of listening.”

Nursing student Danielle Hartzler had only tuned in to a couple of podcast episodes before she found herself flying to Madagascar in 2023 with a dozen or so avid listeners. Since then, the Colorado resident has explored multiple continents and parks with Yahnian and LaRock. She credits the hosts with creating a community of “genuine, kind people who care about each other and the outdoors.”

These days, it’s not uncommon for “National Park After Dark” travelers to meet up on their own time for their own adventures, no hosts required. Hartzler, for example, has skied in Jackson and sipped pisco sours in Flagstaff with friends she met on the Peru trip. “I kind of feel like these proud parents,” Yahnian said. “Like our kids are getting along, and they’re going out into the world together.”

Curiously, given their fascination with all things unexplained, the two have yet to have a spine-tingling encounter of their own. “There’s been a couple places that we’ve had some creepy vibes,” LaRock said, noting their preference for staying in centuries-old park hotels. But so far, nothing has out-and-out spooked them. “When I tell you I am desperate for that,” she said, “I am desperate for that.”

Not that either woman fears running out of podcast material. “The stories are there,” LaRock said. “Sometimes they’re just waiting for someone to pay attention to them.”