Parking It : Magazines: Staffers from Outside focus again on America’s first national park, Yellowstone.

Long before Yogi and Boo Boo began snatching lunches at a parody park called Jellystone, Americans had established Yellowstone National Park as the quintessential family vacation spot. With the 1988 fires and subsequent discussion of the park’s national resource management plan, Yellowstone has been mentioned more often in news stories than travel stories of late.

Driven partly by a sense of nostalgia and partly by an interest in the burning environmental issues the park has come to symbolize, a caravan of staffers from Outside magazine invaded the park last summer. Rushing about with cameras and note pads, they captured many of the infinite facets of America’s “first and finest” national park.

The result of their efforts is an inspired, multifeature section on Yellowstone, which the editors aptly declare “a vast, wondrous, dumb, transcendent place that is best defined by a spirit of innocence.”

The Yellowstone section showcases the talent that has made Outside a prominent voice of the baby boom over the years: “The Joys of Pre-Play” is top-notch Tim Cahill; author Dean Krakell’s travelogue through the grizzly-rich backcountry is enough to make yuppies lust for every lightweight backpacking gadget advertised in the magazine.

And the re-examination of the management issue by contributing editor Alston Chase, who deserves some credit for sparking the whole debate with his book “Playing God in Yellowstone,” offers hope, as well as concern, that the park will survive. “That a place so badly treated could remain beautiful is a gift to savor,” he writes.

Anyone who doubts the beauty of the place need only look at the full-page mock-postcard photographs that illustrate the package.

REQUIRED READING

* In 1965, Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson dazzled Life magazine readers with his photographs of a developing human fetus. Some consider them the most remarkable shots ever to appear in the magazine. Now the August, 1990, Life brings readers even closer to creation, with a series of Nilsson photographs capturing the penetration of the ovum by a sperm and subsequent evolution of the new organism.

Life’s editors call his photographs from 25 years ago “impossible, almost sacred.” The new shots, done with scanning electron microscopes and endoscopes, are even more awe-inspiring. They will certainly give pause to anyone involved with the abortion debate. In an accompanying profile, however, Nilsson, 67, steadfastly refuses to express his own view on when, in its spectrum of infinitely small changes, a cell becomes meaningful as a human life. Perhaps, he suggests, “it starts with a kiss.”

* Abraham Lincoln did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Will George Bush do it? “At two critical moments in American history, the incumbent President chose to dump his incumbent vice president and changed the course of history,” John F. Rothmann writes in the Summer issue of Quayle Quarterly. The clear implication is that Bush should do the same--a bold editorial position for a magazine that would not exist without J. Danforth Quayle.

* Americans seem to have embraced environmentalism in a big way lately. Yet Walden Pond, the inspiration for a man who might be credited with injecting a conservation ethic into the American consciousness, has become a sort of small-scale Coney Island. Now Mary Sherwood, 84, is on a crusade to save Walden. Her efforts are reported in the July-August E magazine.

* The go-go 1980s are gone gone and now the post-mortems are rolling in. In the July 23 New Yorker, Connie Bruck examines the emblematic merger of Shearson-Lehman and American Express and the career of Wunderkind Peter Cohen, who rose and fell with the decade.

* Spin magazine’s August retrospective on 35 years of rock ‘n’ roll has plenty of interesting art and tidbits. Perhaps the most wistful bit of nostalgia, though, is titled “Love Songs . . . 35 Punk Anthems of Peace, Love and Understanding.” Most of the song names are unprintable in this family paper. But the marginally acceptable include No. 3 “Kill the Hippies” by the Deadbeats; No. 4, “Kill the Bee Gees” by Accident; No. 5, “Kill Yourself” by the Lewd; No. 7, “Slash Your Face,” by the Dogs; No. 8, “Baby You’re So Repulsive” by Crime; and No. 16, “Ballad of Extreme Hate,” by Halo of Flies.

* There are more than 500 film studies programs in colleges nationwide. Are the graduates more likely to become successful Hollywood moguls than the uneducated valet at South Coast Plaza? Maybe yes, maybe no, is the sage response of the August American Film, the magazine of the American Film Institute, which turns out its own share of aspiring Scorseses.

* Statistics are still on womens’ side: They are not likely to contract the AIDS virus from sexual activity. But some do. And because the statistics are on their side, because they are not in one of the risk groups that has been decimated by the disease, the cruelty of AIDS expresses itself with renewed clarity. The July 30 People Weekly takes a compelling, compassionate look at women who got AIDS from husbands, lovers, and assailants--as well as women who got the disease from blood transfusions and infected needles.

ESOTERICA

* You will not learn how to kill slugs. You will not learn how to mulch. What you will learn if you read Green Prints is that it may be possible to hear corn growing, that for some, a garden, with its variety of textures, restores appreciation for “the delicacy of touch” and that at least one old woman finds humility in her garden. “For in my garden,” she writes, “I work with a force far stronger than I. When I realize that flowers absorb color and perfume from within a dimension beyond my understanding, my belief in God is strengthened.” A small but potent publication, Green Prints bills itself as “the literary quarterly that chases the soul of gardening.” ($10 a year, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, N.C. 28730)