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Explore all of America's national parks right here with NPF. Discover our most treasured places, supported by people like you, and start your travel planning here. Search by each park individually or browse a full list of parks in the National Park System.

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Location: Northern Minnesota, on the Canadian borderBest place to stay: Camping near Kabetogama lake, for the incredible quietBest entry point: Start paddling from Ash river visitor center

Location: Northern Minnesota, on the Canadian border
Best place to stay: Camping near Kabetogama lake, for the incredible quiet
Best entry point: Start paddling from Ash river visitor center

When you think of stunning waterscapes, places like Acadia national park in Maine and Olympic national park in Washington probably come to mind. Yet Voyageurs national park in Minnesota offers some of the same activities with a fraction of the crowds. Almost half the park is water, with more than 500 islands and 655 miles of undeveloped shoreline. As someone who grew up in the Rockies, lived near the mountains of California and adventured in Alaska, I can tell you that Voyageurs is like no place else.

The northern lights above an island at Voyageurs national park

Start your adventure at either Kabetogama Lake visitor center or Ash river visitor center. Rent a boat, canoe, or kayak and set out for a campsite across the water. From there you can spend the day fishing or cruising around. If you're visiting in July, the wild blueberrieruds and raspberries are ripe for picking and make an excellent addition to your campfire pancakes. There is beauty in taking a break from modern conveniences. When flipped over, the bottom of your canoe provides a great surface to prep your food and perhaps is a better tabletop than a picnic table.

At Voyageurs, you can wrap yourself in quiet that is both comforting and exhilarating. We're not talking complete silence, but rather a silence that gives you space to enjoy the calls of wildlife from miles around. It's one of my most favorite aspects of this park: you can literally go an entire day without hearing any human sounds.
Will Shafroth is the president and CEO of the National Park Foundation

2 The attraction: Biscayne national park, Florida (447,000 visits)
The alternative: Dry Tortugas national park, Florida (54,000 visits)

Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas

Location: Garden Key and six other small islands, 68 miles west of Key West, Florida
Best place to stay: A rustic campsite (BYO tent, charcoal, water, flashlight, and food in a varmint-proof container)
Best sight: Sunrise and star rise over Florida Bay

The threat to America's public lands is increasing - and so is our coverage

If you yearn for more solitude than that afforded by Biscayne national park, head to the other end of the Florida Keys coral archipelago: Dry Tortugas national park.

Three centuries after the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León named the islands Tortugas for the sea turtles - they still nest there - Fort Jefferson was built from 16m bricks. Construction stretched over 30 years, done largely by enslaved, quarantined or imprisoned laborers. The fort was never finished and never saw combat. It was abandoned by the military, and its grim history ended in 1908, when it became a nature reserve. Like so many of our national parks, this beautiful place was once seared with human misery. Today, nature has restored peace on Garden Key. The country's only breeding colony of magnificent frigate birds lives here, having moved west when development encroached on their former rookery, closer to Key West.

Garden Key is 40 minutes via seaplane or three hours via ferry from Key West. There isn't much to do here, which is precisely the allure. Watch pelicans and cormorants dive for fish, read books, and revel in absolute inaccessibility. Wander the massive fort's bastions, battlements, ramparts, moats and lighthouse. The play of ocean light on the red-brick walls and the contrast with cadmium-green waters will mesmerize. Late each afternoon, the ferry and seaplane spirit away daytrippers and the island belongs to the few campers. Sit on the sand beach or moat wall and watch frigate birds soar, scarlet balloons at their throats, as the sun burns from sky to sea. A thick cloak of stars and silence unfurls over endless water, a sliver of beach, your tent, and nothing else.

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The 22 best US national parks to escape the crowds, chosen by experts

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Location: Northern Minnesota, on the Canadian borderBest place to stay: Camping near Kabetogama lake, for the incredible quietBest entry point: Start paddling from Ash river visitor center Location: Northern Minnesota, on the Canadian border Best place to stay: Camping near Kabetogama lake, for the incredible quiet Best entry point: Start paddling from Ash river visitor center When you think of stunning waterscapes, places like Acadia national park in Maine and Olympic national park in Washington probably come to mind.

