Celebrating 25 Years on the Air

Outdoors Maryland is the mid-Atlantic's guide to the outdoors and one of MPT's most popular local programs. This award-winning series delights viewers each week with thought-provoking stories depicting the region's diverse collection of ecosystems, people, and places. The show's beautiful photography and thoughtful scripting capture Maryland's vast diversity and stunning beauty.

The best of Outdoors Maryland in photos, captured by local photographers and voted on by folks like you.

Submit your photos and join the community! Capture Outdoors Maryland is open to everyone and it's completely free. We are a bunch of folks looking for the best of Maryland in photography, in celebration of 25 years of the Outdoors Maryland television program.

» To participate, go to the Capture Outdoors Maryland website

Its producers and photographers have logged hundreds of thousands of miles chasing nature's most compelling stories. It's been watched by millions of people, and it's won more than 50 prestigious television awards. It's helped to turn a few state environmental experts into minor television celebrities, and it's the first and only television series in the region of its kind – a video discovery of Maryland's diverse natural resources and the people who explore them.

Outdoors Maryland – the most popular, highest-rated local public television program that's produced in cooperation with Maryland Public Television and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources – celebrates its 25th season on-the-air in November, 2012.

"I remember exactly how it happened," says Glenn Tolbert, producer of Outdoors Maryland's pilot episode in 1988, recounting how the half-hour program came to be. "Torrey Brown [former DNR Secretary] thought that a public television program about the out-of-doors was necessary to get the DNR's message out there."

A key component to the program's message: Maryland is a small state but one filled with an unusually large and stunning array of natural beauty and diversity.

"Another part of our mission," Tolbert says, "was to show how important the wilderness was in Maryland. No one else was shooting that kind of thing. It was a golden adventure and a lifetime experience."

Over the years, Outdoors Maryland has produced more than 700 stories about people and the outdoors about topics ranging from science-oriented environmental issues to segments about unusual people, animals and places around the state. That's not going to change.

"As long as there are good stories to tell about the natural world in Maryland," says program producer Michael English, "we'll continue to tell them the best way we know how" - with breathtaking photography and thoughtful scripting, while treading gently through our interwoven ecosystems.