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The concept of national parks was one of the most popular ideas the United States ever produced. It stemmed from the desire to protect special places for visitors' present and future enjoyment.

Since Yellowstone was designated in 1872, the concept of what constitutes a national park has expanded significantly. The original focus on natural wonders has evolved to include sites that chronicle human history, educate, and elevate the quality of life.

Origins of the National Park Idea

The grandeur of the American West inspired the idea of national parks. There, vast landscapes, still untouched by development filled the eye. Artists, authors, and scientists struggled to capture the beauty they encountered and to record and share their discoveries. But they worried. What would happen when westward expansion arrived on the doorstep of the wilderness?

Artist George Catlin, during an 1832 trip to the Dakotas, was perhaps the first to suggest a novel solution to this fast-approaching reality. Indian civilization, wildlife, and wilderness were all in danger, wrote Catlin, unless they could be preserved "by some great protecting policy of government...in a magnificent park.... A nation's Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild[ness] and freshness of their nature's beauty!"

A New View of the West

Encouraged by art, literature, and science, a powerful preservationist viewpoint gradually emerged. Even without a national policy or one designated agency, individual sites won protection.

In 1861, Congress appointed Ferdinand Hayden, head of the government's new geological survey, to lead a fact-finding expedition to the region at the headwaters of the Yellowstone River. The area, situated in the Montana and Wyoming territories, had been an attraction for explorers, trappers, and prospectors since the late 18th century.

There were numerous accounts of its strange features, geysers, hot springs, and holes of bubbling mud, but it was not until Hayden's team of geologists, botanists, and zoologists returned from their trip that the U.S. government had a full account of the area's wonders.

The First National Park Emerges

Hayden strongly advocated for setting the Yellowstone region aside as a national park, and it did not take long for him to convince Congress. Congress approved the legislation in early 1872, and on March 1st of that year, President Grant signed the bill designating 2.2 million acres of land as "a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

The second section of the bill gave the Secretary of the Interior responsibility for "the preservation, from injury or spoilation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within said park, and their retention in their natural condition."

Early Policies

The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 allowed presidents to proclaim permanent forest reserves on publicly-owned land-legislation that led to national forests. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gave presidents authority to protect sites of historic significance as national monuments.

Congress also authorized the preservation of four major Civil War battlefields during this era, designating them as National Military Parks.

Other parks followed: Sequoia (1890) Mt. Rainier (1899), Crater Lake (1902) and Yosemite (1890). Over time, the federal government established policies on the preservation of natural resources: Laws and presidential decrees, however, did not solve real-world administration problems.

In Need of Oversight

While some of the national monuments reserved under the 1906 Antiquities Act were located in areas controlled by the Department of the Interior (DOI), others were on land supervised by the Department of War or the Department of Agriculture. With responsibility divided among several departments, who would make the rules, and could they possibly be consistent?

The problem was no single federal agency had the authority to operate and advocate for these parks and monuments. Individual sites received uneven attention and minimal federal support.

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Origin of the National Park Idea (U.S. National Park Service)

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The concept of national parks was one of the most popular ideas the United States ever produced. It stemmed from the desire to protect special places for visitors' present and future enjoyment. Since Yellowstone was designated in 1872, the concept of what constitutes a national park has expanded significantly.

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After Jacob Gray (above) vanished in Olympic National Park in April 2017, his body wasn't found for 18 months. More than 600,000 persons go missing in the US every year -- some 1,600 in US wildlands, according to David Paulides of the North America Bigfoot Search. NurPhoto via Getty Images; Courtesy of Mallory Gray

In April 2017, Jacob Gray rode his bicycle during a rainstorm into Washington state's Olympic National Park and vanished. The 22-year-old's bike and camping gear were discovered near the Sol Duc River, but otherwise there was no trace of him. Several months of search-and-rescue missions uncovered nothing.

The mystery caught the attention of journalist Jon Billman, who has been investigating "missing persons in wild places" since the late '90s. As he writes in "The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands" (Grand Central Publishing), out Tuesday, most disappearances are easy to explain - hypothermia, falls, avalanches, eaten by a mountain lion, etc. - but Billman has long been fascinated by cases that "defy conventional logic . . . the proverbial vanish-without-a-trace incidents, which happen a lot more (and a lot closer to your backyard) than almost anyone thinks."

According to NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), more than 600,000 persons go missing in the United States every year. Anywhere between 89 percent to 92 percent of those missing people are recovered every year, either alive or deceased. But how many of those disappear in the wild is unclear. Neither the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, or the Department of Agriculture's US Forest Service keeps track.

Strangely, the most reliable info on missing people in the wild comes from Bigfoot hunters. In 2011, David Paulides, founder of the North America Bigfoot Search, launched a database of wildland disappearances that occurred under "mysterious circumstances." From his research, there are at least 1,600 people, give or take, currently missing in the wild somewhere in the United States.

Most people, according to his data, disappear in the late afternoon and during or just before severe weather. Bodies are often found in previously searched areas, and often without clothing or footwear, even when hypothermia has been ruled out. (During the last stages of hypothermia, people often feel hot and remove their clothing.) Children are sometimes found at improbably far distances from where they went missing.

The biggest obstacle to getting any information about missing people in the wild, according to Paulides, is National Park Service red tape. He speculates that the Park Service conceals the true data on how and where people disappear and how many have actually been found because it "would shock the public so badly that visitor numbers would fall off a cliff," Billman writes.

"I don't think there's a grand conspiracy to keep the numbers hidden," he says. "But the National Park Service certainly doesn't advertise that there are dozens of still-missing visitors in Grand Canyon or Yosemite, and a county sheriff isn't gonna put a missing person on his reelection poster."

The odds of locating Jacob Gray were "beyond finding a needle in a haystack," Chief Ranger Jay Shields told Billman. Despite a several-month coordinated effort by hundreds of park rangers, local police and volunteers, they found no trace of him.

But Randy Gray, Jacob's father, wasn't about to give up so easily. A 63-year-old house-builder from Santa Cruz, Calif., he went on to "liquidate his world in order to find his son," writes Billman. He sold his house and shuttered his successful contracting business. Loading up an Arctic Fox slide-in camper with food and gear, Randy invited the author to join him as he set out for Washington.

National parks like Yosemite operate almost as sovereign states. When somebody goes missing in their territory, they're not inclined to seek help from outside government agencies. "It would be like the US asking Mexico for COVID-19 ventilators," Billman says. "There's pride at stake, egos, not to mention budgets. A virus is as invisible as a missing person."

A search-and-rescue effort doesn't always make a difference. In 2017, a middle-aged woman named Kara Moore disappeared in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan's Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Almost immediately, dozens of searchers with canines covered 73,000 acres and found nothing, only to have Moore wander home a week later on her own.

A similar search made no difference for Joe Keller, a 19-year-old who went for a run in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado in 2015 and never returned. The search was called off after 13 days - "We even collected bear crap," said local Sheriff Howard Galvez. "We still have it in the evidence freezer." Keller remains an unsolved disappearance.

Nothing about Jacob's disappearance suggested foul play. His bike wasn't damaged, the tires weren't flat, and there was no evidence he'd been in an accident or purposely hit. Randy claimed that his son, a lifelong surfer, was "ionized by water" and never wore a wetsuit, even in the coldest temperatures. At 5-foot-11 and 145 pounds, he was in excellent shape, and was even planning a cross-country trip by bicycle from California to Vermont to visit his brother.

I could see Jacob being adopted by a family of Bigfoot. Hanging with them, you know. Which would be good.
- Randy Gray, whose son went missing in Olympic National Park

But, since his parents' divorce four years earlier, Jacob had shown signs of depression and, his family speculated, possible schizophrenia. It concerned Randy and his ex-wife Laura enough that they sent him to Bellevue, Wash., to live near family, attend community college and look for a job. He quickly dropped out of school, worked at a nursing job and climbing gym, and was always on his bicycle, exploring the mountain trails at every opportunity.

The park seemed convinced Jacob had either drowned in the river or had hitchhiked out of the area and "any resources would have been a waste of money and manpower."

Disembodied human feet - many of them still in shoes - wash up on the shores of Washington state and British Columbia with alarming regularity. "Some come in pairs, some don't," Billman writes. For Randy, every time he learned of a beachcomber finding a dismembered foot inside a New Balance shoe - his son's brand of choice - it was "another catalyst for another bad dream."

And yet, Randy followed every lead, no matter how disturbing. Whether it was a psychic named Lauren who insisted that Jacob had been abducted, or an eerie clue that was "puzzling to the rangers" of four arrows stuck in a meticulously-placed line on the ground near Jacob's abandoned camp, Randy took everything seriously.

Jacob could have ended up in jail. Mark Curry, who runs a search-and-recover nonprofit in Houston, Texas, told the author, "You wouldn't believe how many missing persons they find in jail." Or he could have joined a cult. Randy learned that Twelve Tribes, a cult founded in Tennessee during the '70s, had been recruiting new members along the Pacific Crest Trail. So he traveled to Vancouver, Canada, their home base in the Pacific Northwest, to meet with members and ask questions. But it was another dead end.

Eventually Randy was led to a team of Bigfoot researchers called the Olympic Project, one of the most renowned sasquatch investigator organizations in the world. Founded in 2008 by a deputy sheriff convinced that there were sasquatch in the woods around him, the group had long taken a scientific approach to tracking Bigfoot, focusing on fossil records and DNA evidence. In response to Jacob's disappearance, they created the Olympic Mountain Response Team, an offshoot devoted to "responding to missing persons in the mountains."

They welcomed Randy and Billman to stay at the Bigfoot Barn, a facility filled with supplies, maps and a library of sasquatch information. It's also the closest private property to where Jacob's bike was found, allowing Randy to "live where his son vanished," Billman writes.

But more than a place to sleep and eat, the hunters offered their expertise and intimate knowledge of the region. These mountain-savvy Bigfoot researchers were "smart, fit men and women who take a scientific approach to the fossil record," Billman says. "They volunteered hundreds of hours and hiked hundreds of miles searching for Jacob in the Olympic Peninsula."

Over four straight months, Randy searched the wilderness for 12- to 14-hour days. No one involved in the group tried to convince Randy that his son's disappearance was connected to sasquatch, but many in the group do think Bigfoot has played a role in missing person cases. Tanya Barba, a longtime Bigfoot hunter and Olympic Project member, told Billman she believes Bigfoot is involved in many missing-toddler events.

In January 2019, a 3-year-old boy named Casey Hathaway disappeared near his great-grandmother's home in rural North Carolina. Temperatures dropped below freezing and rain blew sideways. Three days later, the boy was found alive, entangled in briars a quarter of a mile from where he went missing.

"How does a child travel 4,000 feet in elevation in his bare feet in two days?" Barba asks. She is "100 percent certain" that Casey and other children "are picked up by Bigfoot."

Randy entertained the idea.

"I could see Jacob being adopted by a family of Bigfoot," Randy told the author. "Hanging with them, you know. Which would be good."

Losing a family member to the unknown is one of the worst psychological traumas a human can endure, says Pauline Boss, a researcher and family therapist. She coined the term "frozen grief" for this mental anguish. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, calls it "the nation's silent mass disaster."

In the majority of states, a person isn't classified as legally dead unless they've been missing for seven years. At that point, Billman writes, they're declared dead unless there's evidence otherwise. They're dead in absentia, which for many survivors is even worse than finding a body.

Marcel Leget, the brother of a bicyclist who went missing in Nova Scotia in 2014, says he's still haunted by not knowing how - or if - his brother died or suffered.

"I keep telling myself it would be easier if it was a heart attack or car accident - at least we could be angry at something," he says. "It might have been a quick ending, but the thought of him being really hurt and yelling for help will stay with me for a while."

He and his family will likely never know what happened, so there's no way to make peace with the loss.

"Closure isn't an option," Leget says.

It took 18 months, but Randy finally had that closure. On Aug. 10, 2018, a team of biologists who ventured into the mountains to study marmots stumbled upon Jacob's clothing in a remote area of Olympic National Park. Rangers searched the area and found his skeletal remains, 5,300 feet above sea level and 15 miles from where Jacob left his bike.

While the body was soon identified, it remains a mystery what happened to Jacob. The coroner called the official cause of death "inconclusive." His boots were found wrapped in trash bags, which Jacob's brother Micah wondered might be a sign of suicide. "People do crazy things before they commit suicide," he said.

Days after the remains were found, Randy, Micah and Billman hiked up to the spot where Jacob perished, just to see where it happened. They stumbled upon two human bones, one of them a finger bone, that they believe belonged to Jacob. Rather than bringing it to authorities, they had a burial on the mountain, fashioning a cross of tree limbs tied together with a parachute cord.

Randy may not have been responsible for finding his son, but he was on the right track with one detail. Most people lost in the mountains tend to go down, Billman writes. But Randy insisted, "Jacob would have gone up." He couldn't explain why, it was just a gut feeling. And in the end, he was right. Sometimes even the best statistics and search-and-rescue data can't compete with a parent's instincts.

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Why hundreds of people vanish into the American wilderness

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In April 2017, Jacob Gray rode his bicycle during a rainstorm into Washington state's Olympic National Park and vanished. The 22-year-old's bike and camping gear were discovered near the Sol Duc River, but otherwise there was no trace of him. Several months of search-and-rescue missions uncovered nothing.

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13 Mysterious Disappearances in National Parks

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Vanished hikers. Disappearing backpackers. Missing children. Are these mysteries in the great outdoors due to accidents, mistakes and bad luck, or evidence of something more sinister?

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Why spend a fortune for just a few hours at a fabricated haunted house when you can explore truly spooky sites for a whole day in the wild? Some of the most haunted sites in America are part of the national park system, with varied histories from Civil War bloodshed to tragic love stories. Here are some with spectacularly spooky reputations.

Why spend a fortune for just a few hours at a fabricated haunted house when you can explore truly spooky sites for a whole day in the wild? Some of the most haunted sites in America are part of the national park system, with varied histories from Civil War bloodshed to tragic love stories. Here are some with spectacularly spooky reputations.

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Seven Haunted National Parks | ShermansTravel

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Why spend a fortune for just a few hours at a fabricated haunted house when you can explore truly spooky sites for a whole day in the wild? Some of the most haunted sites in America are part of the national park system, with varied histories from Civil War bloodshed to tragic love stories.

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Ghost stories might scare your campfire circle. They can also offer hyperlocal histories for travel destinations around the country. Learn about a few spectral park visitors - if you dare - including kidnapped sailors and a skinny-dipping conservationist.

Thank you to Danielle LaRock and Cassie Yahnian, hosts of the "National Park After Dark" podcast for sharing their research and stories with us!

Olympic National Park, Washington

Lake Crescent has been the site of several mysterious disappearances and accidents over the years, but perhaps none so chilling as the "Lady of the Lake." In 1940, two fishermen discovered an unusually well-preserved body floating on the surface of the 12-mile-wide lake. Deep-water chemicals had turned her skin hard and waxy, and her face wasn't recognizable.

Dental records helped identify the body as Hallie Latham Illingworth, a woman who had vanished from nearby Port Angeles back in 1937. She had been working at a tavern when she met her third husband, but things were bleak from the start - she routinely showed up to work with bruises and black eyes. When Illingworth disappeared six months into their marriage, her husband claimed she'd run off to Alaska with a sailor.

Ropes tied around Illingworth and marks on her body eventually helped authorities convict him of her murder (though he only served nine years). Ghost sightings are common among visitors and locals alike, particularly around the Spruce Railroad Trail and the Lake Crescent Lodge, formerly the tavern where Illingworth worked.

Indiana Dunes National Park, Indiana

Visitors to Indiana Dunes report seeing the spirit of "Diana of the Dunes," also known as Alice Mabel Gray - the reason the dunes are now protected lands.

Born in 1881, Gray attended college at 16, receiving her bachelor's degree and a slew of honorable mentions in biology, math and astronomy, all before most women in the U.S. could even vote. After picking up a master's degree in Germany, she came home to Chicago to a job as a stenographer. She hated the limitations of a 9-to-5 lifestyle and found refuge at Indiana Dunes.

At 34 years old, Gray left society behind and permanently moved to the lakeshore, living on her own in a rundown abandoned shack. She studied the ecology of the dunes, writing, hiking and occasionally frolicking naked in the waves. Sailors spotted her skinny dipping (viewed as an outrage at the time), and newspapers picked up her story, calling her a mermaid, "Nympho of the Dunes" and "Diana of the Dunes" after the Roman goddess of wildlife. She used her newfound fame to talk about conservation and why the dunes shouldn't be destroyed. Though she died of kidney failure before the area was protected as a national park site in 1966, Gray is a direct reason the land is protected. The park honors her memory with " Diana's Dare," a challenge to visit sites associated with Gray to see the park through her eyes.

Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Massachusetts

The wrongfully accused defendants of the 1692 witch trials aren't the only lingering spirits in Salem. In the 1700s, the city was a bustling port with traders from all over the world, contributing to the rise of gambling and brothels.

The wealthy merchant Elias Haskey Derby (owner of Derby House, part of the present-day national park site) created a side business smuggling jewels, foreign metals, art and other valuables into Salem. He realized he needed two things to grow his business: a network of tunnels to move the goods underground and a steady stream of new crew members for his ships (hard labor and rampant disease made less-than-attractive help wanted ads). Derby realized he could kill two birds with one stone by using a tunnel to a local brothel to kidnap young men to work for him.

Today, the brothel is a restaurant called Mercy Tavern, known as one of the most haunted places in Salem. Diners claim to hear voices and see sailors sitting at the bar, and employees report shouts and loud noises under the floorboards. There are plenty of rumors about what happened in those underground passages, but ironically, Derby was able to build the tunnel system by telling the town he wanted to revamp its marshlands into parks (which he did!).

Yellowstone National Park, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming

Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn is home to its fair share of ghost stories, from a crying child in sneakers who disappears when anyone tries to help him to a sea merchant jostling door handles and peering in windows.

Perhaps the most famous spirit is the Headless Bride of Room 127. Legend has it that in 1915, two newlyweds were violently arguing after the husband had gambled away all their money. He fled the park, and the bride wasn't seen for days. According to the story, hotel staff finally found her in the bathtub - without her head.