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UC Berkeley alumnus Doug Harnsberger was hiking along California's scenic John Muir Trail a few years ago when he came across a stone hut at the top of 11,955-foot Muir Pass, inside Kings Canyon National Park.

Harnsberger, a 1977 graduate in environmental design and architecture, is a trained historical architect and immediately knew the shelter was something special - he just didn't know anything about it.

Almost as soon as he returned home to Pennsylvania, he started learning as much as he could about the hut.

The effort took him to UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, where he found the original 1930 blueprint for the building by Henry Gutterson, a 1905 graduate of Berkeley who was commissioned to build the hut by the Sierra Club. It was originally called the John Muir Memorial Shelter.

Harsnberger also pushed the National Park Service to place the hut on the National Register of Historic Places, a listing of buildings and places the government deems worthy of preservation for their historical significance.

Research is now underway to get the 16-foot-by-16-foot octagon hut - and the entire 210-mile John Muir Trail - recognized as a National Historic Landmark, which would place the Muir Hut among the country's most significant structures. Other National Historic Landmarks include the White House and the Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House in Chicago.

"We have the architecture of a medieval stone structure from southern Italy showing up on the Muir Pass," Harnsberger said. "This is a mountaineer's version of that kind of shrine."

Recognizing the hut as a landmark would honor Muir, who is generally considered to be the father of the National Park System, and protect the hut and trail for generations to come, Harnsberger said.

"A building does not last without maintenance," Harnsberger said. "So far, this structure has lasted (almost) 100 years without maintenance, but it might not last another 100 years."
Contact Will Kane at willkane@berkeley.edu

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Berkeley alum uncovers mystery of John Muir's Sierra Nevada hut

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From the Bancroft Library to the high passes of the Sierra, a search for the story

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Theodore Roosevelt

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When Theodore Roosevelt took office as the United States' 26th president, he was only 42, the youngest president in the history of the nation. He was also a fanatic for the outdoors, and was actually heading back from a hike when his predecessor, President William McKinley, took a turn for the worst after an assassination attempt and died.

The presidency and life at the White House didn't stop Roosevelt from enjoying a life outdoors, though. He had a tendency to take ambassadors and friends with him on intense hikes around Washington, D.C., and across the country. "What the President called a walk was a run: no stop, no breathing time, no slacking of speed, but a continuous race, careless of mud, thorns and the rest," French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand detailed in his memoirs.

Though there are many wilderness locales that celebrate Roosevelt's nature-loving legacy-like the Theodore Roosevelt Area of the Timucuan Preserve, Theodore Roosevelt Island and Theodore Roosevelt National Park -the spots below can also claim his footsteps.

Tahawus, New York

On September 6, 1901, President McKinley was shot. At first all seemed well-Roosevelt had gone to his bedside in Buffalo, but left after seeing the situation improving. Roosevelt met his wife on his way to the Adirondacks, and they stopped in Tahawus, New York, which is now a ghost town. While there, he decided he wanted to climb nearby Mount Marcy. Today the trailhead where Roosevelt kicked off his hike is called the Upper Works trailhead. A 21-mile round-trip path leads up the mountain, with a gradual slope up and an often-muddy trail.

Roosevelt had just begun his trek down from the summit when he heard that McKinley's condition had gotten much worse. He instantly headed back to Tahawus and then began the trip back to Buffalo. On the way there, McKinley died, leaving Roosevelt as the new president.

Rock Creek Park, Washington D.C.

When Roosevelt was in office, this was one of his favorite spots to go hiking. He'd often suggest a walk to members of his "tennis cabinet" (a group of informal advisors) or to foreign ambassadors visiting the U.S. Follow the 3.5-mile Boulder Bridge hike through the part of the park Roosevelt frequented. He lost a gold ring at the bridge itself, leaving an ad in the paper for its return: "Golden ring lost near Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek. If found, return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Ask for Teddy."

