Conor Knighton is dedicated to helping the National Park Service (NPS) celebrate its centennial. By the end of 2016, the "CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent will have visited all 59 of the parks as part of his bi-monthly series “On the Trail.” From seeing the first sunrise of the year in Acadia National Park to exploring the implications of increased visitation in Zion National Park, Knighton is highlighting stories from NPS sites around the country in honor of the Park Service’s 100th year.

But national parks are not all forests and mountains, so we caught up with him to learn about the cultural and historical resources being preserved in some of America’s most picturesque locations.

How did you get the idea for the series “On the Trail?”

Sometime last year I’d seen some mention of 2016 being the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. So I started to think, well that would be a cool piece to do for "CBS Sunday Morning." I don’t know what came over me but I was like, maybe it not just a piece, maybe it’s a series of pieces. So that’s what I pitched to my bosses in New York, and we launched “On the Trail” earlier this year.

All year long, every other Sunday, I’ll be doing a piece that’s set in and around a different national park or sometimes a series of parks. On New Year’s Day I started the year by hiking up to Cadillac Mountain at Acadia National Park, seeing the first rays of sun that hit the United States. Since then I’ve been working my way south, and west, and all over the place, often trying to find the type of story that wouldn’t necessarily be the video at the visitor center, but rather an interesting, unique angle about each park.

People have long heard about the natural grandeur of the national parks, but are there historic or cultural resources that visitors have access to?

Hot Springs National Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, is a park that really doesn’t fit the stereotype of what you think of when you think of national parks. It’s mostly this stretch of buildings in a downtown along the main drag of Hot Springs. Back then they thought [the springs] had magical healing properties, so people used to come to Hot Springs with a doctor’s note for a round of baths. These really opulent bath houses were built along what they call Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs.

There is some nature that the park protects; they do have a couple of hiking trails and some hillsides, but you’re not really going there for the views. You’re going to learn that history: the rise and fall of the great American bath house.

What has the Park Service done with the other bathhouses?

One that I thought was particularly interesting is the Superior Bathhouse, which has transitioned into a brewery. There’s a young woman who had been into brewing beer and realized that the first thing that you have to do when you’re making beer is heat the water. Well, in Hot Springs, the water is already hot so you really only have to heat it just a few degrees more to make it the correct temperature for brewing beer. The Park Service was looking for folks that might have a cool idea in terms of how to reuse some of these buildings, and so she sent an application with a plan for what she was going to do, and [now] they're thriving.

They have a full restaurant with food, but then all the drinks, the beer, and even the root beer is made with hot spring water. I think that’s an interesting way of keeping the history alive because the building still looks very much like it did when it was constructed [in 1916] and there are lots of nods in terms of their signage or the names of the things on the menu to the original use of the bathhouse. But today it is full of people, and yeah, they’re drinking beer and they’re eating a meal, but at least there’s still some use for [the structure].

Did any of the parks take you by surprise?

Biscayne National Park has an underwater maritime heritage trail. It’s basically a series of shipwrecks that you have to dive to. They are forty feet underwater and there are placards like you see on a more traditional trail in a forest except these are on the floor of the ocean and they tell you the history of the wreck that you’re looking at.

[One of those is] the Lugano, which was a ship that sank in 1913. You can read what happened to it and see the bones of it on the floor of the ocean. There are actually far more ship wrecks than just the ones on the trail that are a part of the park. That tract of the Florida reef was particularly dangerous; it still is dangerous, ships still run aground on it. But back before there was GPS—there wasn’t even a lighthouse for a long time out there—it was really treacherous. I spoke with Chuck Lawson who is an underwater archaeologist, and what he does full time is explore, preserve, and interpret these sites to the public.