As a kid growing up in Virginia, Mike Baggetta’s bond with the National Parks began at an early age while on family vacations in the Great Smoky Mountains, and road trips along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The connection grew stronger when his family moved to California in 1972, and settled in a neighborhood where ironically every street was named for a different National Park.

While in high school, Mike became an active member of the Yosemite Institute, and backpacked extensively along the John Muir Trail. As he hiked the rugged Sierra Nevada Mountains, Mike was also drawing and painting watercolor studies in his sketchbook – in the tradition of one of his inspirations, renown Yellowstone landscape artist, Thomas Moran.

Graduating with honors from the famed Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Mike also met and then married Marla Tarbox-Baggetta, now his wife of the last fifteen years and a gifted artist and illustrator.

Mike started his professional career on the staff of the Tokyo Disneyland project where he became the youngest salaried employee at Disneyland serving as Senior Graphic Designer.

If you’ve been renting or buying movies on videocassettes or laserdiscs and DVD in the last 16 years, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Mike Baggetta’s work. From classic films to today’s box office blockbusters, Mike’s design studio has created the eye-catching packaging they come in. As a designer, art director, and creative director, Mike has produced award-winning work on behalf of MGM/UA Home Entertainment, Tri-Star Columbia Pictures, Image Entertainment, NBC Television, Republic Pictures Corp., Playmates Toys, and Mattel Toys to name a few.

Most recently Mike was chosen to design and just completed Crater Lake National Park's Centennial logo commerating the first 100 years of Oregon's own National Park.

Away from the studio, Mike and Marla, along with their sons Keith (age 10) and Kevin (age 12), travel extensively from their home in Northern Oregon to National Parks, forests, and historical monuments. At stops along the way they sketch, paint, draw, and photograph the beauty and splendor they encounter. And they pass on to their sons an appreciation and respect for nature and her most breathtaking and majestic sites.

“It’s for these little guys, and all the other kids in their generation, that I’m so committed to the Parks,” says Mike. “When I have to tell them that some part of the park that we’ve read about, and we were coming to see, is closed because of budget problems, it just kills me. Every year we see it gets a little worse. With the help of the Parks Company we’re going to do our best to make sure those places are just as awe-inspiring as they were in the Golden Era of the Parks.”