On one hike in this area, he brought along Jusserand-who was said to be the only one who could actually keep up with Roosevelt on his hikes. The two became fast friends after an incident on the hike. The president, intending to cross Rock Creek, stripped naked in order to keep his clothes dry for when they emerged on the other side. Jusserand reluctantly did the same, but insisted he keep wearing a pair of lavender gloves; he told Roosevelt it was because if they met some ladies while nude, he still wouldn't be underdressed.

Yellowstone National Park

In 1903, two years into the presidency, Roosevelt launched his first cross-country trip out to the western U.S. On the way, he stopped at Yellowstone National Park for a hiking and camping trip with naturalist and essayist John Burroughs. The two covered a substantial section of the park, starting in the northeast and heading to see the geysers, then checking out Fort Yellowstone, Mammoth Hot Springs, Tower Falls and other geologic beauties.

"While in camp we always had a big fire at night in the open near the tents, and around this we sat upon logs or camp stools, and listened to the President's talk," Burroughs wrote for The Atlantic in a 1906 essay about the trip. "What a stream of it he poured forth! And what a varied and picturesque stream-anecdote, history, science, politics, adventure, literature; bits of his experience as a ranchman, hunter, Rough Rider, legislator, Civil Service commissioner, police commissioner, governor, president,-the frankest confessions, the most telling criticisms, happy characterizations of prominent political leaders, or foreign rulers, or members of his own Cabinet; always surprising by his candor, astonishing by his memory, and diverting by his humor."

Yosemite National Park

After Yellowstone, Roosevelt headed out to California and Yosemite National Park, where he would meet naturalist and author John Muir for another guided camping trip. Roosevelt invited him along on the trip through a letter:
My dear Mr. Muir: Through the courtesy of President Wheeler I have already been in communication with you, but I wish to write you personally to express the hope that you will be able to take me through the Yosemite. I do not want anyone with me but you, and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you. John Burroughs is probably going through the Yellowstone Park with me, and I want to go with you through the Yosemite. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt
Muir replied about two weeks later with an emphatic "yes." The two started their journey camping in Mariposa Grove to see the giant sequoias. From there they headed to Glacier Point, Washburn Point, Hanging Rock and Bridalveil Fall. At Bridalveil Fall, hikers today can see a marker-the only official one-that designates the spot where Roosevelt and Muir camped for a night.

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Hike in the Footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt

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Energetic Teddy was a hiking fanatic-follow his trail on these trips

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A tour of Hickory Hill, John Muir's boyhood home

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A tour of Hickory Hill, John Muir's boyhood home

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"After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake Farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,---after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape with life, ---father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields....."

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John Muir: A Brief Biography, A part of the John Muir Exhibit, by Sierra Club John Muir Education Project

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Quotations of John Muir - Writings - The John Muir Exhibit - Sierra Club

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Favorite Quotations from John Muir selected by Harold Wood - John Muir Exhibit - Sierra Club

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Selected Passages by John Muir - John Muir Exhibit

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Selected Passages by John Muir, from the Writings of John Muir, A part of the John Muir Exhibit.

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Main Content

The national parks preceded the National Park Service, but the first great natural park was a state park. California's Yosemite State Park was established in 1864, by a federal cession approved by President Abraham Lincoln, and on October 21, 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes toured California's Yosemite in an open carriage. On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant had approved the establishment of Yellowstone National Park "as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." ¹ Yellowstone was the first "national" park. Following the Yellowstone precedent, Congress established national parks in the 1890s and early 1900s, including Mount Rainier (1899), Glacier (1910), and Yosemite, which was returned to the United States by California in 1890.

