There are only six days a year when all the national parks are freeand this Sunday, August 4, is one of them. If youre close to a park, grab your backpack and slather on the sunscreen because this is your weekend to embrace nature.

　　You may be wondering whats special about August 4. Its the anniversary of the Great American Outdoors Act of 2020, which provided funding to help the parks improve infrastructure and expand their recreational offerings. A fund set up with the act (created by energy development revenue) gives the parks $1.3 billion a year for five years to significantly improve them. Many of the parks had a backlog of repair work and maintenance.

　　For a few quick examples, that fund helped build a new seawall to replace the deteriorating 1954 bulkhead in the Flamingo area of Floridas Everglades National Park, creating a new maintenance building at Maines Acadia National Park to replace unsafe old ones, repairing the road between Badger Pass and Glacier Point in Californias Yosemite National Park and replacing the bridge over McDonald Creek in Montanas Yellowstone National Park.

　　Back to you and your backpack. The free day applies to parks that usually charge admissionthere are many that do not. But it also causes a bit of a crinkle since some national parks dont charge admission but are inaccessible without paying some other fee. A great example of this is the prison island Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Although it is free to enter every day, the ferry that transports you to the island is not, so the free day doesnt really apply here. This page lists all the parks participating in the free day.

　　Busy on Sunday and cant get to the park? You can get into any national park any day for free if you can bring along a fourth grader in the car. Just dont let them drive. The remaining free days for this year will be September 28 and November 11.