People claimed to see the bride floating around the inn, crying and upset, and the story became extremely well-known. Yet, in 1983, an assistant manager at the inn admitted to making the whole thing up. It remains unclear whether the murder actually happened, but the bride has made her way into park folklore regardless.

Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky

Before Mammoth Cave was protected by the National Park Service, it was privately owned, changing hands throughout the 1800s. Owners almost always offered tours to the public, even during the Civil War.

In 1839, a lawyer named John Croghan purchased the caves for $10,000 with even bigger plans: a tuberculosis sanatorium. Croghan believed the cave environment would treat or even cure the disease, since ancient archaeological finds were incredibly well preserved in the cave's depths. Enslaved people built huts (including two that still exist today) where 13 patients planned to live for a year. Public tours occasionally crossed paths with the patients, and visitors would hear echoing coughs and stumble on gaunt patients in hospital gowns by lantern light.

Initially, it did seem like the air quality was helping the patients get better, but things quickly took a turn: Five patients died, and the experiment was nixed. Visitors today recount hearing coughing and seeing the shuffling apparitions of the patients.

Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania

More than 7,800 soldiers lost their lives in July 1863 during one of the most intense battles in U.S. military history, so it's no wonder many consider Gettysburg one of the most haunted places in the country. While less densely haunted than other parts of the battlefield, park-goers can visit the home of the only civilian killed during the battle, the Jennie Wade House.

Mary Virginia "Jennie" Wade was visiting to help care for her sister's newborn baby and do her part to keep the soldiers fed. More than 150 bullets struck the house over the course of the fighting.

On the third and final day, an errant bullet flew through two closed doors and struck Wade as she was kneading bread dough in her sister's kitchen. The shot hit her torso and killed her instantly. She was eventually laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery after her mother campaigned to have her buried there with the soldiers from the battle. A perpetually raised American flag flies next to her monument, an honor she is one of only a few women in the U.S. to receive. Visitors say they see Wade walking through her family's home, wandering the fields and even appearing in photographs taken at the house.

About the author

Vanessa Pius Social Media Manager

As Social Media Manager, Vanessa advances NPCA's mission through creative storytelling and engaging the organization's online community.

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Ghost stories might scare your campfire circle. They can also offer hyperlocal histories for travel destinations around the country. Learn about a few spectral park visitors - if you dare - including kidnapped sailors and a skinny-dipping conservationist. Thank you to Danielle LaRock and Cassie Yahnian, hosts of the "National Park After Dark" podcast for sharing their research and stories with us!

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Theodore Roosevelt and the National Parks

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Theodore Roosevelt and the National Parks

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Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt, often called "the conservation president," impacted the National Park System well beyond his term in office. He doubled the number of sites within the National Park system. As President from 1901 to 1909, he signed legislation establishing five new national parks: Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Sullys Hill, North Dakota (later re-designated a game preserve); Mesa Verde, Colorado; and Platt, Oklahoma (now part of Chickasaw National Recreation Area). However another Roosevelt enactment had a broader effect: the Antiquities Act of June 8, 1906. The Antiquities Act enabled President Roosevelt and succeeding Presidents to proclaim historic landmarks, historic or prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest in federal ownership as national monuments.

Roosevelt did not hesitate to take advantage of this new executive authority. By the end of 1906 he had proclaimed four national monuments: On September 24 he proclaimed Devils Tower (Wyoming). On December 8, he proclaimed El Morro (New Mexico), Montezuma Castle (Arizona), and Petrified Forest (Arizona). Additionally, he interpreted the authority expansively, protecting a large portion of the Grand Canyon (Arizona) as a national monument in 1908. By the end of his term he had reserved six predominantly cultural areas and twelve predominantly natural areas in this manner. Half of the total land area was initially administered by the Agriculture Department and was later transferred to Interior Department jurisdiction, since the National Park Service would not be created until 1916.

Later Presidents have used the Antiquities Act to declare national monuments. For example, In 2018, the President used the authority of the Antiquties Act to create Camp Nelson National Monument . Many national monuments remain, while others have been enlarged into national parks or otherwise reclassified by Congress.

Recalling his legacy, Theodore Roosevelt is now commemorated at six units of the National Park System. Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in New York City, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Oyster Bay, New York, Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York, Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, and Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, DC, all trace his career and memorialize his contributions to America. Additionally, Theodore Roosevelt is one of four Presidents gracing Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. The National Park Service is honored to administer these park sites, and the many others Roosevelt made possible during his storied career as a conservationist.

Learn more about the history of the National Park Service , or explore more stories .

Read more about Theodore's conservation with birds here.

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Theodore Roosevelt and the National Park System - Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)

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Theodore Roosevelt, often called "the conservation president," impacted the National Park System well beyond his term in office. He doubled the number of sites within the National Park system.

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RESEARCH INITIATIVE: National parks have never been more popular, but they need protection from Washington's budget fights.

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http://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/national-parks/trump-utah-national-monument

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The Trump administration is trying to scrap a ban against uranium mining in the watershed near the country's most renowned natural wonder: the Grand Canyon.

The 20-year uranium mining ban-installed during the Obama administration in 2012-covers over one million acres of land near the Grand Canyon owned by the Forest Service. The proposal was released with a list of policy proposals that the Forest Service said are preventing the production of domestic energy, The Hill reported.

"The Forest Service should be advocating for a permanent mining ban, not for advancing private mining interests that threaten one of the natural wonders of the world," Amber Reimondo with the Grand Canyon Trust said in a statement. "The Grand Canyon and the people and communities that depend on it cannot be left to bear the risks of unfettered uranium mining, which is what will happen if the moratorium is removed."

The proposal, which was a response to an executive order Trump signed in March, "could re-open lands to mineral entry, and possibly exploration and development of uranium resources," Babete Anderson, a spokesperson for the service, said in an email to Newsweek. "There is no plan to do so at this time."

"The Executive Order requires the Forest Service to identify potential burdens to the development or use of commercial produced energy resources and then to examine these same potential burdens," said Anderson.

This isn't the first national park or monument threatened by the Trump administration.

In August, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke sent an executive report about what national monuments to modify as a result of Trump's executive order to review the status of certain national monuments.

That report- obtained by the Washington Post after the White House refused to release the report publicly-found that Zinke planned to shrink the boundaries of at least four and modify six others. Those four include Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou, Nevada's Gold Butte, Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.

Zinke justified the move, stating that "No President should use the authority under the Antiquites Act to restrict public access, prevent hunting and fishing, burden private land, or eliminate traditional land uses, unless such action is needed to protect the object."

Traditional land uses could include grazing, mining, and timber production, according to the documents obtained by the Washington Post.

"The recommendations I sent to the president on national monuments will maintain federal ownership of all federal land and protect the land under federal environmental regulations, and also provide a much needed change for the local communities who border and rely on these lands for hunting and fishing, economic development, traditional uses, and recreation," Zinke said in an August statement.

The department's secretive handling of the national monuments review has pushed six environmental organizations, led by Earthjustice, to file a lawsuit against the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Council on Environmental Quality for failing to respond to requests for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.

"The Trump administration continues its onslaught against America's national monuments, hoping to cover up its misdeeds by blocking public access to information crucial to the protection of these iconic places," Yvonne Yuting Chi, an attorney for Earthjustice, said in a statement.

The Interior "has no new announcements on the monument review at this time," and pointed to the Department of Justice to answer questions in regards to the lawsuit filed this week, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said in an email to Newsweek on Friday.

In a kick of irony at the end of October, the National Park Service announced that entrance fees to 17 of the most popular national parks, one being Yosemite National Park, would be raised to $70 in order to fund infrastructure maintenance.

The Interior Department estimates that the extra revenue will add up to $70 million per year-a far cry from the $11 billion maintenance needs and less than a quarter of Trump's proposed $400 million budget cut to the national parks, as reported by the Desert Sun.

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Trump Administration Threatens Parks and Monuments

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mystorybook.com

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Create your own storybook online. Make writing and publishing a book more fun with our picture book making tool!

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PIXTON

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Educators! Learn how to use Pixton in the classroom. Set up your classroom and begin teaching any subject in minutes through the super-power of comics.

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Untold Stories
The term "national park" conjures up thoughts of big, natural landscapes like Grand Canyon and Yosemite. But two-thirds of the National Park Service's 392 areas were created to protect historic or cultural resources, from colonial Boston to New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. And many of those parks lack the money and staff to use those resources to their fullest."We have an incredible collection of museum artifacts, and 45 percent of the Park Service collections have not even been catalogued," says James Nations of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). "We've got stuff, and we don't even know what we've got, and we don't have places to store it. We're missing opportunities to tell the story of America through our national parks."

Crumbling History
National parks protect the historic buildings in which America's history was made, places like Independence Hall, Ellis Island, and the San Antonio Missions. But some of these hallowed edifices are crumbling and in desperate need of repair. They're a big part of a $9.5 billion maintenance backlog that plagues the park system."We need to preserve and maintain those buildings because the stories are written in the stone and the bricks," NPCA's Nations says.

Wildlife Management
No park exists in isolation, and that fact is becoming increasingly clear as the areas surrounding parks are developed for living space, agriculture, mining, forestry, and more. The iconic species protected inside the parks don't recognize boundaries and must often move in and out of the parks to feed, mate, or migrate. If larger ecological wildlife corridors can't be maintained to include the lands outside of parks, many species may not survive within them either.

Foreign Invaders
National parks are inviting places, especially for non-native species that can cause havoc once they move in. Plants and insects often hitchhike to our shores on boats or airplanes while other species, like snakes, are intentionally imported for the exotic pet trade. When turned loose with no competition, invasive species can run amok in an ecosystem and send a park's native residents toward extinction.More than 6,500 non-native invasive species have been found in U.S. national parks. Seventy percent of them are plants, which encroach on a staggering seven million acres (2.8 million hectares) of our national parklands.

Adjacent Development
A Canadian company hopes to site North America's largest open-pit gold and copper mine right next to Alaska's remote Lake Clark National Park. Uranium prospecting is currently under way on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Sugar producers have long fouled waters with phosphorus pollution and disrupted critical flows to the Everglades.What happens on a park's borders can dramatically impact the environment inside the park itself. Mining, petroleum prospecting, clear-cut lumbering, and other developments are generally prohibited inside parks-but they still pose serious threats to water quality, clean air, and other vital aspects of the park environment.

Climate Change
If Earth's climate continues to change as scientists predict it will, the national parks will be impacted like the rest of the planet. Glaciers may melt away, as indeed they are at Glacier National Park in Montana. Fire seasons may grow in length and severity, and the landscape may shift under the feet of the parks' wild residents."Changes in temperature and precipitation can push species out of their previous ranges towards softer temperatures, either upwards in elevation or northward," says Nations. "But they don't recognize where the boundary is and in many cases that land is owned by someone else."

Water Issues
Some parks are already feeling drier these days, as increasing human demand shrinks supplies on which aquatic species depend. In Florida's Biscayne National Park, where freshwater arrives from the highly compromised Everglades ecosystem upstream, a freshwater shortage is becoming an issue even though 95 percent of the park remains covered with seawater.Ten parks are touched by the Colorado River and its tributaries, which are being drained of water by the growing cities and farmlands of an increasingly thirsty West. Less reliable precipitation on a warmer, drier Earth would make this growing problem worse.

Air Pollution
Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Southeast wasn't named for its smog, but it is one of many parks seriously affected by the problem. Air quality issues originate outside the parks. At Great Smoky, power plant and industrial emissions are blown by winds to the southern Appalachians and trapped there by the mountains.Air quality problems choke off views, poison plants, and even foul water. Recent air quality data show a glimmer of hope-visibility and ozone concentrations are stable or improving in most parks. However, in too many cases, stable means simply preserving a subpar status quo.

Transportation Troubles
National parks are the destination of many a great American road trip. But too many roads within the parks themselves are in disrepair and some pose a real danger to drivers. The same goes for many parts of the parks' transportation infrastructure, from shuttle buses to hiking trails.Repairs are always under way but it will take time and money to truly set things right. More than half of the Park Service's $9.5 billion maintenance backlog is earmarked for the transportation infrastructure that enables people to actually visit the parks.

Visitor Experience
Popular parks like Yosemite face overcrowding issues that would have amazed John Muir. Managers must balance open access with negative impacts on visitor experience and on park environments.Today's visitors also use parks in new ways. Snowmobilers prowl Yellowstone and pilots fly visitors over the Grand Canyon. Mountain bikers, motorboaters and many others all hope to enjoy their favorite pastimes in their favorite parks.Does allowing such activities enhance the park experience or detract from it? Managing preferences and park usage conflicts is a growing challenge for administrators-but NPS Chief of Public Affairs David Barna says the top priority is clear."When we have to make a choice between recreation and preservation, we will always choose preservation," he says, "and our decision will be based on our mandate, policies, and good science."

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Top Ten Issues Facing the National Parks -- National Geographic

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Untold Stories The term "national park" conjures up thoughts of big, natural landscapes like Grand Canyon and Yosemite. But two-thirds of the National Park Service's 392 areas were created to protect historic or cultural resources, from colonial Boston to New Mexico's Chaco Canyon.

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Explore the links below to find some of the most frequently requested information about the National Park Service. Need more information? See frequently asked questions and publications.

General Information

Links to Additional Resources

Budget Information : Download NPS budget-related publications.

Congressional Resources: The Office of Legislative and Congressional Affairs develops and implements strategies to advance NPS legislative initiatives and other interests relating to Congress.

Maps: Find maps of national parks and learn how we make maps and use them to manage our lands.

National Register Research: Search the National Register of Historic Properties Database, access the download center, and discover more about historic and archeological resources.

NP Gallery: This site offers access to a wide variety of digital images and documents.

Planning, Environment and Public Comment (PEPC): The National Park Service prepares a variety of planning and environmental documents to help guide resource management. This site contains all of the currently active projects.

Visitor Use Statistics: The Visitor Use Statistics Office coordinates visitor counting protocols and provides visitation statistics and forecasts.

Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA): Access the Electronic Reading Room, locate FOIA officers and learn more about the FOIA process.

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Facts & Figures (U.S. National Park Service)

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Explore the links below to find some of the most frequently requested information about the National Park Service. Need more information? See frequently asked questions and publications. Budget Information : Download NPS budget-related publications. Congressional Resources: The Office of Legislative and Congressional Affairs develops and implements strategies to advance NPS legislative initiatives and other interests relating to Congress.

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Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About National Parks - Photo Essays

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With Ken Burns' 12-hour documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea debuting on PBS, a look at some lesser-known facts about the most beloved public spaces in the U.S.

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Did you know bears were once encouraged to eat out of dumpsters and visitors were allowed to sit and watch? Can you name the first official national park? How about the location of where President Theodore Roosevelt mourned the death of his wife and mother?

Here are 10 fascinating, and sometimes bizarre, facts about the U.S. national park system that you know and love.

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10 Bizarre and Interesting Facts About the U.S. National Parks

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Did you know bears were once encouraged to eat out of dumpsters and visitors were allowed to sit and watch? Can you name the first official national park? How about the location of where President Theodore Roosevelt mourned the death of his wife and mother?

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America's National Parks Service celebrates its birthday on August 25 (101 years old this year!), but you don't need a special occasion to celebrate their beauty every day of the year.

One park not to be missed is Joshua Tree National Park, located at the convergence of the Colorado and Mojave Deserts in California. The park spans almost 800,000 acres and is famous for its tree-sized yuccas, called Joshua Trees. These trees are believed to have gotten their name from Mormon settlers, according to Lonely Planet, who thought the upward stretching branches resembled the Biblical prophet Joshua pointing the way to the promised land. Tourists visiting the weekend of April 18 will also save the $15 admission fee. Saguaro National Park is also a great destination to explore. Not only is it home to the largest cacti in the United States, but it also features strange wildlife that have adapted to swining temperatures and constant water shortage, such as jackrabbits (which cool off through their ears), javelinas, desert tortoises and a variety of reptiles and birds.

Wildlife lovers should visit Katmai Natinal Park, where in July and August, some of the park's 2,200 wild brown bears can be seen searcing for food. Many of the dominant males are known to fish for sockeye salmon at Brooks Falls, which features a wildlife observation platform for visitors to safely observe. Shenandoah National Park is also a great wildlife refuge, home to 200 bird species and 50 mammal species. Visitors also have an easy time spotting some of these creatures because many of the mammals, such as deer, are alrge and conspicuous.
(MORE: Travel Quiz - How Well Do You Know America's National Parks?)
So whether you want to take advantage of this fee-free weekend, relax at your local park or take a special wildlife tour, check out our slideshow above to see all 59 of America's incredible national parks.

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Celebrate America's National Parks (PHOTOS) | The Weather Channel

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America's National Parks Service celebrates its birthday on August 25 (101 years old this year!), but you don't need a special occasion to celebrate their beauty every day of the year. One park not to be missed is Joshua Tree National Park, located at the convergence of the Colorado and Mojave Deserts in California.

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These Were the Most Visited National Parks in 2015

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Ahead of their 100 year anniversary celebration, the National Park Service released of their annual visitors data.

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Also see:  http://blog.theclymb.com/out-there/5-national-park-ghost-stories/

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Bigfoot aside, the instances of otherworldly national parks visitors are almost too numerous to chronicle.

1. GREAT SAND DUNES

The Great Sand Dunes National Park is surrounded by San Luis Valley, a place where 60 UFOs have been spotted since 2000. Unexplainable cattle mutilations have also supported speculation that there's something highly unusual happening in the region-which may also contain portals to another universe.

2. MAMMOTH CAVE

At Mammoth Cave National Park, the ghost of Stephen Bishop, a slave and Mammoth Cave explorer who is buried nearby, is said to make occasional appearances. In the 19th century, Mammoth was also the site of a failed tuberculosis hospital; today, you can now reportedly hear the coughs of patients who perished while being treated.

3. GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS

The Norton Creek Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains is home to the legend of Spearfinger, a witch who'd disguise herself as an old woman, snatch children, and use her obsidian stone finger to cut out their livers, which she considered a delicacy. Another legend chronicles a man who was murdered while looking for his daughter, and now manifests as a light that leads hikers.

4. GRAND CANYON

The " Wailing Woman " haunts the Transept Trail at Grand Canyon National Park. According to legend, she committed suicide there in the 1920s after hearing that her husband and son had died while hiking. She floats around the trail in a white dress with blue flowers on stormy nights, slamming doors and haunting the Grand Canyon Lodge.