President Theodore Roosevelt saw in conservation a means of keeping the natural wealth of the United States for the public and not leaving it as it had been for the economic benefit of entrepreneurs. In a move to preserve prehistoric Indian ruins and artifacts on public lands, he signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, using it to create eighteen national monuments by presidential proclamation, including Devils Tower in Wyoming; El Morro in New Mexico; and, in Arizona, Montezuma Castle, the Petrified Forest, and the Grand Canyon. During his tenure as president Roosevelt established 150 national forests, 51 bird preserves, and 4 game preserves. ² In those same years Congress established 5 national parks, including Crater Lake in Oregon, Wind Cave in South Dakota, and Mesa Verde in Colorado. Roosevelt increased natural forest lands from 43 million to 194 million acres.

Several Park Service sites recognize Roosevelt's conservation efforts. In 1932 Congress authorized Theodore Roosevelt Island as a national memorial. This island, in the Potomac River at Washington, D.C., was reclaimed as a forest and wildlife sanctuary. Another memorial to Roosevelt's conservation efforts is Theodore Roosevelt National Park, established in 1947. This is the ranch in North Dakota that Roosevelt bought as a young man and where he fell in love with the natural wilderness of the area. Roosevelt once said of the Grand Canyon: "Leave it as it is. You cannot improve it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar. What you do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American . . . should see." ³

Evidence of Roosevelt's love of the wilderness was Pine Knot, a cabin and 15 acres near Charlottesville, Virginia, that First Lady Edith Roosevelt purchased as a rural retreat, a four-hour train ride away from Washington and the White House. The Roosevelts and their children enjoyed Pine Knot, visiting several times during the Roosevelt presidency. It was the first of the presidential rustic cabins, which culminated in Camp David.

In 1909 William Howard Taft, who followed Roosevelt in the presidency, proclaimed Mukuntuweap National Monument in Utah (later it became Zion National Park), and he continued to establish national monuments by presidential proclamation. Under Taft, Glacier National Park was established in 1910. In 1912, First Lady Helen Herron Taft and her friend the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted two Yoshino cherry trees on the banks of the Potomac River, near what was to become the Jefferson Memorial, to celebrate the gift sent by Yukio Ozaki, mayor of Tokyo, of 3,020 Japanese cherry trees to beautify the parks of Washington, D.C. Mrs. Taft knew Japan well from the time when her husband was governor-general of the Philippines, and she remembered the spring cherry blossoms.

The national parks had been developed by conservationists and by hunters like Roosevelt in an idealistic impulse to preserve nature, but also by businessmen in the desire to promote tourism. Western railroads favored many of the early parks by building grand hotels, where those who traveled by train could stay. Promoters launched a crusade for a national parks bureau in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and the National Geographic. Legislation creating the National Park Service was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on August 25, 1916.

In 1923, President Warren G. Harding created a number of national monuments, including Aztec Ruins in New Mexico, Hovenweep in Utah and Colorado, and Pipe Spring in Arizona. Harding dedicated a monumental bronze statue to the Greek hero of music, Orpheus, at Fort McHenry Park in Baltimore on June 14, 1922. His speech was the first to be broadcast on live radio coast to coast.

No president had visited Yellowstone since Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. Stephen Mather, first director of the National Park Service, convinced President Harding to visit three national parks in route to his ill-fated vacation in California and Alaska in June and July 1923. President and Mrs. Harding stopped at Zion National Park. A coterie of seventy-two along with reporters and newsreel cameramen followed them to Yellowstone. Mounted park rangers formed an honor guard as the presidential motorcade entered through the stone arch with its inscription: "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People." When the president noted there were no crowds on the roads, he took out a package of chewing tobacco and started to chew. After a visit to Old Faithful and a night in the Old Faithful Inn, the president had his picture taken with Jesse James, a famous black bear of the park. A group of college girls who worked at a park hotel gathered at the presidential touring car and sang for the Hardings. Near the park's exit President Harding gathered with reporters and newsreel cameras and said, "Commercialism will never be tolerated here as long as I have the power to prevent it." ⁴

