HELENA – Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced funding for 110 projects in national parks across the country as part of the National Park Centennial Challenge to help prepare for the 100th anniversary of national parks in 2016.
Yellowstone National Park’s Centennial Challenge programs have nearly $1.6 million in funding, half of which was donated to the Yellowstone Park Foundation.
Yellowstone’s projects include $918,000 to document environmental relationships among microbial species in the park, $265,000 for an online science learning center and $240,000 to catalog and house 40,000 artifacts in the Yellowstone Research Center.
Yellowstone also has a $160,460 “No Child Left Inside,” initiative for park programs to reach out to school groups, park officials said.
Glacier National Park is slated to receive $490,000, half of which was raised by the Glacier National Park Fund. About $350,000 of that will be spent preparing the park for its own centennial celebration in 2010.
Kempthorne announced the $51.5 million initiative Thursday in Washington, D.C., including almost $27 million in private funding. He arrived at the event in a bright red 1936 Ford bus trucked in from Glacier National Park.