5. NEW JERSEY PINELANDS

At Batona Trail in the New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve, the Jersey Devil can be heard screaming at night-though it's much better to hear him than to see him. The creature is said to have the head of a dog, bat wings, horns and forked tail.

6. YOSEMITE

The cries of another tragic figure haunt Grouse Lake in Yosemite National Park. Legend has it that a Native American boy who drowned in the lake calls out to hikers for help. America's first park ranger, Galen Clark, heard the cries in 1857 and assumed they were from a lost dog. When he asked a band of Native American hunters about it that evening, they informed Clark of the story.

The Miwok Indians also believe that Yosemite's waterfalls are haunted by an evil wind called Po-ho-no. The wind draws people to the edge and pushes them off. And the spooky legends surrounding Yosemite don't stop there: The Ahwahnee Hotel is supposedly haunted, and the entire Tenaya Canyon was cursed by Chief Tenaya in 1851 when the U.S. Cavalry forced his tribe off their land.

7. GETTYSBURG

Battlefields, not surprisingly, often possess their own haunted histories. At Devil's Den, a hill in Gettysburg National Military Park, a barefoot ghost known as the "Tennessean" or "The Hippie" will point toward the Plum Run stream and say, "What you're looking for is over there," before disappearing.

8. CRATER LAKE

The Klamath Indians consider Crater Lake-a caldera and the deepest body of water in the U.S.-a sacred place. A legend states that it holds a spirit named Llao who was thrown into the lake by another spirit called Skell and devoured by monsters. In 2002, a tourist in a rowboat reported seeing an enormous creature swimming underneath her vessel. What's more, rangers regularly spot campfires on the lake's Wizard Island, but find no evidence of people or a fire when they go to investigate. (It's possible that Bigfoot or Sasquatch are to blame for those.)

9. YELLOWSTONE

Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park is also supposedly haunted. According to legend, a bride who was decapitated on her honeymoon now strolls around with her head tucked under her arm. Another woman in 1890s fashions has appeared floating at the foot of a bed in Room Number 2 at the Old Faithful Inn, and one worker reported seeing a fire extinguisher spin all by itself in the hallway.

10. HAWAII VOLCANOES

Pele-the volcano goddess, not the soccer player-inflicts severe punishment on anyone who steals from her during visits to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Every year, tourists walk off with souvenirs in the form of volcanic rocks, and more than a few of them seem to experience negative consequences afterward. In fact, thousands of pounds of mail addressed to "Queen Pele" are returned every year, begging her to lift the curse on them.

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10 National Parks and the Ghosts and Monsters Who Supposedly Live There

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Bigfoot aside, the instances of otherworldly national parks visitors are almost too numerous to chronicle. 1. GREAT SAND DUNES The Great Sand Dunes National Park is surrounded by San Luis Valley, a place where 60 UFOs have been spotted since 2000.

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Joshua Tree National Park, California

FAMOUS QUOTES CONCERNING THE NATIONAL PARKS

AN ACT TO IMPROVE THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE NATIONAL PARK SYSTEM

(General Authorities Act), 1970 (84 Stat. 825):

"...that the national park system, which began with establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, has since grown to include superlative natural, historic, and recreation areas in every major region of the United States...; that these areas, though distinct in character, are united through their inter-related purposes and resources into one national park system as cumulative expressions of a single national heritage; that, individually and collectively, these areas derive increased national dignity and recognition of their superb environmental quality through their inclusion jointly with each other in one national park system preserved and managed for the benefit and inspiration of all the people of the United States...."

Stephen T. Mather, NPS Director, 1917-1929:

"The parks do not belong to one state or to one section.... The Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon are national properties in which every citizen has a vested interest; they belong as much to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of Florida, as they do to the people of California, of Wyoming, and of Arizona."

"Who will gainsay that the parks contain the highest potentialities of national pride, national contentment, and national health? A visit inspires love of country; begets contentment; engenders pride of possession; contains the antidote for national restlessness.... He is a better citizen with a keener appreciation of the privilege of living here who has toured the national parks."

Newton B. Drury, NPS Director, 1940-1951:

"The American way of life consists of something that goes greatly beyond the mere obtaining of the necessities of existence. If it means anything, it means that America presents to its citizens an opportunity to grow mentally and spiritually, as well as physically. The National Park System and the work of the National Park Service constitute one of the Federal Government's important contributions to that opportunity. Together they make it possible for all Americans--millions of them at first-hand--to enjoy unspoiled the great scenic places of the Nation.... The National Park System also provides, through areas that are significant in history and prehistory, a physical as well as spiritual linking of present-day Americans with the past of their country."

George B. Hartzog, Jr., NPS Director, 1964-1972:

"The national park idea has been nurtured by each succeeding generation of Americans. Today, across our land, the National Park System represents America at its best. Each park contributes to a deeper understanding of the history of the United States and our way of life; of the natural processes which have given form to our land, and to the enrichment of the environment in which we live."

Edwin C. Bearss, NPS Chief Historian, 1981-1994:

"As we Americans celebrate our diversity, so we must affirm our unity if we are to remain the 'one nation' to which we pledge allegiance. Such great national symbols and meccas as the Liberty Bell, the battlefields on which our independence was won and our union preserved, the Lincoln Memorial, the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and numerous other treasures of our national park system belong to all of us, both legally and spiritually. These tangible evidences of our cultural and natural heritage help make us all Americans."

J. Horace McFarland, president, American Civic Assn., 1916:

"The parks are the Nation's pleasure grounds and the Nation's restoring places.... The national parks...are an American idea; it is one thing we have that has not been imported."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt:

"There is nothing so American as our national parks.... The fundamental idea behind the parks...is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us."

Wallace Stegner, 1983:

"National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."

George M. Wright, Joseph S. Dixon, and Ben H. Thompson, Fauna of the National Parks of the United States, 1933.

"But our national heritage is richer than just scenic features; the realization is coming that perhaps our greatest national heritage is nature itself, with all its complexity and its abundance of life, which, when combined with great scenic beauty as it is in the national parks, becomes of unlimited value. This is what we would attain in the national parks."

Freeman Tilden to George B. Hartzog, Jr., ca. 1971

"I have always thought of our Service as an institution, more than any other bureau, engaged in a field essentially of morality--the aim of man to rise above himself, and to choose the option of quality rather than material superfluity."

Theodore Roosevelt, in The Outlook, February 3, 1912, p. 246. See, Paul Schullery, Theodore Roosevelt: Wilderness Writings, 142.

"The establishment of the National Park Service is justified by considerations of good administration, of the value of natural beauty as a National asset, and of the effectiveness of outdoor life and recreation in the production of good citizenship."

Frederick Law Olmsted, "The Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees," (1865), in Landscape Architecture 43:1 (October 1952).

"It is the will of the nation as embodied in the act of Congress [in setting aside the Yosemite government reservation in 1864] that this scenery shall never be private property, but that like certain defensive points upon our coast it shall be solely for public purposes.

Two classes of considerations may be assumed to have influenced the action of Congress. The first and less important is the direct and obvious pecuniary advantage which comes to a commonwealth from the fact that it possesses objects which cannot be taken out of its domain, that are attractive to travellers and the enjoyment of which is open to all.

A more important class of considerations, however, remains to be stated. These are considerations of a political duty of grave importance to which seldom if ever before has proper respect been paid by any government in the world but the grounds of which rest on the same eternal base of equity and benevolence with all other duties of republican government. It is the main duty of government, if it is not the sole duty of government, to provide means of protection for all its citizens in the pursuit of happiness against all the obstacles, otherwise insurmountable, which the selfishness of individuals or combinations of individuals is liable to interpose to that pursuit."

Joseph L. Sax, "America's National Parks: Their Principles, Purposes, and Prospects, Natural History, Supplement, October 1976.

"As Olmsted [FLO, Sr.] demonstrated, the question in a democratic society is not the acceptance or rejection of what the people want. People get the recreation that imaginative leadership gives them.... The essence of recreational policy in a democratic society, he believed, was the willingness to treat the ordinary citizen as something other than a passive customer to be managed and entertained. Olmsted based his theory of recreation on what he called "a faith in the refinement of the republic," a faith in the possibility of liberation from self-interested manipulation."

Stephen Mather, internal document, February 1925.

"The primary duty of the National Park Service is to protect the national parks and national monuments under its jurisdiction and keep them as nearly in their natural state as this can be done in view of the fact that access to them must be provided in order that they may be used and enjoyed. All other activities of the bureau must be secondary (but not incidental) to this fundamental function relating to care and protection of all areas subject to its control."

Biologist Charles C. Adams, in "Ecological Conditions in National Forests and in National Parks," The Scientific Monthly, June 1925.

"It is fortunate indeed that the forest service started with a distinct professional leadership and this was possible because European forestry was highly developed. But the idea of wild or wilderness national parks is a distinctly American idea and did not have a European tradition. The European tradition is about formal park design rather than large wild parks, such as our national parks. For this reason we must develop our own policies for the parks...."

return to Thinking About National Park Service History page

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National Park Service History: Famous Quotes Concerning the National Parks

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Joshua Tree National Park, California FAMOUS QUOTES CONCERNING THE NATIONAL PARKS AN ACT TO IMPROVE THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE NATIONAL PARK SYSTEM (General Authorities Act), 1970 (84 Stat.

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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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Not sure which of the 58 national parks you should visit this year? No worries—we’ve handpicked 10 of the best.

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Washington Post article

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A visitor's guide to the country's 63 spectacular national parks

The landscape of Yellowstone National Park. (Brian Flaherty/The Washington Post)

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America's natural heritage

The essential guide to all 62 U.S. National Parks

By Rebecca Powers
Sort the parks. Name Size State Annual attendance

A bus, one of many tours, drives through Denali National Park. (Tim Rains/National Park Service)

Denali, Alaska
"In the stillness of Denali, two sounds dominate the landscape: the river (and its tributaries) and the wind." - Justin Ralls, composer and conductor

Size: 6,075,029 acres (park and preserve)

Founded: As Mount McKinley Park, 1917; renamed Denali Park and Preserve (and roughly tripled in size), 1980

Annual attendance: 601,152

This subarctic wilderness is home to North America's tallest mountain (Denali, formerly McKinley), as well as glaciers, wildflowers, caribou, moose and Dall sheep. The park's 92-mile road takes visitors into a place where the summer solstice brings nearly 21 hours of daylight and the winter solstice yields less than five. Park rangers say weather is fickle; average summer temperatures can range from 33 to 75 degrees. Despite the inherent extremes of its remote location, this park is home to 172 species of birds and hundreds of mosses. In addition to viewing the rugged landscape and large mammals, activities include various bus tours and ranger walks. (Cars are limited to the first 15 miles of paved road.) Popular walks include hiking to the kennels, where sled-dog demonstrations are staged. Scenes of the Sean Penn-directed "Into the Wild" were filmed here.

A mountain range at Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve. (National Park Service)

Gates of the Arctic, Alaska
"It seemed as if time had dropped away a million years and we were back in a primordial world." - Robert Marshall, forester and wilderness activist, who coined the park's name

Size: 8,472,506 acres (park and preserve)

Founded: National monument, 1978; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 10,518

Visitors walk or fly into this northernmost park, which is as much sanctuary as it is vacationland. It offers no established trails or visitor facilities; solitude is listed as one of its many assets. The Park Service describes it as a "gaunt beauty" and "a place of profound quiet." Self-sufficient outdoor enthusiasts who venture into this remote land 240 miles north of Fairbanks, are treated to Brooks Range peaks, six wild rivers and tundra (vast, flat and treeless land with permanently frozen subsoil).

Visitors are encouraged to leave the territory as untouched as they found it. This is a place buffered from change. An indigenous community, Anaktuvuk Pass, lies within park boundaries, and traditional human subsistence uses of the land are allowed. Also at home here are grizzly and black bears, moose, Dall sheep, wolverines, musk oxen and red foxes. The western Arctic caribou herd uses ancient migration routes through this area's mountains. Humans who venture here are somewhat less mobile, with backpackers often achieving only six miles a day.

For those without backcountry skills, local air taxis provide flight-seeing trips, day trips or overnight campouts at remote locations.

Icebergs stranded at low tide in Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve. (Sunny K. Awazahura/Reed/Alamy)

Glacier Bay, Alaska
"It gives you the feeling that you are a part of this magical world." - Bertha Franulovich, Glacier Bay descendant and cultural heritage guide, at Alaskanativevoices.com

Size: 3,281,789 acres (park and preserve)

Founded: National monument, 1925; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 672,087

No roads lead to Glacier Bay. And the closest town, Gustavus, has no stoplight or fast food. However, camping and accommodations at the Glacier Bay Lodge, as well as bed-and-breakfasts, are available in and near the park. Many tourists simply take in the view from the deck of a cruise ship. The true luxury here, fans might say, is the chance to hear or see glaciers as they crash, along with humpback whales, sea otters, sea lions, bald eagles and harbor porpoise.

Although remote by lower-48 standards - access is via sea or air - the maritime climate here is somewhat more temperate than in other northern parks. Summer highs average from 50 to 60 degrees. That said, rangers suggest being prepared for changes in weather. (Think gloves and fleece.) As one Park Service ranger put it: "XtraTuf boots are considered Southeast Alaskan sneakers."

Newcomers here may gain an expanded vocabulary. "Calving" is the term for great blocks of ice breaking loose from glaciers and crashing into the water. Also, the end of a glacier is a "snout."

In 2018, the Hoonah Indian Association and the park erected a totem to depict the healing taking place between the National Park Service and the Tlingit People, for whom Glacier Bay is homeland.

Mount Martin is one of Katmai National Park's active volcanoes. (National Park Service)

Katmai, Alaska
"The whole valley as far as the eye could reach was full of hundreds, no thousands - literally, tens of thousands - of smokes curling up from its fissured floor." - Robert F. Griggs, botanist and explorer, in his 1922 book "The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes"

Size: 4,093,228 acres (park and preserve)

Founded: National monument, 1918; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 84,167

This site of the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century (1912) has 14-plus volcanoes. In the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes (the eruption site), volcanic ash is eroding into an "intricately carved badlands," the Park Service says.

Visitors arrive via boat or float plane to observe the impressive population of brown bears. (The park is home to about 2,200 of them. They can grow to weigh more than 1,000 pounds.)

There are other natural assets in this park, which filmmaker John Grabowska described as a "cloud-cloaked landscape." Katmai (pronounced "cat-my") supports moose, caribou, wolves, lynxes, wolverines, river otters, minks, martens, porcupines, snowshoe hares and beavers, as well as sea lions, sea otters and whales.

Here, 290 air miles from Anchorage, the Brooks Lodge offers food, lodging and ranger programs. Other lodgings also are available. Popular park activities include bus tours, fishing, hiking and backcountry adventures.

Bear Glacier, the longest in Kenai Fjords National Park. (National Park Service)

Kenai Fjords, Alaska
"It is spectacular." - President Obama

Size: 669,650 acres

Founded: National monument, 1978; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 356,601

The smallest national park in Alaska, it has the largest ice field that is contained totally within the United States. Slightly more than half the land here is covered in ice that is thousands of feet thick.

In this frozen territory with more than 30 glaciers, mountain peaks that pierce the ice are called nunataks. Mountaineering visitors seek out that rugged vista by crossing the ice field. (April is considered the best time for that effort; expertise is a necessity because, as the Park Service advises on its website, there is "the possibility of being pinned down by winds and whiteout for days at a time."

Also thrilling, but less grueling, are sightseeing-boat excursions that depart Resurrection Bay. They offer views of wildlife and glaciers. Look for pillow-shaped basalt, spires, cliffs and coves in the various surfaces.

Sightseeing from a kayak also is popular. (A guide is strongly recommended.)

Kenai Fjords is reachable via rail, plane, cruise ship and car. The Seward Highway, which is a National Scenic Byway and All-American Road, makes driving there half the pleasure.

Dunes at Kobuk Valley National Park. (Laura Cattrall/National Park Service)

Kobuk Valley, Alaska
"Where Alaska meets 'Lawrence of Arabia.' " - Anchorage Museum, in its promotion of the exhibition "Arctic Desert: Kobuk Valley National Park"

Size: 1,750,716 acres

Founded: National monument, 1978; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 15,766

National parks have the ability to shatter our assumptions. Here, 35 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun does not set from early June to early July, sand dunes reach as high as 100 feet and summer temperatures can reach 100 degrees.

The dunes (Great Kobuk, Little Kobuk and Hunt River) are Ice Age relics that wouldn't, as the Park Service says on its website, "look out of place in the Sahara."

The views provide a glimpse into the planet's past via the ecosystem of Beringia, the 1,000-mile-wide expanse of grassland that once connected Asia and North America during the last Ice Age. Here, 15,000 years ago, woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats roamed the valley.

Enjoying Kobuk Valley's vistas doesn't come easily. There are no roads or visitor facilities here. Plan to fly via a commercial airline from Anchorage or Fairbanks. Authorized air taxis fly into the park, offering the less-arduous option of "flightseeing." Summer visitors to this park, named for the Inupiat Eskimos' word for "big river," may bring their own packable boats and have pilots drop them off for a float through the park.

The home of Richard L. Proenneke on Upper Twin Lake in Lake Clark National Park. (Kent Miller/National Park Service)

Lake Clark, Alaska
"Silence closed in around me and it was a good feeling." - Richard L Proenneke, naturalist, in "One Man's Wilderness"

Size: 4,030,110 acres (park and preserve)

Founded: National monument, 1978; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 17,157

Majestic volcanoes and a humble, hand-hewn cabin are among the features that draw visitors to this wilderness park.

Its two active volcanoes are registered as National Natural Landmarks. And the cabin? That was built and occupied by naturalist Richard L. Proenneke, who first came to the upper of the Twin Lakes here in 1962 to visit friends. Six years later, on his own building site, he harvested spruce trees and began construction of the cabin where he lived for 30 years. He became known for his advocacy and journals (available in book form).

The cabin is in a roadless wilderness reachable by backpacking from other areas of the park or via small planes that land on the upper lake. The flight from Anchorage is less than an hour; flying time from Port Alsworth is about 30 minutes.