A short time later, on August 2, 1923, news reached Yellowstone that President Harding was dead. After visiting the park he had gone to Alaska, where he had been taken ill, and then taken by ship to San Francisco. He died in San Francisco's Palace Hotel just before his last planned park visit to Yosemite. ⁵

To get away from Washington's summer heat and insects, President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Goodhue Coolidge spent the summer of 1927 at a game lodge in Rapid City, South Dakota, in the Black Hills. President Coolidge fished for trout in streams recently stocked by the locals for his pleasure. It was a summer much in the press, not least for the "Black Hills Affair," in which reporters greatly embellished the first lady's being lost for several hours on mountain trails with a Secret Serviceman. An angered president gave no comment. The South Dakotans presented him with a widebrimmed Western hat and boots, which he obligingly wore. He was photographed in an elaborate Indian headdress presented to him by a local Indian chief. In Rapid City he made the announcement: "I do not choose to run for president in 1928."

That summer, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum persuaded Coolidge to dedicate Mount Rushmore on August 10, 1927, before work began on the carving of the heads of four presidents. Coolidge presented Borglum with six steel drill bits to start the work. On August 22, the Coolidges arrived at Yellowstone, where the president fished in the Firehole River near Old Faithful. At first he insisted on using worms and did not catch anything, but the park's chief ranger taught him how to use spinners, and the president was delighted when he caught fifteen fish. ⁶

President Herbert Hoover and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover sought forest land not far from Washington where they could get away, rest, and engage in the president's passion for trout fishing. At the urging of William E. Carson, head of the Virginia Commission on Conservation and Development, Hoover established a fishing camp on the upper Rapidan River in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Madison County, Virginia, about 100 miles from Washington. The area had been designated to become part of the upcoming Shenandoah National Park. A road was built up to the Rapidan campsite, and rustic cabins were constructed. What became Camp Hoover was the setting for entertaining Charles A. Lindbergh and British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. The Hoovers enjoyed Camp Rapidan and were active in establishing a Herbert Hoover Mountain School for the children of the mountain people. Riding up from Camp Rapidan to Skyland, a resort on the Blue Ridge, Hoover became convinced that the government should build a public road connecting the two, incorporating views eastward from the Blue Ridge and westward into the Shenandoah Valley. This plan was accomplished during the Roosevelt administration and became the Skyline Drive of Shenandoah National Park. Hoover paid for his camp on the Rapidan personally and eventually deeded the property to Shenandoah National Park. ⁷

Early in his administration Franklin Roosevelt drove out to Camp Hoover to see if it was suitable for a presidential retreat. The presidential party drove from the camp to Skyland on a road improved by Hoover, but eventually to become the Skyline Drive, and then back to Washington. Former President Hoover's offer was rejected because of the inconvenience of the camp for wheelchairs.

On the road back to Washington, Roosevelt listened to plans laid out by Horace Albright, director of the National Park Service, to make the Park Service the sole federal agency responsible for all federally owned public monuments and memorials. This transfer would include Civil War battlefields, such as Antietam, Chattanooga-Chickamauga, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Petersburg, and Shiloh, which were managed by the War Department; various national monuments; and the entire park system of the nation's capital, at that time under the Army Corps of Engineers. By this time the Park Service had acquired Morristown National Historical Park in New Jersey; Colonial National Monument, including Jamestown and the Yorktown battlefield in Virginia; and George Washington Birthplace National Monument, also in Virginia. The executive order agreed upon by Roosevelt and signed on June 10, 1933, established the Park Service in the administration of East Coast historical parks, to be added to the great Western parks, as well as the national capital parks of Washington.

President Roosevelt proposed a Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) to take 250,000 jobless young men, pay them $30 a month, and give them useful work in federal and state parks and forests. Men of the CCC developed the Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park from 1933 to 1942 during the New Deal. In 1933 President Roosevelt visited a CCC Camp in Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park to promote his national recovery program. He returned to dedicate the northern section of the Skyline Drive on July 3, 1936. The work of the CCC encompassed building roads, bridges, forests, cabin camps, and park structures in parks nationwide. It was the largest park improvement program, and the magnitude of its achievement in the national parks has never been surpassed.

By 1940 President Roosevelt needed his own presidential retreat convenient to Washington. Not since his visit to Camp Hoover in 1933 had he wished for a Washington area retreat; now visits to Hyde Park took him too far from his associates in the capital. He had spent relaxing weekends on the presidential yacht Potomac, and he had visited Barnard Baruch's Hobcaw Plantation in South Carolina. After consulting the Park Service, he chose Cabin Camp 4, one of a series of camps at Catoctin Recreational Demonstration Area near Thurmont, Maryland, within the Catoctin Mountains. A quickly rehabilitated boy's camp for children from Baltimore, the retreat became Roosevelt's "Shangri-La," later renamed Camp David by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. ⁸

President Harry Truman is not remembered historically as a conservationist. Yet on December 6, 1947, he formally dedicated a huge marshland in south Florida called the Everglades and met with tribal leaders of the resident Seminoles. On September 14, 1950, Truman signed legislation consolidating 310,000 acres of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. After decades of controversy with private property owners, much of the land for the park was purchased by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and given to the U.S. government.

Laurance Rockefeller and members of the Rockefeller family acquired more than 5,000 acres of land on St. John, Virgin Islands, which they donated to the federal government. On August 2, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a law establishing the Virgin Islands National Park. On January 19, 1961, he signed legislation creating the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, extending uninterrupted from the District of Columbia to Cumberland, Maryland, along the Potomac River.

Eisenhower had great interest in the Gettysburg battlefield, where he set up his retirement home-itself to become a national park. In a visit to the Pennsylvania monument at Gettysburg National Military Park on October 23, 1954, about the time work rebuilding his house was completed, Eisenhower said to an admiring crowd: "I hope you are people we will get to see a lot of in the days to come. . . . And I assure you that one of the things we are looking forward to, more than anything else in our lives, is when that day comes that we can go over here and settle down back of Round Top, and begin to raise few cows of our own." ⁹

President John F. Kennedy established Cape Cod National Seashore on August 7, 1961. He visited Gettysburg on March 31, 1963, and was guided around the battlefield by a local history teacher and National Park Service historian, Jacob M. Sheads. In 1963 Kennedy dedicated Whiskeytown Lake as part of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in California.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was very active in the conservation movement largely because of the interest of First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. In 1964 Mrs. Johnson formed the Committee for a More Beautiful Capital, and she directed planting of flowers-notably tulips-throughout the parks of Washington. She expanded her "beautification" movement nationwide as she visited scenic areas, national parks, and historic sites promoting conservation and historic preservation. Nash Castro of the National Park Service was the key official in her programs overseeing its objective and details. On Mrs. Johnson's nine beautification trips, she visited the Hudson River National Heritage Area in New York, Big Bend National Park in Texas, Redwood National Park in California, and various Virginia historic sites. The Johnson administration achieved passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, and the establishment of numerous new national parks. Mrs. Johnson wrote the introduction for the seminal book, With Heritage So Rich, which helped promote passage of the 1966 Historic Preservation Act, setting up the National Register of Historic Places and a presidentally appointed Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Her work is commemorated by the Lady Bird Johnson Park across from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac along the George Washington Memorial Parkway. For her activity in preserving Redwood National Park in California, President Richard Nixon dedicated, on August 27, 1969, a Lady Bird Johnson Grove within the park.

In his youth, President Gerald R. Ford worked as a park ranger at Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1936. As president he returned to Yellowstone on August 29, 1976, generating renewed interest in the national parks.