This park has been continuously inhabited since early prehistoric times and remains sparsely populated. Activities for visitors include hiking, bear watching, kayaking, fishing, rafting and winter biking on fat-tired cycles.

The Crystalline Hills at Wrangel-St. Elias National Park. (National Park Service)

Wrangell-St. Elias, Alaska
"A little-known Alaska full of names that ring with romance. ... The Mile High Cliffs. Disenchantment Bay." - John Grabowska, filmmaker, in "Crown of the Continent"

Size: 13,175,791 acres (park and preserve)

Founded: National monument, 1978; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 74,518

The wild character of this vast region is due, in part, to its sheer size. This, the country's largest contiguous wilderness, is the size of Yellowstone and Yosemite combined with an entire country - Switzerland. It has a glacier that's larger than Rhode Island. It's also vertically impressive. Mount Saint Elias is the country's second-highest peak; it also claims nine of the 16 highest mountains in the United States. Within its boundaries are the ghost town of Kennecott, a remnant of copper-mining days; and the town of Yakutat, which is a traditional fishing village of the indigenous Tlingit people. It is reachable by boat or plane. Two roads travel into the park, and they are not regularly maintained during winter months. Drivers should be aware that fuel options are limited. Because the words "rugged" and "remote" define this park, visiting motorists are advised to check road conditions on the Alaska state website.

Camel Rock, near the village of Lauli'i, in the National Park of American Samoa. (Sorin Colac/Alamy)

National Park of American Samoa, Territory of American Samoa
"[Its] super-corals may hold clues to saving coral reefs everywhere." - National Parks Conservation Association

Size: 8,257

Founded: Authorized, 1988; established, 1993

Annual attendance: 60,006

"Samoa" means sacred earth, and visitors to this Polynesian paradise are encouraged to exhibit the implied respect. Here, in the only national park south of the equator, beaches are among the world's most beautiful. But this is not a cabana-style destination. Those who fly from California to Honolulu to Pago Pago International Airport typically are seeking something more rare.

The effort of traveling 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii is rewarded by rain forests and extensive coral reefs. (Bring your own snorkel or diving gear; air tanks may be rented.)

In contrast to most U.S. parks, the only land mammals here are three types of bats, and the fruit bats have three-foot wingspans. Much more diverse is the underwater population of at least 800 native fish and 200 coral species, as well as rare and endangered sea turtles and humpback whales. In addition to snorkeling and swimming, bird watching and hiking are popular activities.

Visitors are encouraged to learn about the 3,000-year-old Samoan culture in advance. Modesty and humility are advised.

Mather Point, at the South Rim, in Grand Canyon National Park. (Michael Quinn/National Park Service)

Grand Canyon, Arizona
"It became an obsession. ... I was determined to put it all to music." - Ferde Grofé, composer of "The Grand Canyon Suite"

Size: 1,201,647 acres

Founded: National monument, 1908; national park, 1919

Annual attendance: 5,974,411

The Colorado River gorge is notable for its depth (one mile, on average), as well as its variegated colors. It's regarded as one of the seven wonders of the natural world and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The organization describes it on its website as "the most spectacular gorge in the world."

Its dramatic beauty draws visitors from around the world. In a 2005 tourism study, 17 percent of Grand Canyon visitors needed a passport to get to it.

Vistas here have moods. Hues change by time of day and season, and canyon views vary by the perspective from all four directions (rims).

The South Rim (open all year) is the most accessible and offers classic views most associated with the canyon. Wheelchair-accessible bus tours are available. (Reservations are a must.) The Bright Angel Trail is smooth and easy to navigate. The North Rim is smaller, less visited and typically is cooler.

Those who hike to the bottom pass, geologically speaking, through a third of the earth's existence. At the base of this naturally carved spectacle is the Colorado River, which draws water from seven states and travels 1,450 miles from its Rocky Mountains source to the Gulf of California.

The Jasper Forest Pedestal Logs at Petrified Forest National Park. (National Park Service)

Petrified Forest, Arizona
"A kaleidoscope fashioned by God's hand." - John Muir, naturalist

Size: 221,390 acres

Founded: National monument, 1906; national park, 1962

Annual attendance: 643,588

A faded remnant of the historic Route 66 unpaved roadbed here is a mere newcomer within the surrounding context of ancient fossils going back more than 200 million years, Pueblo structures and petroglyphs, which are visible on Newspaper Rock.

The park is best known for having the world's largest and most colorful collection of petrified wood. The brilliant hues - blue, purple, red, yellow, black and brown - come from the elements that replaced the organic materials. The petrified wood, which weighs about 160 to 200 pounds per cubic foot, was deposited in the park's various forests more than 200 million years ago.

Although the terrain is challenging, the main park road runs 28 miles, with spurs and viewpoints along the way. Bicycles are permitted in paved and public areas. Among the sites of interest is the 1920s-era Painted Desert Inn National Historic Landmark, two miles from the north entrance. The former Route 66 accommodation, now restored as a museum, overlooks the Painted Desert, the multicolored badlands that stretch nearly to the Grand Canyon.

Cactuses at dusk in Saguaro National Park. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

Saguaro, Arizona
"It ranks with the great redwoods." - Homer L. Shantz, botanist and president of the University of Arizona in the early 1900s

Size: 92,876 acres

Founded: National monument, 1933; national park, 1994

Annual attendance: 1,020,226

In addition to the famed giant cactuses, much of the park is a vast, federally designated wilderness that includes a desert ecosystem, mountains and Native American cultural traditions.

Among its natural wonders is this: It can take the saguaro 10 years to reach a height of one inch. After a century, it can hit 15 feet and display the beginning of its first arm. After 200 years, a saguaro reaches its full average height of 45 feet. Fully hydrated examples can weigh up to 4,800 pounds.

The park has two separate districts: Tucson Mountain (west) and Rincon Mountain (east), each with its own entry center. The west side has the largest stands of saguaro and the east has sky islands (mountains rising from the desert) with diverse animal life.

Highlights may be viewed via accessible trails, picnic areas and interpretive centers.

Along the Tufa Terrace Trail in Hot Springs National Park. (Stephen Saks/Alamy)

Hot Springs, Arkansas
"After Hot Springs Reservation was reestablished as government property, the area rapidly changed from a rough frontier town to an elegant spa city." - Sharon Shugart, museum specialist, Hot Springs National Park

Size: 5,544 acres

Founded: Federal protection, 1832; national park, 1921

Annual attendance: 1,467,153

The oldest designated area protected by the Park Service is also one of the most colorful. Hot Springs' therapeutic waters have attracted people since Native Americans called this the "Valley of the Vapors" and bathed here for the reputed healing powers. In 1541, Hernando de Soto became the first European explorer to visit Hot Springs.

Centuries later, Hot Springs became a hotbed of gambling and outlaws. Jesse and Frank James, Al Capone and Charles "Lucky" Luciano all found their way here. Luciano met his not-so-lucky downfall in Hot Springs when a New York City police detective spotted him.

Eight bathhouses, constructed between 1892 and 1923, still stand. They and the brick Grand Promenade were declared a National Historic Landmark district in 1987. The park visitor center and museum are inside the Fordyce Bathhouse.

Nature paths also were laid down early in the park's history; hiking is a popular pastime.

The water continues to flow at a rate of 700,000 gallons a day, at a temperature of 143 degrees, and may be experienced by visitors at spas and elsewhere. Here, about an hour southwest of Little Rock, tourists may take a traditional thermal bath at Buckstaff Bathhouse, Quapaw Baths and Spa or the Arlington Hotel.

Park visitors may use the fountains to fill bottles with drinking water.

A kayaker navigates around Arch Rock in Channel Islands National Park. (Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Channel Islands, California
"Fifteen million people lived only 20 miles away, but here, we couldn't have known it." - Cole and Elizabeth on Switchbackkids.com

Size: 249,561 acres

Founded: National monument (two islands, Anacapa and Santa Barbara), 1938; national park (all five islands and surrounding waters), 1980

Annual attendance: 409,630

Although this park is just off the coast of Southern California, it remains remote. The archipelago, often called the "Galapagos of North America," enjoys solitude because it's reachable only by air or sea. (Mainland visitor centers are in Ventura and Santa Barbara.) Once there, sightseers may explore on foot or with boats and kayaks. And they must bring food and water. There are no concessions. Campground facilities are primitive, fires are not allowed and advance planning is recommended.

Such limitations emphasize and maintain the wild beauty and deep history. The park and marine sanctuary comprise five (of the eight) islands and the surrounding waters. The marine sanctuary spans 1,470 square miles surrounding the islands.

The sea life there sustained and protected native dwellers, whose ancestry dates back to some of the oldest-documented inhabitants of North America. Chumash and Tongva people built cultures based on the sea, which they navigated in redwood-plank canoes.

The islands' past also includes sheep-and-cattle ranching. Hikers may see remaining historic ranch buildings, as well as forests, ocean vistas and such sea life as common dolphins, migrating Pacific gray whales, California sea lions and northern elephant seals.

The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park. (David Walter Banks)

Death Valley, California
"It's my favorite place on earth. I feel at home there, which is bizarre because it's so arid. ... The beauty is in its starkness." - T.J. Scott, director of "Valley of Death"

Size: 3,408,396 acres

Founded: National monument, 1933; national park, 1994

Annual attendance: 1,740,945

The hottest, driest place in North America is surprisingly vibrant. It is the largest national park in the lower 48 states, and within its boundaries are wildflowers, waterfalls, oases, geological color, fish, migrating birds and the human comforts of food, lodging and swimming - even a saloon.

It remains best known, however, for its extremes, including the highest accurate temperature so far recorded on Earth (134 degrees, in 1913). Although its reputation is forbidding, Death Valley is highly accessible by car, mountain bike, on foot or horseback (seasons and weather permitting). This park, which lies primarily in California and partly in Nevada, has more than 785 miles of roads.

Here, there are evolutionary sights as well as wildlife and cultural history. The Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, for example, lived in the region, and the village of Timbisha at Furnace Creek is within the park's boundaries.

Visitors should expect multi-colored rocks, ghost towns, petroglyphs, bighorn sheep, a spring-fed waterfall and dunes. Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America (282 feet below sea level) is a vast array of salt flats. Another area of stark beauty is the Devil's Golf Course, where rock salt has been eroded into jagged spires.

Its otherworldly landscape has appeared in several films. Among the best known is the first "Star Wars" movie, in which Death Valley poses as the planet Tatooine.

One of many sculpturelike trees at Joshua Tree National Park. (Brian Flaherty)

Joshua Tree, California
"I speak for the trees." - The eponymous main character of "The Lorax," Dr. Seuss's famous children's book, in a quote often used in the park's publications

Size: 795,156 acres

Founded: National monument, 1936; national park, 1994

Annual attendance: 2,988,547

The tranquility, rocks and sculpturelike trees of this arid landscape have attracted recording artists (perhaps most notably the Eagles and U2), prospectors, Native Americans, Mormon settlers and a determined California socialite.

Well before Mormons allegedly named the Yucca brevifolia after biblical figure Joshua because its limbs resembled arms outstretched in supplication, Native Americans used the tree's tough leaves for making baskets and sandals, and ate Its flower buds and seeds.

Settlers, ranchers and miners saw the territory as ripe for raising cattle and digging for gold. They used the Joshua tree's limbs and trunks for fencing and corrals. Perhaps they should have named it the "giving tree." But among those who wanted to give back was Pasadena socialite Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, who advocated for the area's protection.

Today, this park draws rock climbers, hikers, geologic sightseers and stargazers. Although its land includes two deserts, it is highly accessible via roads (including an 18-mile tour), campgrounds and thousands of climbing routes.

Near Palm Springs and just 140 miles east of Los Angeles, some of the darkest night skies in Southern California are found here. Joshua Tree offers many visitors their first clear view of the Milky Way.

A hiker atop Fin Dome at the Rae Lakes Overlook in Kings Canyon National Park. (Tom Grundy/Alamy)

Kings Canyon, California
"As close to heaven as you can possibly get on this Earth." - Betty White, actress, for the Wilderness Society
Here, 60 miles from Fresno (California's fifth-largest city), trees tower and canyons plunge. Nearly 150 years ago, naturalist John Muir called this area a "rival to Yosemite." Today, that observation applies to Kings Canyon and Sequoia, the national park next door.

Among the highlights here is the 268-feet-tall General Grant tree, the second-largest tree in the world (the largest is in Sequoia, by the way). In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge named it the Nation's Christmas Tree. Three decades later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated it a national shrine (the only living thing to be so named) in memory of the fallen men and women of the armed forces. Redwood Canyon shelters the world's largest remaining grove of giant sequoia trees.

Kings Canyon is a wide glacial valley with hundreds of miles of trails that range from easy to strenuous. The Wilderness Society lists the park's Rae Lakes among its 30 prettiest lakes in wild lands. They note that Rae Lakes is actress Betty White's "soul place."

Hiking opportunities here include paved trails that accommodate wheelchair users and strollers. Lodging and food, as well as ranger-led tours and an in-park shuttle, are available. Other activities in this landscape of dramatically disparate elevations include rock climbing and, in winter, snowshoeing.

Fall colors at Cliff Lake in Lassen Volcanic National Park. (National Park Service)

Lassen Volcanic, California
"This park has everything that a geologist could wish for." - Scott Burns, geologist at Portland State University, on the website of the Geological Society of the Oregon Country

Size: 106,589 acres

Founded: National monument, 1907; national park, 1916

Annual attendance: 517,039

Devastation is part of the natural beauty here; Lassen Peak erupted in 1915. The volcanic explosion had been the last in the Cascade Range until Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980.

Today, Lassen visitors can easily view fumaroles (steam vents) and gurgling, boiling mud pots.

The Devastated Area interpretive trail is a short, easy walk that highlights the effects of the eruptions. Sights include pink and gray lava rocks.

Touring by car also is easy. The park, 50 miles east of Redding, has vehicle entrances.

The Wilderness Society lists this, probably California's snowiest place, among its 20 prettiest national parks in winter, citing the vistas of snow-topped volcanoes and smoky steam vents, as well as such activities as sledding (with mountain views), snowshoeing to suit a range of experience levels and backcountry skiing. This park gets double billing from the Wilderness Society, which also puts Helen Lake, formed by a crater at Mount Lassen, among its 30 prettiest lakes in wild lands.

Peaks in the Bear Gulch Day Use Area at Pinnacles National Park. (National Park Service)

Pinnacles, California
"It served as the backdrop for John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' and 'East of Eden.' " - Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), in the Congressional Record in 2012

Size: 26,686 acres

Founded: National monument, 1908; national park 2013

Annual attendance: 177,224

This landscape, created by volcanic eruption 23 million years ago, lies just outside today's epicenter of modern technology.

In his letter of support, documentarian Ken Burns called this area, about 120 miles south of San Francisco, a "critical record of geological time" that helps visitors "understand the vast tectonic forces that shaped - and still shape - our continent."

Remarkable on their own, the rocky spires and caves also serve as a setting for hiking trails and as a backdrop for nature. Among the notable inhabitants here are the California condors, which have wingspans as wide as 10 feet. Early-morning visitors to the High Peaks area of the park may see condors roosting in the rock formations or in gray pines before they begin soaring on currents of warm air, the Park Service says. Pinnacles also is home to North America's greatest concentration of bees, which may be due to the wide variety of wildflowers that bloom here in March and April.

Other sights include views of the San Andreas Fault, which may be seen from some of the 32 miles of trails.

Mouth of the Klamath River at sunrise in Redwood National Park. (National Park Service)

Redwood, California
"They are not like any trees we know. ... They are ambassadors from another time." - John Steinbeck in "Travels with Charley: In Search of America"
Like factors known to contribute to human longevity, there are ingredients that contribute to the life span of redwoods. Fog and tannin are two elements. Here, a six-hour drive north of San Francisco on the Pacific Coast, a quarter of the moisture that sustains the giant redwoods and other plants comes in the form of fog. Winter (October to April) also brings 60 to 80 inches of precipitation.

Tannin in redwood bark makes it resistant to insects. The official status (one national park and three state parks are combined, here) also helps by sheltering the trees from human threats.

One way to experience this area is via bicycle. Although most national parks prohibit backcountry biking, Redwood offers some opportunity on rehabilitated logging roads. Hiking and camping also are popular. More than 200 miles of trails weave through prairies, old-growth redwood forests and beaches.

Cascading stalactite and stalagmite formations in the Dome Room at Crystal Cave in Sequoia National Park. (John Walker/Alamy)

Sequoia, California
"The big tree is nature's forest masterpiece and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things." - John Muir, naturalist, in "Our National Parks"
This second-oldest national park (after Yellowstone) was the first dedicated to protecting a living organism, the giant sequoia. Here stands the largest (by volume) tree on Earth: The General Sherman tree. It stands at 275 feet, weighs nearly 4.2 million pounds and is estimated to be between 2,300 and 2,700 years old.

Sequoia is connected to neighboring Kings Canyon by the Generals Highway. Together, they are estimated to possess a third of all naturally occurring giant sequoias.

Although visitors here spend much of their time looking up, one of the park highlights is below ground. The Crystal Cave is a cavern of marble polished by subterranean streams. A tour with a cave naturalist will showcase rare minerals and dramatic formations. Summer visitors may appreciate the cave's constant temperature of 48 degrees.

Hiking is a popular activity in the park and the Mineral King area offers several days hikes that offer panoramic views of the southern Sierras.

A boy takes in the view at Yosemite National Park. (David Walter Banks)

Yosemite, California
"None can escape its charms. ... You will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree." - John Muir, naturalist, in "John of the Mountains"

Size: 761,748 acres

Founded: Grant protection, 1864; national park, 1890

Annual attendance: 4,422,861

Yosemite evokes an immediate mental image of Ansel Adams's famed black-and-white photographs - his "Moon and Half Dome," among many others. It's also the focus of much modern-day fascination - think of the attention surrounding the first free climb of El Capitan's difficult Dawn Wall in 2015 and popular culture (cartoon character Yosemite Sam and the setting of "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," for example).

That said, man and this Sierra Nevada landscape have been linked for 3,000 years. There is a deep history of indigenous people here.

Today, this glacier-carved parkland less than three hours from Sacramento is a tourism magnet for recreation, photography, sightseeing, geology and culture.

Many visitors head to the picturesque Yosemite Valley, but that section makes up only 1 percent of the park. This protected land is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site and is designated by the American Bird Conservancy as Globally Important Bird Area. More than 60 Yosemite properties are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. They include the Wawona Covered Bridge, the Yosemite Valley Chapel, the Tioga Pass Entrance, the Ahwahnee Hotel (now Majestic Yosemite Hotel) and the Rangers' Club.

Buildings here reflect the Park Service's rustic architecture style, which is said to have been born in Yosemite. The Rangers' Club, which still houses seasonal crew, is one example.

The club building, which opened in 1920, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1985. The style, influenced by architecture of the era, was designed to blend seamlessly with the surrounding natural setting.

The Inner Canyon at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. (Lisa Lynch/National Park Service)

Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Colorado
"An eye-popping chasm." - J. Carlson and D. Noe, in the Colorado Geological Survey's Rock Talk newsletter

Size: 30,780 acres

Founded: National monument, 1933; national park, 1999

Annual attendance: 432,818

Because this canyon is so deep and narrow, it's often described as a gash or slit in the earth that allows sunlight to fully reach the bottom only at midday.

The Park Service calls this protected area of Southwest Colorado (264 miles from Denver) a "vertical wilderness," with some of the steepest cliffs, oldest rocks and craggiest spires in North America. The Park Service says the gorge reaches a depth of 2,722 feet. Its narrowest point is 40 feet.

Park visitors may hike, drive and camp. Trails range from easy to strenuous. However, climbing here is for highly experienced experts only.

Driving routes also provide access to views of the chasm.

The seven-mile South Rim Drive has 12 overlooks, most reached by walking a short trail. North Rim access is via a gravel road that includes six overlooks and some of the park's most impressive views. The East Portal Road into the Curecanti National Recreation Area provides river access.

Medano Creek at Great Sand Dunes National Park. (Patrick Myers/National Park Service)

Great Sand Dunes, Colorado
"A sandbox of epic proportions." - Colorado.com

Size: 149,032 acres (park and preserve)

Founded: National monument, 1932; national park and preserve, 2004

Annual attendance: 527,546

The tallest sand dunes in North America don't border an ocean or lake, although the 30-square-mile sand-dune field here was once a lake. Instead of the expected beach and surf, these massive, windswept mounds are surrounded by alpine peaks, a desert valley, creeks, mountains and rural range land in Southern Colorado. Atop the tallest dune (750 feet from base to crest), the nearest city, Albuquerque, feels more distant than 246 miles.

Today, on land once roamed by Stone Age people hunting with large stone spears or dart points, park visitors may hike, sand board, sled, splash in Medano Creek or simply wander. (Just note that summertime sand surface temperatures can top 150 degrees.)

Tourists here also may do what the early nomads likely did in this place: look at the night sky.

During a full moon, sky watchers may experience the view and move about without need for a flashlight.

Ancient dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. (National Park Service)

Mesa Verde, Colorado
"From the rim of the [canyon] we had our first view of Cliff Palace. ... To me, this is the grandest view of all among the ancient ruins of the Southwest." - Charlie Mason, co-discoverer, in "Mesa Verde National Park: Shadows of the Centuries," by Duane A. Smith
Ancient Pueblos built dense and intricate dwellings on this plateau near the modern-day Four Corners junction, where the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet. Just the name Cliff Palace is intriguing enough to inspire interest in this largest archeological preserve in the country.

Protected in this park - also a UNESCO World Heritage site, established by President Theodore Roosevelt as the first to "preserve the works of man" - are 600 cliff dwellings and 4,300 archeological sites from ancestral Pueblo culture, which endured from A.D. 600 to 1300.

Cliff Palace, the most famous of the structures, has 150 rooms and 23 kivas, which are rooms dedicated to ritual and cultural activities. Park visitors may take guided and self-guided tours.

A six-mile driving tour of the park takes in a dozen easily accessible sites.

Hallett Peak is reflected in the water of Dream Lake at Rocky Mountain National Park. (John Marino/National Park Service)

Rocky Mountain, Colorado
"The raw beauty of the rugged mountains contrasts with the calm loveliness of wildflower gardens growing nearby." - The Park Service's "Natural History Handbook Number Three" (1954)
It's no surprise that the Who's "I Can See for Miles" was on the "Easy Rider" movie soundtrack. It's an apt road-trip song about the vistas travelers seek. Here, park visitors can appreciate those lyrics by driving the highest paved road in the Park Service. Trail Ridge Road crests at 12,183 feet. It's designated as an American Byway and All-American Road.

The park's panoramas also include two bodies of water considered by many to be the prettiest lakes in wild lands: Mills Lake, which offers high-elevation views of Longs Peak and the Keyboard of the Winds (spires that channel wind into unearthly sounds); and Loch Lake, with views of mountain peaks and Glacier Gorge.

Here in north-central Colorado, vacationers may access 355 miles of trails designed for all levels of ability. Hikers can walk valleys and meadows that were trod by native Utes until the late 1700s. Its later visitors included gold miners, followed by homesteaders and sightseers drawn to the lush environment. Today, the Park Service says the landscape is home to a large variety of animal dwellers, including 60 species of mammals and 270 bird species. The park, which straddles the Western Continental Divide, also has 141 confirmed species of butterflies.

Red mangrove trees on Boca Chita Key in Biscayne National Park. (Paul Marcellinii/Alamy)

Biscayne, Florida
"No sea-lover could look unmoved on the blue rollers of the Gulf Stream and the crystal-clear waters of the Reef." - Ralph Middleton Munroe, an early Floridian, in his autobiography, "The Commodore's Story"

Size: 172,971 acres

Founded: National monument, 1968; national park, 1980

Annual attendance: 708,522

This park, explorable only by watercraft, is 95-percent underwater.

Here, in the shallow bay one hour from Miami, is a world of shipwrecks, manatees, coral, sea grass, sea turtles and 500 species of fish.

Its protected, in some cases endangered, assets may be discovered via a boat cruise or snorkeling, scuba diving, canoeing or kayaking. Camping also is allowed on two Florida Keys: Boca Chita and Elliott.

On Elliott Key, the park's largest, hiking is available.

The wrecks of six ships that sank between 1878 and 1966 have been mapped and are part of the Maritime Heritage Trail, where snorkelers may view them.

Canoeing and kayaking also afford exploration of the park's mangrove-edged shorelines.

Visitors may want to learn about the park's best-known resident: Lancelot Jones, a man of African American and Bahamian American descent whose family became wealthy as the country's largest independent supplier of Key limes. He eventually became a sought-after guide to southern Biscayne Bay. He sold his island properties to the Park Service to ensure their protection.

Stiltsville, a part of Biscayne Bay's history, is within the park. Seven shacks built atop stilts remain from a onetime colorful community of 27 structures. Today, they are protected and preserved by the Stiltsville Trust. Access is by permit only.

The sea wall around Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

Dry Tortugas, Florida
"Here, you may find a ruby-throated hummingbird, broad-winged hawk and white-eyed vireo all in one tree." - The Park Service's Dry Tortugas National Park News

Size: 64,701 acres (40 acres above water)

Founded: National monument, 1935; national park, 1992

Annual attendance: 79,200

The name Tortugas (sea turtles in Spanish) dates from 1513, when explorer Juan Ponce de Leon arrived here. "Dry" refers to the lack of fresh water on the seven Florida Keys. Those who come (by water or seaplane) should tote their own food and drink.

Although the Tortugas are far-flung, they have a rich history because of their key location along the shipping channel that links the Gulf of Mexico, the western Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. That history includes the construction, from 1847 to 1875, of Fort Jefferson on the park's Garden Key. It's the largest all-masonry fort in the United States and was positioned to protect the water gateway to heartland America. Also here are 200 sunken ships dating to the 1600s.

Novelist and fishing enthusiast Ernest Hemingway notably visited several times when he lived 70 miles away, on Key West. Activities here today include snorkeling, swimming and camping. Some of Garden Key's largest and best-preserved coral heads grow so massive that you cannot swim over them. Visitors are advised to protect such vulnerable assets.

Clouds loom over the Florida Everglades. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Everglades, Florida
"It is a river of grass." - Marjory Stoneman Douglas, journalist and environmentalist, in "The Everglades: River of Grass"

Size: 1,508,939 acres

Founded: Authorized as a reserve in 1934; national park, 1947

Annual attendance: 1,118,300

This park is a prairie, although not in the "Little House" sense. Sharp-edged sawgrass stretches for acres of marshland. It's a landscape Native Americans called Pa-hay-okee (grassy waters). "Everglades" was the name early European explorers applied to the expanse. Following thousands of years of use by indigenous people, newcomers came to grow sugar cane, as well as hunt and fish. Bird populations were decimated for their plumes to festoon women's hats. Developers dredged, drained and diverted the wetlands. They cleared mangroves to open up ocean views.

Quickly vanishing resources prompted the creation of the park to protect its ecosystem. Today, it's a designated by UNESCO as both a biosphere reserve (along with Dry Tortugas) and World Heritage site, and also is a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention.

This third-largest park in the lower 48 states is home to at least 39 rare, threatened or endangered native Florida species, including the Florida panther, the American crocodile and the West Indian manatee. It harbors the largest contiguous strand of protected mangrove forest in the western hemisphere and also shelters the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. The Everglades is the main source of drinking water for South Florida.

Despite being a protected environment, Everglades is a remarkably accessible park. Three car entrances include the main entry in Homestead. Boaters and paddlers can enter via its coastal boundaries and waterways.

Ranger-led programs include a meteor-shower bike ride, sightseeing by tram and various birding excursions.

Haleakalā silverswords in a lava field at Haleakalā National Park. (National Park Service)

Haleakalā, Hawaii
"I felt like the Last Man ... left pinnacled in mid-heaven." - Mark Twain, as quoted by John F. Stone in the Mid-Pacific Magazine (1920)

Size: 33,265 acres

Founded: 1916 (separated from Volcanoes Park in 1961)

Annual attendance: 994,394

In a park whose name means "house of the sun" in Hawaiian, it's appropriate that visitors' eyes are often drawn skyward. Rapidly changing cloudscapes, rainbows, moonbows and nighttime celestial bodies are highlights. Views can reach as far as 115 miles out to sea.

On land, there are rare plants and animals with memorable names. This is one of the last sanctuaries of the vibrant honeycreeper bird. And the protected silversword plant, which lives up to 90 years, flowers just once and then dies.

Botanists also call this the geranium capital of the world, which hardly sounds exotic. But, species of the flower here appear nowhere else.

Two sections - the summit and coast - make up this park on the island of Maui. They are not connected by road. Above, is a crater formed by erosion. It's a 19-square-mile wilderness area that's popular with backpackers. Visitors flock to the summit for spectacular sunrise and sunset views. Below, in a lush landscape of forest, waterfalls, meadows and ocean, visitors watch for sea turtles, monk seals, dolphins, seabirds and humpback whales.

Overnighters may reserve wilderness cabins, which are accessible by hiking. Two car-accessible campgrounds also are options. All visitors are advised that the wild environment here includes the weather, which can be changeable.

Ferns in a lava field at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park. (National Park Service)

Hawai'i Volcanoes, Hawaii
"An unique example of significant island building through ongoing volcanic processes. The volcano Mauna Loa, measured from the ocean floor, is the greatest volcanic mass on Earth." - Statement of Significance, UNESCO World Heritage Centre
Here on the big island of Hawaii, 30 miles from Hilo, are two of the world's most active volcanoes: Kilauea, whose name means spreading, much spewing; and Mauna Loa, which translates to long mountain. Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984; Kilauea is no longer erupting, but is considered an active volcano, producing steam and volcanic gas.

Although volcanoes are undeniable draws, this park is also home to historic sites and endangered flora and fauna. Hiking and biking are popular ways to take in the scene. Driving routes also offer a dramatic overview. Crater Rim Drive and Chain of Craters Road include a number of vantage points. Kilauea's summit may be seen along Crater Rim Drive. Other stops on the driving route include the Thurston Lava Tube (which Hawaiians call Nahuku), a walk-in tube that ends in a tropical rain forest. Tubes are formed when an underground channel of molten lava creates a hollow chamber.

In-park lodging is available at the Volcano House hotel, which overlooks Halema'uma'u Crater. It has been operating since 1846, when it began as a grass shack.

Boardwalk steps down a dune at Indiana Dunes National Park, where once-threatened land now shelters rare and threatened flora and fauna.

Indiana Dunes, Indiana
"Those dunes are to the Midwest what the Grand Canyon is to Arizona and the Yosemite is to California. They constitute a signature of time and eternity." - Poet Carl Sandburg

Size: 15,349 acres

Founded: National lakeshore, 1966; national park 2019

Attendance: 2,134,285

The 61st national park is the embodiment of shifting sands-in metaphor and in reality.

Its protected area was borne of an urgency to shield the wild landscape from the shifting sands of development. The actual shifting sands are nature's hourglass. Mount Baldy, a 126-foot dune, moves 5 to 10 feet a year, a perpetual change indicated by marram (beach) grass bending in the wind.

Indiana Dunes cradles the southern tip of Lake Michigan along 15 miles of Indiana shore, where it accommodates bicycling, fishing, birding, swimming and hiking along multiple trails in dunes, wetlands, prairies and forests.

Although visitors may come simply for a day at the beach, the park's ecology is significant.

Despite its metropolitan proximity, it has been dubbed the birthplace of ecology in America. That designation stems from the work of botanist Henry C. Cowles (and others) who studied the surroundings.

Just an hour from Chicago and bordering Gary, Ind., the once-threatened land now shelters rare and threatened flora and fauna. Wildflowers, such as nodding lady's tresses and the federally threatened Pitcher's thistle, bloom. The piping plover, a small, threatened shorebird finds refuge, and some350bird species have been observed. An annual birding festival is held in May.

"The biological diversity within Indiana Dunes National Park is fourth among all of our national parks," the Park Service reports. That diversity includes some of the last surviving black oak savannas, which now find safe harbor from change.

Broadway inside Mammoth Cave. (National Park Service)

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky
"No changes of seasons, no sound of storm or thunder penetrate here; winter and summer, day and night, peace or war, it is all one; a world beyond the reach of change, because beyond the reach of life." - John Burroughs, naturalist, "In Mammoth Cave" (1887)
In a state known for its elevated landscape in the form of the Appalachian and Cumberland mountains, it is an inverse topography - the world's longest known cave system - that is Kentucky's lone national park. This underground wonder, whose dimensions suit its name, is mapped at 420 miles - a length that increases with ongoing exploration.

Here, midway between Louisville and Nashville, this limestone labyrinth with a colorful and contentious (land-ownership) past fascinates visitors.

The deep history goes back 10 million years in time and 379 feet into the earth, where ancient human remains and artifacts are legally protected. The modern story includes African American history, such as the legacy of Stephen Bishop, who ventured into unexplored areas and became a guide. He is buried at the park's Old Guides' Cemetery.

In popular culture, Mammoth has inspired a short story, an early computer game, poetry and rock-music lyrics.

Today, park rangers continue to guide cave visitors through tours of varying length, style and level of physical demand - from easy to extremely strenuous. Tours include Gothic Avenue, which has historically significant passageways where 19th-century signatures are preserved.

Interior temperatures average about 54 degrees. Bring a jacket or sweater and wear shoes suitable for walking. Aboveground activities include hiking and fishing.

The Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse at Acadia National Park. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Acadia, Maine
"The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory. " - Alexander Chee, novelist, in the New York Times

Size: 49,071 acres

Founded: National monument, 1916; national park, 1919 (originally named Lafayette National Park)

Annual attendance: 3,437,286

The oldest national park east of the Mississippi is one of the first places in the country to see the sunrise (about 50 minutes before dawn in the D.C. area). Park visitors trek to Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak on the Eastern Seaboard, to greet the day.

Early visionaries who sought to protect this carved granite, coastal landscape included John D. Rockefeller Jr. He is responsible for carriage roads and trails that meander for use by hikers, horseback riders and bicyclists.

Acadia lies primarily on Mount Desert Island, which owes its name to explorer Samuel de Champlain, who called it "Isles des Monts Déserts" (island of barren mountains). Despite that early observation, the park's glacially carved landscape is quite rich in nature and scenic panoramas, with many pine forests, ocean views and nine birding areas. Avian occupants include peregrine falcons and sharp-shinned hawks.

Moviemakers have flocked here, as well. Scenes in "The Cider House Rules" and "Pet Sematary" (adapted by Maine native Stephen King from his own book) were filmed on park grounds.

This is a shoreline park next door to the seaside resort town of Bar Harbor. Two beaches (one ocean with water temperatures for thick-skinned swimmers and one warmer, freshwater site) are available.

In 2015, the last three wolves known to live in Isle Royale National Park. (Rolf Peterson/Michigan Technological University via AP)

Isle Royale, Michigan
"Solitude is its central ingredient." - Napier Shelton in "The Life of Isle Royale"
Rugged, remote and relatively untouched, this park possesses the ingredients for rare 21st-century solitude. It's a designated U.S. Wilderness and UNESCO biosphere reserve. To the moose and the dwindling population of wolves, it's home. They're among the animals that have shared this Lake Superior island with sporadic humans for thousands of years. Today, visitors arrive by ferry from Michigan's Upper Peninsula or Minnesota. The Ranger III ferry is the largest piece of moving equipment owned and operated by the Park Service. It carries 128 passengers and offers interpretive programs, dining and lounges on indoor and outdoor decks.

Isle Royale is the least-visited of the national parks in the lower 48 states, and the only one completely closed in winter.

In season, it attracts hikers and campers, who pluck and eat the wild blueberries and thimbleberries in late July and August. Scuba divers explore shipwrecks that date to as early as 1877. The sunken vessels are protected by the Park Service. (Licensed scuba charters serve the area, where a wet suit is necessary and a dry suit recommended due to water temperatures of about 35 degrees at depths below 50 feet in the world's largest freshwater lake.

Island comforts include rustic cabins and the Rock Harbor Lodge, which has accommodations and a restaurant that serves fresh lake trout.

A rock island covered with orange lichen on Kabetogama Lake in Voyageurs National Park. (Don Breneman/Alamy)

Voyageurs, Minnesota
"We have so much to learn from Indians and no better place to learn it today than portages worn smooth by our Indian predecessors." - Ernest Oberholtzer, explorer and writer
This park comprises 30 lakes and 900 islands that once were traversed by the Native Americans, European explorers, fur trappers and gold miners who navigated the U.S.-Canada border in birch-bark canoes. Today, much of the park remains reachable only by water. Sightseeing boats staffed by park naturalists depart from visitor centers.

Hiking trails (some reached by water) also meander the wilderness. They range from easy to strenuous. Some trails are groomed for snowshoeing and skiing. Trail users may see moose or a blue heron rookery, as well as aspens, pines and rock outcroppings. Loons may be seen diving for fish in deeper parts of the lakes.

In addition to camping, accommodations are available in the nearby resort communities of Kabetogama Lake, International Falls, Crane Lake and Ash River.

The storied Kettle Falls Hotel is the only lodging within the park. Built by a timber baron in 1910, it served a region where commercial fishermen sold their catch and bootleggers sold whiskey. Today, the hotel offers 12 rooms, a restaurant and the Lumberjack Saloon.

The 630-foot Gateway Arch was completed in 1965; an interior tram takes visitors to the windowed viewing platform at the top.

Gateway Arch, Missouri
"The conservationist today is a seeker and preserver of the values that have a personal meaning to man ... whether they are found on an urban riverbank ... or in the far reaches of a northern forest." - Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey

Size: 193 acres

Founded: Formerly Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, 1935; (Arch completed, 1965) national park, 2018

Attendance: 2,055,309

The Gateway Arch hovers like a silver rainbow over St. Louis.

The stainless-steel monument, standing 630 feet high on the banks of the Mississippi River, is a ceremonial portal to the American West. Architect Eero Saarinen said of his design, "The arch [should] be a triumphal arch for our age as the triumphal arches of classical antiquity were for theirs."

It was intended as an intersection between past and present, and the surrounding grounds and exhibits parallel that goal. Below ground, at the base of the Arch is the Museum at the Gateway Arch, which details more than 200 years of history. Exhibits explore President Thomas Jefferson's dream of westward expansion, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the displacement of Indigenous people, stolen lands, women's rights and the fight for African American freedoms and equality. (The Old Courthouse is currently undergoing restoration.)

As of 2018, the renovated Gateway Arch grounds have a better link to the city itself, thanks to the addition of connecting green space, a plaza and glass museum entrance facing downtown St. Louis. The redesign also created a better connection with the surrounding historical context. The Park includes the Old Courthouse where the pivotal Dred Scott civil rights case was heard. It was there that Scott and his wife, Harriet, both enslaved people, filed lawsuits seeking their freedom.

At the Arch itself, an interior tram takes visitors to the windowed viewing platform at the top, for views of Missouri, Illinois, the river and the American horizon beyond.

The landscape of Glacier National Park. (Brian Flaherty)

Glacier, Montana
"Mountains that wear the dawn like yellow hats." - Greg Beaumont in "NPS Natural History Handbook: Glacier" (1978)
This pristine landscape does more than feed the appetite for scenic adventure. It quenches the thirst of the American continent. Here, 150 miles from Missoula, in northwestern Montana, the park and neighboring wilderness lands are called the "Crown of the Continent," a headwaters for three rivers leading to the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as the Hudson Bay.

The lush region includes 762 lakes within park boundaries. Among them, Lake McDonald is so clear that it's possible to see, from the surface, to 30 feet below.

The list of plant and animal species living here has remained unchanged since the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Trust for Public Land notes. Not unchanged are the 25 glaciers, which are shrinking.

The panoramas remain verdant, however, and a popular way to view the vistas is by taking a two-hour drive on Going-to-the-Sun Road. (It appears in the opening of "The Shining.") The east-west parkway, built in 1932, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a designated as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Expect two tunnels, steep drop-offs, tight curves and spectacular views - including mountain goats and bighorn sheep.

Non-driving activities include hiking on 746 miles of trails, boat tours and backcountry camping. Hotel accommodations also are available.

A look at the drastic elevation changes from Great Basin National Park. (National Park Service)

Great Basin, Nevada
"This location is one of the best remaining undeveloped sites for observing the sky in the United States." - David Bennum, physicist at the University of Nevada at Reno, on Greatbasinobservatory.org

Size: 77,180 acres

Founded: National monument (Lehman Caves), 1922; national park, 1986

Annual attendance: 131,802

Ancient trees and dramatic cave formations highlight this park, which is 286 miles from Las Vegas near the Utah border.

The trees, bristlecone pines up 4,000 years old, are contorted, as if twisted from the sheer effort to survive harsh conditions. The cavern, Lehman Caves, is a geologic remnant of an ancient, shallow inland sea - a paradoxical image in this arid setting.

Tourists can sightsee at various levels: 194 feet below ground; at the surface; at 13,063 feet in elevation (Wheeler Peak); and higher above in the night sky, which is said to provide the best visibility of the Milky Way in the continental United States. (Great Basin is a designated Dark Sky Park.)

Two guided cave tours are offered: the Lodge Room (one hour) and the Grand Palace (90 minutes). Of note among the many subterranean formations is the Parachute Shield. At least 80 U.S. caves have shields, which are circular plates. Lehman Caves has 300.

As for the park's namesake, this region is part of a 200,000-square-mile area that drains internally, rather than into rivers that feed the Pacific Ocean or Gulf of Mexico. The Great Basin takes in most of Nevada, half of Utah and portions of Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon and California. For a wider view of the basin, visitors may hike an 8.6-mile trail to the Wheeler Peak summit, where vistas reward the effort.

The Doll's Theater at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. (Peter Jones/National Park Service)

Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico
"I found myself gazing into the biggest and blackest hole I had ever seen, out of which the bats seemed literally to boil ... any hole in the ground which could house such a gigantic army of bats must be a whale of a big cave." - Jim White, cowboy and early Carlsbad explorer, in "Jim White's Own Story"

Size: 46,766 acres

Founded: National monument, 1923; national park, 1930

Annual attendance: 440,691

Will Rogers, the famed cowboy, humorist and actor, once called Carlsbad Cavern the "Grand Canyon with a roof on it."

Beneath that roof is a subterranean mansion with 119 limestone caves and a "chandelier" in the Big Room. It's naturally air-conditioned to a constant 56 degrees, which is welcome during New Mexico summers, when July days average 95 degrees.

Self-guided tours are available to visitors. They include the Natural Entrance Trail, which begins with a steep descent from the entrance to the Big Room. It lasts one hour and is more physically demanding than the Big Room Trail, which is accessed via elevator.

Other, more strenuous tours are available, including one of Slaughter Canyon Cave. Guides lead the way into an underground wilderness. Here, darkness is broken only by the flashlights and headlamps of rangers and tour members. Sights include the 89-foot-high Monarch column, which is one of the world's tallest, and the Christmas Tree, a sparkling, crystal-studded column.

The limestone rock that holds Carlsbad Cavern contains ocean fossils of plants and animals dating from a time when this area, 149 miles from El Paso, lay beneath an inland sea.

The 275-square-mile gypsum field at White Sands National Park is the largest in the world.

White Sands, New Mexico
"The only plants that thrive in this desert are those able to grow fast enough to survive dune burial." - NASA

Size: 146,344 acres

Founded: National monument, 1933, national park 2019

Attendance: 608,785

In home-decor terms, the stark simplicity of white dunes is minimalist.

Its otherworldly landscape has served as a backdrop for several films, including "Hang 'Em High" and "The Man Who Fell to Earth."

But this is no mere backdrop. For all its visual austerity, White Sands is a lived-in environment. It invites play in the form of dune sledding, hiking, picnicking and camping in a backcountry campground. For windshield sightseers, there's the Dunes Drive.

A vast field of gypsum, the largest in the world, it harbors at least 45 species found nowhere else. Denizens include the Apache pocket mouse and the bleached earless lizard. Many of the park's birds inhabit scrub surrounding the Spanish pueblo-adobe style visitor center, which was built during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps.

Though the setting feels rare, it's composed of one of the world's most common minerals: gypsum.

"An average new American home contains more than 7 metric tons of gypsum in the form of more than 6,000 square feet of wallboard," the U.S. Geological Survey reports. Pure gypsum sand is rare because it dissolves on contact with water. (Total annual rainfall at the park is about 8 inches.)

Because gypsum's pale color doesn't absorb heat, it remains cool to the touch. Precautions are in order, however. The Park Service advises sunscreen, a hat and sunglasses because "the sun reflecting off the white sand is intense year round and can cause severe sunburns."

That intensity may make the monthly full-moon hikes, offered April through December, an appealing option. The lunar light is so bright you will see your moon shadow.

Newfound Gap in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (David Davis/Alamy Stock Photo)

Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina and Tennessee
"The dreamy blue haze ... that ever hovers over the mountains ... softens all outlines, and lends a mirage-like effect of great distance to objects that are but a few miles off." - Horace Kephart, travel writer, in The Outing magazine (1912)
Every year here, for a few weeks in late spring, there's a twinkling light show, courtesy of synchronous fireflies. Also in spring, an annual wildflower pilgrimage showcases blooms so prolific and diverse that this landscape is nicknamed "Wildflower National Park."

Although this is the most-visited U.S. national park, it retains an enchanted quality, a place where emerald moss carpets boulders and a dreamy, "smoky" mist recalls the region's Cherokee name, Shaconagay, "land of the blue smoke."

This area was part of the Cherokee homeland before the tribe was forced west. Some remained in what is now the park, either by hiding or by lobbying the government, and their descendants live in the nearby Qualla Boundary.

Today, visitors hike, bike and drive the history-steeped land. The American Hiking Society says, "Almost every trail in Great Smoky Mountain National Park is eligible for your hiking bucket list." However, the organization's blog cites the 12-mile Baxter Creek Trail's "4,000 feet of climbing, sweetly smelling spruce trees and a lush rainforest understory." The Appalachian Trail also makes a 70-mile appearance here.

Several self-guided car routes are available along the 384 miles of road. An 11-mile, one-way loop road circles the historical Cades Cove, where preserved log cabins, barns and churches highlight the region's former way of life. Every Saturday and Wednesday morning (from May to September), the car route is open to bicyclists and walkers only.

This is a park rich with stories. Of the Walker sisters, from a family of 11 children with a Union-soldier father who farmed the land, six of them never married and stayed in what became the park, meeting visitors and carrying on with traditional work and crafting well into old age. Their log home remains.

Sightseers encounter place names reflecting southern storytelling tradition. Among them: Place of a Thousand Drips (waterfall), Mouse Creek Falls and Hen Wallow Falls. A rounded rock outcropping is dubbed Charlies Bunion.

Visitors who arrive via Cherokee, N.C., Gatlinburg, Tenn., or Townsend, Tenn., enter an area that's 95 percent forested with the largest block of virgin red spruce on Earth. And if they visit Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Smokies, on a clear and (rare) pollution-free day, they can see for 100 miles and possibly take in seven states.

One of the more than 100 miles of hiking trails at Teddy Roosevelt National Park. (Ryan Marthaller/National Park Service)

Theodore Roosevelt, North Dakota
"It was here that the romance of my life began." - President Theodore Roosevelt, whose ranch is preserved within the park, in 1903

Size: 70,447 acres

Founded: Memorial park, 1947; national park, 1978

Annual attendance: 691,658

This park is a memorial to one man's love of the American landscape. Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president (1901-09), established five national parks and help found the U.S. Forest Service. His first cabin (Maltese Cross) is on park grounds and open for touring. The foundation of his second, at Elkhorn Ranch, also is here in a remote area.

Three separate sections make up this park. They include a badlands area populated by bison, pronghorn, elk, wild horses and bighorn sheep.

Roosevelt, a New York native, found this land restorative and wrote extensively about his time in the West. Contemporary visitors can experience this windswept territory, due west of Bismarck, from their cars, on bicycle, on horseback, on foot or by canoe or kayak on the Little Missouri River.

Prolific wildflowers, which appear from May to September, soften the stark landscape. June and July are their peak months; later-season tourists will find sunflowers, asters and rabbitbrush. In late September, cottonwood leaves turn a brilliant gold.

Changing colors at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. (Sara Gure/National Park Service)

Cuyahoga Valley, Ohio
"[The park] sits a short distance from the urban environments of Cleveland and Akron, yet seems worlds away." - National Park Foundation

Size: 32,572 acres

Founded: National recreation area, 1974; national park, 2000

Annual attendance: 2,237,997

Most national parks preserve and protect pristine lands. This park is an example of restoring what once was. Land and water along miles of the winding Cuyahoga River between Cleveland and Akron were reclaimed from industrial pollution and other environmental abuses. Today, beavers have returned to the marshes. The bird activity has merited designation as an Important Bird Area by BirdLife International. Animal inhabitants here include muskrats, coyotes, red and gray foxes, peregrine falcons, river otters, bald eagles and great blue herons.

Visitors hike, bike, run, snowshoe, ride horses and observe wildlife. The scenery includes waterfalls, farmland, forest and wetlands. The Wilderness Society lists this park among its 15 national parks for fall color.

History also is highlighted here. For example, there is the 19th-century Everett Covered Bridge. And it's possible to walk or bike the same path that mules trod while towing canal boats loaded with goods and passengers. Canal locks and other structures built between 1825 and 1832 are still visible.

The Towpath Trail follows the historic route of the Ohio & Erie Canal, which opened the sparsely settled area to commerce with the Eastern states.

The Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad operates here during summer and autumn months. Paralleling the history of the park, the rail was opened in 1880 as a means to transport coal, as well as passengers. In 1972, it became a scenic excursion route for leisure, as well as railroad preservation.

Wizard Island at Crater Lake National Park. (National Park Service)

Crater Lake, Oregon
"Crater Lake must be seen to be appreciated properly. Photographs simply cannot depict the majesty of the lake in its setting, the depth of the blue." - Thomas J. Williams, former park superintendent, just before his retirement in 1968, from quotes collected by the Crater Lake Institute
Vacations give us stories to tell. And sometimes the places we visit tell us stories. That's true of this legend-steeped ancient lake. The deepest one in the United States (1,932 feet), it is also deep blue, a hue that inspired Native American legends claiming that the mountain bluebird was gray before dipping into the lake's water.

Indigenous people could have witnessed the formation of this lake about 7,700 years ago, when a volcanic eruption of Mount Mazama triggered its collapse. Rain and snow filled the crater - and continue to feed the lake today.

Visitors to this park in southern Oregon, 85 miles from Medford, may view the lake by car on the 33-mile Rim Drive, except in months with heavy snow, or by hiking. Cleetwood Trail leads to the lake's shore. Boat tours, with park-ranger narration, are another option. A longer boat excursion includes a three-hour hike of Wizard Island, a volcanic cinder cone rising 755 feet above the lake.

Tourists should watch for the Old Man of the Lake, an ancient hemlock stump that has confounded visitors and scientists by floating upright in the lake, unanchored, for more than a century. Local lore claims that "he" can control the weather.

Contemporary Crater Lake storytelling includes an appearance in the movie "Wild," based on the Cheryl Strayed memoir about walking the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Mexico to Canada and crosses this land.

Bald Cypress and willows at Bates Old River in Congaree National Park. (Jeff Lepore/Alamy) (Jeff Lepore/Alamy Stock Photo)

Congaree, South Carolina
"The largest old-growth bottomland forest in the country, the only one that remains intact, reminding us of what was once a common feature of the southern landscape." - From the South Carolina Educational Television documentary "Roots in the River: The Story of Congaree National Park" (2008)

Size: 26,693 acres

Founded: National monument, 1976; national park, 2003

Annual attendance: 159,445

There is a bald-cypress tree with a name in this old-growth bottomland forest. It's called Harry Hampton, named after the man who began lobbying to protect this land in 1954. His effort gained momentum when college students, enthused by the first Earth Day in 1970, joined in. Today, the park visitor center also bears the name of Hampton, who died in 1980.

Visitors to the park, which is near Charleston and Columbia and named for Native Americans who lived in central South Carolina, may walk, paddle, camp and fish here. The interior is accessible via boardwalks, which provide views of Spanish moss, bald cypress and a forest of water tupelos.

Canoeing or kayaking Cedar Creek (bring your own boat or take a guided tour with park vessels) takes visitors past some of the tallest trees in eastern North America. Also part of the scene are river otters, deer, turtles, wading birds and the occasional alligator. Several species of woodpeckers can be found in the park, including the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

A ranger at Badlands National Park. (National Park Service)

Badlands, South Dakota
"What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere." - Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in a 1935 letter to the editor of the Evening Huronite

Size: 242,756 acres

Founded: National monument, 1939, national park, 1978

Annual attendance: 970,998

Badlands are good for movies, and the land here is sheer drama. This park provided the asteroid surface for "Armageddon," and scenes from "Dances With Wolves" were filmed here.

Visitors aim their own cameras at the same austere beauty, which includes buttes (isolated steep hills), canyons, pinnacles, spires and prairie. "The Badlands are cut from deep alluvial and volcanic ash deposits that have been sculptured and carved into fantastic forms by the continuous action of wind and water," the editors of Consumer Guide explain at adventure.howstuffworks.com. That sculpting began 80 million years ago.

The resulting view - 75 miles east of Rapid City Regional Airport and 90 minutes from Mount Rushmore - can be seen via hiking, backpacking, camping or driving the Badlands Loop.

Animal inhabitants roaming the landscape include bison, bobcats, badgers and butterflies. Of the estimated 14,500 butterfly species in the world, the Park Service says 69 have been documented in Badlands, where wildflowers support them. The butterflies include the distinctive two-tailed swallowtail, whose wingspan reaches five inches.

The park's Stronghold District, also known as the South Unit, is composed of lands on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation owned by the Oglala Sioux Tribe. The 133,300 acres of the Stronghold District were added to Badlands National Monument in 1976, before the monument became a park in 1978. The land is full of history. And that story is memorialized, in part, at the nearby site of the massacre at Wounded Knee.

A hiking trail at Wind Cave National Park. (National Park Service)

Wind Cave, South Dakota
"Native Americans told stories of holes in the ground that blow wind. ... [In 1881] Jesse and Tom Bingham [heard] a whistling noise. Wind was blowing out of the cave entrance with such force it blew off Tom's hat." - Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) in the Congressional Record (2003)
For most tourists, the road less taken is the path that leads underground. Here, beneath the prairie, this cave runs 143 miles long and 654 feet deep.

The subterranean maze 54 miles south of Rapid City is rich in formations with names that will provide a new sightseeing vocabulary: frostwork (delicate, needlelike growths), popcorn (small and knobby) and boxwork (paper-thin, honeycomb-like veins).

A variety of ranger-guided cave tours are offered, from family friendly to more adventuresome, even candlelit. Among them, the Wild Cave Tour may provide the most impressive postcard copy. Much of the trip involves crawling. The park provides hard hats, lights and kneepads.

Aboveground, sights include a large herd of bison (the official national mammal). As with all national parks, this comes with a history lesson. It is a culturally significant and sacred site to the Lakota and Cheyenne people and to many other tribes.

There is no evidence of anyone entering the cave until 1881. Alvin McDonald was the first to explore the cave extensively, in 1891. Using candlelight and string, he covered eight to 10 miles, named rooms and passageways, and kept a detailed journal. At one point, McDonald noted: "Have given up the idea of finding the end of Wind Cave." McDonald is buried near the entrance.

A canoe trip down the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. (Erich Schlegel/The Washington Post)

Big Bend, Texas
"No other national park has this combination of size and remoteness coupled with the romance and mystery of the Mexican border." - Frank Deckert, former Park Service chief naturalist, in "Big Bend: Three Steps to the Sky" (1981)
For a clue to the character of this sprawling landscape, consider this: It was used for astronaut training because of its harsh terrain and climate.

But this park is also hospitable. It's home to 75 species of mammals, nearly 450 species of birds, 56 species of reptiles and more than 1,000 species of plants. The wide-ranging flora and fauna is due to the ecological diversity: water (the Rio Grande), mountains (the Chisos range) and desert (the Chihauhuan). Taking it all in can be done via car on 100 miles of paved road, or by hiking and rafting. This park has 244 miles along the Rio Grande. Visitors will encounter places with such colorful names as Panther Junction, Mule Ears Trail, Dog Canyon and Devil's Den.

When first lady Claudia "Lady Bird" Johnson visited the park in 1966, her stay included rafting. The trip was part of her campaign to highlight the 50th anniversary of the Park Service. In this centennial year, her words still speak to the wonder of the parks.

Johnson reportedly stood on a ridge in the Chisos Basin and said, "This looks like the very edge of the world."

Fifty years later, park visitors can honor "Lady Bird" by doing a little birding. Cactus wrens, curve-billed thrashers, black phoebes, Lucifer hummingbirds and greater roadrunners are among the year-round avian inhabitants.

Park staffers also suggest stargazing. The International Dark-Sky Association has certified Big Bend as a Dark Sky Park - no surprise, given that El Paso, the nearest large city, is 300 miles away.

Lower Pine Spring Canyon, seen from Hunter Peak in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. (National Park Service)

Guadalupe Mountains, Texas
"Guadalupe Peak is the highest place you can get in a state full of tall tales and big history." - Sam Martin, writer, in Texas Monthly (1969)
To the uninitiated, sightseeing in sun-bleached desert landscapes may seem like a "Where's Waldo" challenge. On close inspection, however, nature and beauty appear. Creatures show themselves in the morning or late evening. And even park staff make new discoveries, including a little, yellow violet that was an unknown species until 1990.

There are obvious assets, of course, including Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas (8,749 feet). In addition, visitors find canyons, a high-country conifer forest and lush streamside woodlands.

More than 300 species of birds either nest or migrate here. Depending on season and location, birders may spy western bluebirds, violet-green swallows, white-throated swifts and red-naped sapsuckers.

Nature here in West Texas (110 miles from El Paso) lives among layers of history. There are remains of ancient cultures (projectile points, baskets, pottery and rock art). From the displaced Mescalero Apache inhabitants, there are agave-roasting pits. And from later years, there is a memorial to the Butterfield Overland Mail stage line. A stainless steel pyramid on Guadalupe Peak commemorates the line (1858-1861), which passed south of the mountain as it carried mail from St. Louis to San Francisco. Such overland driving does not happen here, now. There are no car tours of the park.

The Lawaetz Family Museum on St. Croix at Virgin Islands National Park. (Alamy)

Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands
"I hear the seductive thumping of steel bands, I taste the dirt-cheap white rum, and I see the blue Atlantic and Caribbean glittering on either side of our mountaintop house." - Herman Wouk, novelist, in an introduction to a later printing of "Don't Stop the Carnival," on his memories of writing the book on St. Thomas
Caribbean Islands are synonymous with surfside leisure. And that's true here, where Trunk Bay is one of the most photographed beaches in the world.

But also here, just east of Puerto Rico, are hiking trails, historical sites and fragile coral reefs.

The U.S. Virgin Islands include St. John, St. Croix and St. Thomas, which has the nearest airport. The park covers more than half the island of St. John and most of the small, neighboring Hassel Island. Within the boundaries are more than 100 historic sites and undisturbed Caribbean landscapes.

Significant archeological sites - on almost every beach and in every bay - date from as early as 840 B.C. to the arrival of Columbus.

Today, visitors may hike 20 trails suited to a variety of interests and physical abilities. Sights along the way include carved petroglyphs and ocean views. Snorkeling opportunities include the Underwater Trail, which has plaques explaining the marine life. (More than 40 percent of this park is under water.)

Among the architectural remains are structures from plantation estates and the days when sugar was king. Ruins include windmills, factories, great houses and at least 2,000 house sites once occupied by the enslaved plantation workers and their graveyards, as well.

Double O Arch at Arches National Park. (Neal Herbert/National Park Service)

Arches, Utah
"You can't see anything from a car ... walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe." - Former Park Service employee Edward Abbey, in his introduction to "Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness," on how best to experience the park

Size: 76,679 acres

Founded: National monument, 1929; national park, 1971

Annual attendance: 1,659,702

It's no surprise the U.S. Postal Service chose to depict this park on one of its commemorative Park Service centennial stamps. Cameras love the complementary combination of red-orange sandstone against high-desert blue skies. Photographers flock here, 236 miles from Salt Lake City, to capture the 2,000 arches, as well as the fins, balanced rocks, pinnacles and spires in their best light. It's alluring to filmmakers, as well. "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" is among the movies with scenes filmed here.

The story of the arches begins 65 million years ago, when the area was a dry seabed and the rock was still uncarved, raw material.

Because the resulting natural beauty draws crowds, the Park Service suggests visiting before 8 a.m. or after 3 p.m. And they advise treading with care. The formations are more delicate than their rocky foundation would suggest. That's also true of the ground.

Visitors should avoid stepping on the crusty cryptobiotic soil, which is alive and prevents erosion. That said, seeing the park on foot is suggested and hiking options - from family friendly to strenuous - are plentiful. Among the more physical hikes is a ranger-guided, three-hour one to Fiery Furnace, which includes rock scrambling up and through narrow cracks and along steep ledges above drop-offs.

Sightseeing by car is also possible; popular features, such as Balanced Rock, are visible from the main road.

In this park so dominated by stony beauty, wildflowers may get overlooked. The Park Service provides an interactive wildflower guide to help visitors to determine what they'll see and when.

The landscape of Bryce Canyon National Park. (Brian Flaherty)

Bryce Canyon, Utah
"One of the world's best sites for an appreciation of the inexorable, titanic forces which have shaped the globe's surface." - Nicholas Scrattish, historian, in "Historic Resource Study Bryce Canyon National Park"

Size: 35,835 acres

Founded: National monument, 1923; national park, 1928

Annual attendance: 2,594,904

This landscape is actually a collection of natural amphitheaters - stone bowls - rather than canyons. Bryce Amphitheater covers six square miles.

Inside the hollows are hoodoos, which are tall spires of rock protruding from the bottom of arid basins. The park has more hoodoos than any other spot on Earth.

Visitors gazing at hoodoos from the basin rim or trails below see stoic, sometimes human-shaped rock forms ranging from as tall as adults to taller than 10-story buildings. Observing the upright shapes gives a sense of being a spectator in a Greek amphitheater. It's understandable why Paiute inhabitants here said the hoodoos were "Evil Legend People."

The dramatic figures of Bryce were shaped by water's freeze-thaw cycle and by erosion from rain (as opposed to by a river carving a canyon). And they continue to be eroded.

Here, about 270 miles from Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, this landscape can be seen by car or on foot, as well as on snowshoes or cross-country skis and by winter backpacking.

This park is named for homesteader Ebenezer Bryce, a Scottish immigrant who arrived in 1875 and reputedly once said, "It's a hell of a place to lose a cow."

A less practical take on this land today includes such annual events as Prairie Dog Day and geology and astronomy festivals. And because park visitors aren't tending cattle like Mr. Bryce, they can stop to appreciate the colors of the rock, which are said to be especially vibrant after a rainstorm.

An ancestral Puebloan granary at Canyonlands National Park. (National Park Service)

Canyonlands, Utah
"Some of the most remote and rugged terrain in the continental United States." - NASA, on its Earth Observatory website
At this landscape in southeastern Utah near Moab, the rock art (petroglyphs and pictographs) in the Great Gallery here is a sort of a message in a bottle sent centuries ago. The well-preserved, life-sized figures with intricate designs are hailed as the most significant rock art in North America.

As the human parade crisscrossing this region evolved, European explorers found Canyonlands to be more of an impediment than a destination. Today, this land may be appreciated in as little as an hour, with a drive to Grand View Point for a panoramic vista. Add another hour, and there's also time for a half-mile hike to Mesa Arch, one of the most popular sites here.

Canyonlands' geographic districts include Island in the Sky and the Needles district. Island in the Sky is a mesa on sheer sandstone cliffs with spectacular views. The Needles district offers variegated spires of cedar mesa sandstone. Activities include hiking and four-wheeling. Kayaking on calm stretches of the Green and Colorado rivers provides another perspective.

The Maze district ranks among the most remote areas in the United States. Backpacker Magazine included the Maze on its "America's 10 Most Dangerous Hikes" list, noting that route-finding is tough among "sandstone fins and interconnecting canyons that all seem to look the same."

It's no wonder outlaws, including Butch Cassidy, made use of Horseshoe Canyon in the late 1800s, taking refuge in the confusing network of canyons.

One of the "tanks" in the Capitol Gorge at Capitol Reef National Park. (Jacob Frank/National Park Service)

Capitol Reef, Utah
"With abundant evidence of an ancient culture, as well as artifacts and orchards from a more recent frontier community, the park offers fascinating human stories that interweave with its natural history." - Rick Stinchfield, author, in "Capitol Reef National Park: The Complete Hiking and Touring Guide"

Size: 241,905 acres

Founded: National monument, 1937; national park, 1971

Annual attendance: 1,226,519

This remote landscape is a wrinkle in time. Its main feature, the Waterpocket Fold, is a wrinkle in the earth's crust known as a monocline. Here, the folding and tilting of rock layers opened a glimpse into millions of years of geologic history.

The park gets its name from white domes of Navajo sandstone that resemble capitol domes and rocky cliffs that form a land barrier reef. Such features earned the park a place on the Wilderness Society's "America's best kept secrets" list. At night, its starry status as a Dark Sky Park is revealed.

This craggy topography, 235 miles from Salt Lake City, attracts rock climbers. Hiking (day and backcountry) and car tourism also afford ample views. Various walking trails may lead into a narrow gorge, to cliff tops, under a stone arch or to historic inscriptions. Road routes are paved and unpaved. (Rustic roads require four-wheel-drive vehicles.)

Despite the rocky terrain, this area has an agricultural past.

Fremont and ancestral Pueblo people added farming to their hunter-gatherer ways about 2,000 years ago, growing corn, beans and squash. Petroglyph panels throughout the park depict stories of the early inhabitants.

Today, there are no restaurants or lodging here. However, an oasis of hospitality exists at the Gifford Homestead (a farmhouse on the National Register of Historic Places). Now a museum and store, it sells reproduction household tools, jellies, rag dolls and books. Also popular: locally made fruit pies.

Night at Zion Canyon in Zion National Park. (Rebecca Alfafara/National Park Service)

Zion, Utah
"Never before has such a naked mountain of rock entered into our minds! Without a shred of disguise, its transcendent form rises preeminent. There is almost nothing to compare to it." - Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, early explorer-topographer of the American West

Size: 147,243 acres

Founded: As Mukuntuweap National Monument, 1909; as Zion National Park, 1919

Annual attendance: 4,488,268

Americans look anything but sedentary here among the formations of sedimentary rock. The terrain invites climbing, scrambling, hiking, wading and canyoneering. Although shuttle buses and cars can access views, sightseeing here can seem a bit like a competitive sport.

Among the challenges is the Subway, a slot canyon that requires route finding, rappelling and swimming. (Permits are required.)

Lower-exertion paths are also available among the trails that meander throughout the varied landscape of desert, mountains, forests, valleys and river.

The Narrows, a canyon-network trek along the Virgin River that involves wading and, sometimes, swimming, is less challenging. The visual reward for such efforts is evident in this: Zion is one of the most Instagrammed places in the country. (Scenes in the Oscar-winning 1969 film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" were filmed here.)

Spectacular sites include a man-made addition. As the U.S. Interior Department puts it, "Zion is home to one of the greatest engineering feats of modern times." To make the area accessible, construction began on a 25-mile stretch of road to connect Zion to the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon. The Zion-Mt. Carmel Highway and Tunnel, completed in 1930, includes a 1.1-mile-long tunnel that slices through Zion's sandstone cliffs. The tunnel has windows to provide views of Zion Canyon.

Early inhabitants called this land Mukuntuweap, meaning straight canyon in the language of the Southern Paiute. Zion is the Mormon name. Other names here include the Great White Throne (of white Navajo sandstone), the Watchman, Three Patriarchs, Weeping Rock, Checkerboard Mesa, Emerald Pools. Monkey flowers and hanging gardens (created by water seeping from sandstone and feeding ferns and mosses) are part of a diversity that's made possible by the park's location at the intersection of the Colorado Plateau, Basin and Range Province and Mojave Desert.

This park is open all year, and fans of snowshoeing and cross-country skiing flock to Zion in winter.

Campers from Camp Sonshine at the Hughes River Gap overlook on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Shenandoah, Virginia
"The overall idea was that motorists should be able to drive out of Washington for a Sunday's mountain experience and get back home by night." - Charles E. Peterson, Park Service landscape architect, circa 1930s
A classic road trip lies within the boundaries of this park. Skyline Drive runs like a 105-mile spine along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. With 75 scenic overlooks and a leisurely speed limit, traveling end to end takes three to four hours. The roadsides bloom with a seasonal progression of wildflowers - from early trillium through azaleas and mountain laurel to black-eyed Susans and goldenrods. The Wilderness Society listed Shenandoah among its best parks for fall color. The annual Fall Foliage Bike Festival coincides with that display.

Although the park can be driven in a day, accommodations and dining are available for those who linger to explore the paths, including 101 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Overnight options include the 1939 Big Meadows Lodge, a stone and wormy-chestnut structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Before the area was designated as a park, homeowners here kept farms, orchards and grazing animals. Traces of former residents include garden-patch daffodils and more than 100 family cemeteries, some still maintained by descendants.

One site of note is Rapidan Camp, the summer retreat of President Herbert Hoover. Here, 70 miles from the White House on 164 wooded acres, the president, first lady and friends relaxed and held meetings. The guest book of the 13-cabin compound includes such names as Lindbergh, Ford and Edison.

In 1935, the compound became part of the park; its three remaining buildings are open for ranger-led tours.

Today, summer visitors may catch a view of a more ethereal variety.

"Fog lies like a soft white blanket on the Shenandoah Valley and the Piedmont, while the mountaintop is clear," visitskylinedrive.org says.

"If conditions are right, you can look down on a 'fog ocean,' with the lower peaks rising above it like islands."

Mount Rainier and Nisqually Glacier at dusk in Mount Rainier National Park. (National Park Service)

Mount Rainier, Washington
"There is an indescribable ghostliness about [Mount Rainier] that suggests a living double personality." - From "The Saga of a Mountain," a Tacoma Eastern Railroad pamphlet (1911)
Mount Rainier is an icy volcano, which sounds contradictory. But this icon, which reaches 14,411 feet above sea level and last erupted in 1894, is the most heavily glaciated peak in the lower 48 states. Its glaciers feed six rivers as well as wildflower meadows and forests.

Mount Rainier is a Pacific Northwest landmark. And the surrounding landscape is rife with flora and fauna. But another notable aspect of this park is man-made. Mount Rainier Park was designated a National Landmark for its collection of structures built in the Park Service's rustic style of architecture. Examples here include the 1916-built Paradise Inn, which still accommodates guests. It's built of timbers that had weathered naturally for 30 years before they were used in the construction. Other rustic buildings dotting the parkland include three late-1920s structures in the Longmire Village area, made of large, glacial boulders and logs for an appearance designed to fit the surroundings.

Although rustic and rugged, this park was the first to allow visitors to enter with cars. Today, vehicles may go no higher that the Sunrise area. Because Sunrise is at 6,400 feet, the road doesn't typically open until late June or early July. It usually closes by early October. Sunrise offers views of Mount Rainier and other Cascade Mountain volcanoes, as well as wildflower meadows and valleys. Climbers seeking to summit Mount Rainier should be in good physical condition, with expertise and proper equipment.

The aptly named Paradise area of the park is popular year round and also is a prime area for winter sports. The Paradise Inn was one of the earliest ski resorts in the United States. Although just a two-hour drive from Seattle, Paradise is listed among the snowiest places on earth.

Horses in the Pasayten Wilderness at North Cascades National Park. (Steve Kazlowski/Alamy Stock Photo)

North Cascades, Washington
"I went out in my alpine yard and there it was ... hundreds of miles of pure snow-covered rocks and virgin lakes and high timber." - Jack Kerouac, author, in "The Dharma Bums" (1958, 10 years before the area became a national park)
This portion of the Cascades Range, dubbed the American Alps, feels much farther removed than its three-hour distance from Seattle.

There is a depth of wilderness here, due to its rugged terrain, as well as to its neighbors: Ross Lake and Lake Chelan national recreation areas. Running through this land is a stretch of the famed Pacific Crest Trail, which extends from the U.S.-Mexico border to Canada.

Along with climbers, equestrians, backcountry hikers and day tourists, a wide-ranging ecosystem thrives at various elevations here. Mammals include the reclusive and, some argue, threatened wolverine, as well as the mountain goat. A note for postcard writers here: Mountain goats aren't really goats. They're members of the antelope family.

Mountain goats are "generalist herbivores" that eat most plants, the Park Service says. Like that wide-ranging diet, this park bills itself as a "hikers smorgasbord." In additional to serious mountaineering, it offers accessible trails and short, scenic strolls and steep, grueling hikes.

Such an unadorned nature experience evokes the words of writer-conservationist Wallace Stegner, who once noted, "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in."

Hurricane Ridge at Olympic National Park. (Dave Turner/National Park Service)

Olympic, Washington
"Curtains of clubmosses hang from ... archways, separating one green forest room from another." - Gunnar O. Fagerlund, in the Park Service's "Natural History Handbook Number One" (1954)

Size: 922,649 acres

Founded: As Mount Olympus National Monument, 1909; national park, 1938

Annual attendance: 3,245,806

Few people think "United States" when they hear the words "rain forest." Here, just over an hour from Olympia, the state capital, the Olympic Peninsula offers just that.

In addition to having national park status, this rare landscape is a UNESCO World Heritage site and biosphere reserve.

UNESCO cites this park's longest undeveloped coast in the contiguous United States and its complex ecosystems, which range from Pacific shore through temperate rain forest, from Alpine meadows to glaciated mountain peaks. In addition, it claims one of the world's largest stands of virgin temperate rain forest and many of the world's largest species of coniferous trees.

This water-rich place is prime for boating. Visitors may kayak or canoe on a various lakes, rivers or the ocean.

In a single day, sightseers can take in Hurricane Ridge, Hoh Rainforest and Rialto Beach (save it for last for a Pacific sunset). Multi-day visitors may stay inside the park at the vintage Lake Quinault Lodge, built in 1926, or Lake Crescent Lodge (1915).

The Park Service suggests bringing binoculars and looking for wildlife at dawn and dusk. Bald eagles, marmots, black oystercatchers and sooty grouse are among the denizens. Coastal hikers in the months of April, May, October and November may see migrating whales along the Kalaloch, Rialto and Shi Shi beaches.

One researcher suggests that visitors also explore with their ears. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic audiologist and proponent of limiting noise, identified a spot on the Hoh River Trail that he calls "One Square Inch of Silence."

At one time, the Hoh Rainforest edged the Pacific Coast from Southeastern Alaska to California's Central Coast and abundant resources sustained a number of indigenous dwellers, including the Hoh people. Today, eight Olympic Peninsula tribes have a relationship with the park.

Sandstone Falls on the New River at New River Gorge National Park.

New River Gorge, West Virginia
"The sandstone here is unlike anyplace else in the country. It's bullet hard and seems almost tailor made for a variety of technical, gymnastic and thought-provoking rock climbing." - Jay Young, New River Alliance of Climbers

Size: 72,346 acres

Founded: National river, 1978; national park and preserve, 2020

Attendance: 1,195,721

In this storied place, where coal miners labored to extract fossil fuel from seams in the earth, visitors test their recreational muscle. Among abandoned timber and mining towns, buff adventurers tackle white-water rapids and steep gorge walls carved by an ancient river paradoxically called the New.

In addition to the high-energy activities of hiking, mountain biking, rappelling, fishing and annual bridge BASE jumping on the first Saturday of October, there is a quieter side, contemplative, even. Among the sights are abandoned towns, pioneer gravestones, moss-covered railroad tracks, train depots, mines and rusting relics of the mining history. Active rail tracks also operate in the area. They include Amtrak passenger service, which has stops within the park.

Remains of former activity include onetime homesteads and subsistence farms.

And there is natural beauty. Trillium and bluebells bloom here, as do masses of rhododendrons. Great rhododendrons, West Virginia's state flower, thrive in dense thickets covered in pale pink-white flowers in late June and early July.

The gorge itself has been dubbed the Grand Canyon of the East-with good reason. The canyon reaches 1,400 feet at its deepest point.

That depth parallels a deep history, tucked into what the Park Service describes as "the largest remaining block of relatively unfragmented, mid-latitude forest in the world."

Middle Teton, the third-highest peak at Grand Teton National Park. (National Park Service)

Grand Teton, Wyoming
"This is how mountains are supposed to look." - President Theodore Roosevelt
The superlatives "awesome" and "amazing" have been diminished by overuse. But we still have "majestic." And there are still landscapes - including here - that merit that description.

Majestic might also apply to the creatures that populate the ground that surrounds the Teton peaks. Park inhabitants include bison, weighing in at as much as 2,000 pounds, and calliope hummingbirds, as light as two paper clips.

The tiny calliope breeds in the chilly mountain environments and is remarkable for being the smallest bird in the United States and Canada and the smallest long-distance avian migrant in the world, according to Cornell University.

The beauty that surrounds such creatures is, like them, both grand and subtle. They all play a role in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompasses this park, Yellowstone Park and portions of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

This vast network of flora, fauna and geology is a significant interconnected environment. Here, grass is essential for the soil and for the animals it feeds. Tickle grass and tufted hair grass, among others, tint the vistas with subtle hues.

The land here beside the city of Jackson Hole also fed early tribal inhabitants. Native Americans roasted camas bulbs, for example, in underground pits.

Today Grand Teton, named for the main peak, feeds visitors' hunger for nature and recreation. Activities include mountaineering, hiking, backpacking, bicycling, fishing, boating, floating, skiing, snowshoeing and, of course, sightseeing.

Among the hiking trails is the Paintbrush and Cascade canyons' 18-mile loop. The Wilderness Society says this route offers "winning views" of the Cathedral Group, which are the tallest peaks in the Teton Range.

The panoramas here have attracted moviemakers. Grand Teton has served as a backdrop for parts of "Django Unchained," "Rocky IV" and "Shane."

Cynobacteria forming waves of color in hot water at Yellowstone National Park. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

Yellowstone, Wyoming
"[It] is no more representative of America than is Disneyland." - John Steinbeck, author, in "Travels with Charley: In Search of America"
This, the first U.S. national park, in part owes its physical asset to the active volcano that lies beneath its surface, where the Park Service says there's enough magma to fill the Grand Canyon about 11 times.

Seismologist Robert B. Smith has described the park as "an active geologic laboratory - and the laboratory is alive."

That living landscape speaks through 10,000 hydrothermal features: hissing fumaroles (steam vents), spewing geysers and gurgling mud pots. Old Faithful geyser, the most well-known, erupts about 17 times a day.

The subterranean side of Yellowstone is what the Park Service has called a pressure cooker. Aboveground, much of Yellowstone is a protected paradise. Its beauty became widely known when photographer William Henry Jackson documented the region for the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. His images helped inspire Congress to establish the park.

Yellowstone is large, with 17 rivers, 290 waterfalls, five entrances, 4,000 bison and acreage spanning portions of three states (96 percent in Wyoming, 3 percent in Montana and 1 percent in Idaho). It has the largest lake on the continent at a high elevation (7,733 feet).

Yellowstone is home to the largest concentration of mammals in the lower 48. In addition to bison, those inhabitants include grizzly bears, wolves, lynxes, foxes, moose and elk.

Humans also have left their mark on this western range. It has 27 associated Native American tribes, 466 miles of roads (310 miles paved) and more than 900 historic buildings. Included among those vintage structures are Old Faithful Inn and the Lake Hotel, built in 1891, the oldest operating hotel in the park.

Also here is an unexpected category: "other life forms." That "other" is heat-loving bacteria, which create the ribbons of color in hot water.

As the Park Service explains, the green, brown and orange mats are cyanobacteria, which can thrive in waters as hot as 167 degrees. Here, the colors are visible in the Grand Prismatic Spring at Midway Geyser Basin. Grand Prismatic is the largest hot spring in the country and the third largest in the world.

In 1871, well before color photography could document the vibrant phenomenon, Ferdinand Hayden, leader of the U.S. Geological Survey expedition, described the hot spring's "peculiar vividness and delicacy of color [from] nature's cunning skill."

About this story

Annual attendancefigures are from 2019; park acreage figures are as of June, 2022.

correction

A previous photo caption for Haleakalā National Park in Hawaii misidentified the plants in the photo as ferns. The plants are Haleakalā silverswords. This article has been corrected.
Design by Matthew Callahan, Jess Eng and Jeong Shin

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A comprehensive guide to the country's 63 national parks

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The essential guide to the nation's national parks.

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Billion is a pretty big number. (To wit: A million seconds equals about 11 days, but a billion seconds is almost 32 years.) So it's all the more incredible that the National Park Service's records have registered over 14 billion visits since 1904. That's nearly twice the planet's population. It's greater than the number of years the universe has existed at all. ( See extraordinary photos of national parks from space.)

Those massive crowds keep coming because of the parks' enduring power. Parks-" America's best idea"- preserve wildlife and wild places, provide vital recreation, and create priceless cultural spaces. And while it's well worth a trip to each of the system's 418 parks (60 of which are "national"), there are certainly some heavy hitters among them.

Check out this photo gallery to learn about each of the top 10 most visited national parks, and explore this graphic to see how their stats stack up.

This article is updated yearly with new information.

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Billion is a pretty big number. (To wit: A million seconds equals about 11 days, but a billion seconds is almost 32 years.) So it's all the more incredible that the National Park Service's records have registered over 14 billion visits since 1904. That's nearly twice the planet's population.

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Ready to explore the National Parks of the United States? The U.S. is fortunate to have an abundance of beautiful parks to explore. Putting it all together, there are over 390 sites that the US National Park Service maintains from National Parks, National Monuments, Seashores, Battlefields and more. To top that off, there are hundreds of sites by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and so much more! Whether you are on the west coast, the east coast, in the rockies or located in the midwest, there are more than enough opportunities to get outdoors and enjoy one of these magnificent parks. Discovering a park is easy. You can explore a park through our Find Your Park pages, by alphabet and find them on the map above. Parks offer everything from wonderful hiking trails, photography and wildlife viewing opportunities, to stargazing or even boating and climbing. There is so much to do at any one of these parks and it's a fantastic way to spend time with the family. Great for all ages, educational and most of all, the serenity of parks makes for a very relaxing and rewarding experience.

Looking to plan a scenic trip in the US? Our pre-planned road trip suggestions take you through some of America's most stunning national parks. Our road trips are designed to help you put together your own route. Load up the car and start exploring by taking a vacation to one of these amazing destinations! See parks like Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, Grand Canyon National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Shenandoah National Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, Assateague Island National Seashore, Redwood National and State Parks, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Lava Beds National Monument and more!

Exploring the US National Parks can be done a multitude of ways. Whether it be by half day hikes to multi-day backpacking trips or by rafting, floating or paddling down a river, climbing some of the most extreme challenges on earth like Half Dome or El Capitan, by experiencing some of the best wildlife viewing experiences in the world... there's something for everyone.

Search our Outdoor Gear Store for anything from camping tents, fleece apparel, hiking boots, backpacking packs, water filtration and more. No matter who you are shopping for, we have something for every outdoor enthusiast.

From the Bryce Canyon Lodge or the Majestic Yosemite Hotel to staying in West Yellowstone, Montana and Jackson, Wyoming or Moab, Utah, discover the many options for staying in or near a National Park.

Are you interested in viewing wildlife during your next outdoors adventure? Here a couple great ideas if wildlife viewing is top on your list for your next trip.

Featured National Parks

Explore the Fall colors of the aspens in Rocky Mountain National Park, visit Yellowstone during quieter visitation times, explore Zion National Park or let your adventure take you to Arches National Park. These are the featured parks of October! Can't make it to any of these parks? Never fear, find your park using our park locator pages.

Utah is world famous for being host to some of the United State's most spectacular scenery. Some of the most stunning National Parks are home to the beautiful state of Utah.

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Ready to explore the National Parks of the United States? The U.S. is fortunate to have an abundance of beautiful parks to explore. Putting it all together, there are over 390 sites that the US National Park Service maintains from National Parks, National Monuments, Seashores, Battlefields and more.

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Mr. Nussbaum USA United States National Parks Activities

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Parents and Teachers: In light of the COVID-19 crisis, and the many disruptions it has caused or will cause to our kids' education, I am offering subscriptions to (the upgraded site) MrN365.com at 80% off the normal price through JULY. Please note the site you are on, mrnussbaum.com, is and always will be FREE!

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The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks - Google Arts & Culture

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Travel to a National Park for a vacation that's equal parts affordable, adventurous and memorable. Check out Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, see glaciers at Glacier National Park, hike Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, or climb canyons in Zion National Park. The great outdoors calls.

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Official MapQuest - Maps, Driving Directions, Live Traffic

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Official MapQuest website, find driving directions, maps, live traffic updates and road conditions. Find nearby businesses, restaurants and hotels. Explore!

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National Geographic's guide to U.S. National Parks

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Read recent press releases, policy updates, blog posts, and magazine articles.

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A Century of Impact is a 192-page hardbound treasure celebrating NPCA's first 100 years of protecting America's national parks. LOOK INSIDE -->

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Link to PBS movies

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The National Parks: America's Best Idea is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone. As such, it follows in the tradition of Burns's exploration of other American inventions, such as baseball and jazz.

The narrative traces the birth of the national park idea in the mid-1800s and follows its evolution for nearly 150 years. Using archival photographs, first-person accounts of historical characters, personal memories and analysis from more than 40 interviews, and what Burns believes is the most stunning cinematography in Florentine Films' history, the series chronicles the steady addition of new parks through the stories of the people who helped create them and save them from destruction. It is simultaneously a biography of compelling characters and a biography of the American landscape.

With 391 units (58 national parks, plus 333 national monuments and historic sites), the National Park Service has a presence in 49 of the 50 states (Delaware is the sole exception). Like the idea of freedom itself, the national park idea has been constantly tested, is constantly evolving and is inherently full of contradictory tensions: between individual rights and the community, the local and the national; between preservation and exploitation, the sacred and the profitable; between one generation's immediate desires and the next generation's legacy.

As America expanded westward, pioneers would "discover" landscapes of such breathtaking and unusual beauty that written descriptions of the lands were sometimes assumed by people in the East to be works of fiction. Eventually, there emerged a belief that these special places should be kept untarnished by development and commerce so that they could be experienced by all people.

Wallace Stegner called the national parks "the best idea we ever had," and no activity of the federal government engenders such universal support and public loyalty; yet the story of how these special places became preserved as parks, the role of individual citizens in creating them, and the powerful stories of people's emotional connection to them remain relatively unknown.

Among the lengthy cast of characters profiled in the series is James Mason Hutchings, a magazine publisher who was one of the first people to promote Yosemite and who sought to develop a resort hotel on the land; John Muir, a deeply religious mountain prophet who found inspiration in Yosemite and then inspired generations of parks enthusiasts; George Masa, a Japanese immigrant whose photographs of the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee served in the fight to protect the region as a national park; Chiura Obata, another Japanese immigrant, whose highly-acclaimed paintings of Yosemite gave Americans a fresh perspective through which to see their beloved landmarks; Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who persuaded Congress that a swamp in southern Florida, the Everglades, should be set aside as a national park; George Melendez Wright, a park ranger from San Francisco who recognized the need to preserve the parks' wildlife in its natural state; Adolph Murie, a young biologist and protégé of Wright who was instrumental in reforming park policy so that wildlife - even predators - would have the same protections as the land itself; and Stephen Mather, a wealthy businessman who used his personal fortune and genius for promotion to create a National Park Service.

These historical accounts are paralleled with contemporary stories of people who continue to be transformed and inspired by the parks today. They include Shelton Johnson, an African American who grew up in Detroit, where the national parks seemed distant, unreachable places until he later became a park ranger; Gerard Baker, a Native-American park superintendent whose tribe has long considered the land sacred; Tuan Luong, a Paris-born Vietnamese rock climber and photographer who fell in love with the parks and dedicated himself to photographing all 58 national parks with a large format camera; and Juan Lujan, who grew up in west Texas during the Depression and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, with which he would help develop Big Bend National Park in Texas. Also included in the film are interviews with best-selling author Nevada Barr, a former park ranger; writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams; historians William Cronon, Paul Schullery and Alfred Runte; and many others.

Nearly a decade in the making, The National Parks: America's Best Idea is a visual feast, featuring some of the most extensive, breathtaking images of the national parks system every captured on film. It contains the most contemporary footage of any Ken Burns film since Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, shot principally by chief cinematographer Buddy Squires (who has filmed all of Burns's documentaries), long-time Florentine cameraman Allen Moore, Lincoln Else (who also is a former ranger at Yosemite) and Burns himself.

As with all of Burns's films, there is an extensive educational component, an interactive web site that provides more information about the film, the parks and related issues, as well as a large-scale community engagement initiative. Four years ago, WETA and Florentine Films, with generous support from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, launched the Untold Stories project, designed to bring to light stories from the national parks focusing on the role of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans in the creation and protection of individual parks and to engage new and traditionally underserved audiences in the educational richness of the national parks.

Accompanying the series is a companion book, written by Dayton Duncan, and introduced by Ken Burns, which has been published by Alfred A. Knopf, Ken Burns's long-time publisher. PBS Home Video has produced a complete DVD box set featuring "making of" footage and an interview with Burns and others involved in the film.

In addition to Peter Coyote's narration, The National Parks: America's Best Idea features first-person voices read by some of America's greatest actors. Tom Hanks reads the voices of several characters in the film, including Congressman John F. Lacey, who helped push a bill through Congress to protect Yellowstone's last wild buffalo herd. Other voices include Andy Garcia, Josh Lucas, Eli Wallach, Campbell Scott, Sam Waterston, John Lithgow, George Takei, Philip Bosco, Carolyn McCormick, Adam Arkin and Kevin Conway.

For information in Spanish please visit www.vmetv.com/parquesnacionales.

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The National Parks: America's Best Idea is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone.

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How they tell our story

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National Geographic stories take you on a journey that's always enlightening, often surprising, and unfailingly fascinating.

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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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official government website

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NPS.gov Homepage (U.S. National Park Service)

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The National Park Service cares for special places saved by the American people so that all may experience our heritage.