During the Camp David Summit on September 10, 1978, President Jimmy Carter toured Gettysburg battlefield with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menahem Begin of Israel. That same year, the Carters vacationed in Grand Teton National Park. With a broad use of the Antiquities Act, President Carter took action on December 1, 1978, to preserve seventeen vast and endangered areas of Alaska by declaring them national monuments. In 1980, he signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which protected more than 100 million acres of federal lands in Alaska, creating ten new national parks and enlarging three others.

Widening the focus of the Park System, in 1988 President Ronald Reagan created a national park in American Samoa. On July 12, 1984, he visited Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, and on July 4, 1986, First Lady Nancy Reagan visited the Statue of Liberty National Monument in New York Harbor.

President George H. W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush were enthusiastic visitors to national parks, touring Yellowstone, Grand Teton, the Everglades, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the USS Arizona National Memorial at Pearl Harbor, and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. At home in Washington, D.C., they visited the Lincoln Memorial, the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, the Jefferson Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Ford's Theatre National Historic Site, and the Korean War Veterans Memorial. George H. W. Bush, with his son President George W. Bush, visited the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on May 8, 2007.

President Bill Clinton used the 1906 Antiquities Act to create nineteen national monuments, including the long-overlooked Lincoln Summer White House at the Soldiers' Home, Washington, D.C. ¹⁰ On October 31, 1994, Joshua Tree National Park was established by President Clinton as part of the California Desert Protection Act, which created the largest protected wilderness area in the Lower Forty-Eight, adding 234,000 acres to the existing boundaries and elevating it to national park status. Clinton visited Yellowstone, Grand Teton, the Grand Canyon, and the Great Falls of the Potomac River, part of George Washington Memorial Parkway, on Earth Day on April 22, 1996.

President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush visited many national parks during their eight years at the White House. President Bush took a walking tour of Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park on May 1, 2001. He delivered remarks on homeland security at Mount Rushmore in August 2002 and visited the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, Thousand Oaks, California, shortly afterward. Both President Bush and Mrs. Bush attended a roundtable on the National Parks Centennial Initiative at Shenandoah National Park, in Luray, Virginia, on February 7, 2007. They toured Jamestown National Historic Site during the celebration of the 400th anniversary of settlement on May 13, 2007. Laura Bush delivered remarks at the rededication of the Zion National Park Nature Center in Springdale, Utah, on April 29, 2007, and on August 27 she spoke to junior rangers during a visit to Grand Teton National Park.

In 2006, President Bush proclaimed the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, creating the largest marine reserve to date. ¹¹ Renamed Papahanaumokuakea in 2007, its 84 million acres are home to 7,000 species of fish, birds, and other marine animals. As he was leaving office, President Bush established the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument in the South Pacific, attesting to the durability of the Antiquities Act of 1906.

Following the long presidential tradition, President Barack Obama and his family visited Yellowstone National Park on August 14, 2009, and the Grand Canyon on August 16. The Obama family visited Acadia National Park on July 13, 2010.

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Main Content The national parks preceded the National Park Service, but the first great natural park was a state park. California's Yosemite State Park was established in 1864, by a federal cession approved by President Abraham Lincoln, and on October 21, 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes toured California's Yosemite in an open carriage.

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Theodore Roosevelt and Conservation - Theodore Roosevelt National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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“We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.” - Theodore Roosevelt

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Rachel Carson warned the world of the dire environmental impact of fertilizers and pesticides in her influential work Silent Spring . Learn more at Biography.com

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Rachel Carson: Environmentalist and Writer | Scholastic.com

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Read about scientist, environmentalist, and writer Rachel Carson, whose revolutionary book, Silent Spring, led to public awareness of the dangers of pesticides.

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Official website for Rachel Carson

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Perhaps the finest nature writer of the Twentieth Century, Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is remembered more today as the woman who challenged the notion that humans could obtain mastery over nature by chemicals, bombs and space travel than for her studies of ocean life.

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National Women's History Museum

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Rachel Carson catalyzed the global environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring.