Greatest U.S. National Parks

El Capitan presents about 3,000 feet of granite in a single sweep, and Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 feet in three tiers. Lincoln signed the 1864 Yosemite Grant protecting the valley, the first land the federal government set aside for preservation; the park followed in 1890.

Signed into law on March 1, 1872, this was the first national park anywhere. Over 10,000 hydrothermal features sit atop the caldera, including more than 500 geysers, about half the geysers on Earth. Gray wolves were returned to the Lamar Valley in 1995 after a seventy-year absence.

Carved by the Colorado across 277 river miles, the canyon runs up to 18 miles wide and about a mile deep, exposing rock nearly two billion years old at the bottom. Roughly five million people come each year, and under one percent of them reach the river.

Sheer walls rise some 2,000 feet above the Virgin River in a canyon roughly 15 miles long. Angels Landing has required a lottery permit since April 2022, and The Narrows pushes hikers upstream through the channel where the gorge pinches to 20 or 30 feet wide.

Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses 50 miles of the park over Logan Pass, an engineering job finished in 1932, the same year it joined Canada's Waterton Lakes as the first international peace park. Of roughly 150 glaciers standing here in 1850, about 26 remained by 2015.

Cadillac Mountain tops out at 1,530 feet, the highest point on the US Atlantic coast. Established in 1919 as Lafayette National Park, this was the first national park east of the Mississippi, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid for the 45 miles of carriage roads that thread it.

About 12.2 million recreation visits in 2024 made this the busiest national park by a wide margin, roughly two and a half times the runner-up. It charges no entrance fee, and biologists have now documented more than 19,000 species inside it, synchronous fireflies among them.

Three distinct ecosystems sit inside one boundary: glaciated peaks up to Mount Olympus at 7,980 feet, temperate rain forest, and 73 miles of wilderness coast. The Hoh takes 12 to 14 feet of rain a year, among the wettest spots in the contiguous United States.

Trail Ridge Road tops out at 12,183 feet and keeps eleven miles above treeline, the highest continuous paved road in the country. The park protects 77 named peaks over 12,000 feet, with Longs Peak at 14,259 feet the only fourteener inside its boundary.

Freeze and thaw cycles, roughly 200 a year, carve the hoodoos here rather than a river, and no permanent stream runs through the amphitheater. The rim sits between about 8,000 and 9,100 feet, and the thin dry air yields some of the darkest night skies in the country.

General Sherman measures 52,508 cubic feet, the largest tree on Earth by volume, and stands in a Giant Forest full of near rivals. Mount Whitney, the high point of the lower 48 at 14,505 feet, marks the eastern boundary. It became the second national park in 1890.

Two deserts meet inside the boundary: the higher Mojave, where the Joshua trees grow, and the lower Colorado, where they do not. Monzogranite weathered into rounded boulder piles has made Hidden Valley and Jumbo Rocks a climbing destination for decades. National park in 1994.

More than 2,000 documented stone arches are packed into about 76,000 acres, the densest concentration anywhere. Landscape Arch spans 306 feet, the longest in North America, and it has shed rock in living memory, including a 60-foot slab in 1991.

Rising 14,410 feet, this is the most heavily glaciated peak in the contiguous United States. Paradise recorded 1,122 inches of snow during the winter of 1971 to 1972, a world record at the time, and the park was established in 1899 as the country's fifth.

Snowmelt and rain are the lake's only sources, which is part of why 1,943 feet of water reads that blue. The caldera formed when Mount Mazama collapsed roughly 7,700 years ago, leaving the deepest lake in the United States and the cinder cone of Wizard Island rising from it.

Jackson Hole ends abruptly at a fault-block range with no foothills, and the Grand tops 13,775 feet roughly 7,000 feet above the valley floor. Congress protected the peaks in 1929 and folded in Rockefeller's purchased valley land in 1950 after years of local opposition.

Six million acres are served by one 92-mile road, closed to private vehicles beyond Mile 15 and traveled mostly by park buses. North America's highest summit rises 20,310 feet at the center of it, though cloud hides the mountain on most summer days.

Badwater Basin sits 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in North America, and Furnace Creek recorded 134 degrees Fahrenheit in July 1913, the highest air temperature ever measured. At 3.4 million acres it is the largest national park outside Alaska.

Kilauea and Mauna Loa both sit inside this park, established in 1916 and later named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. During the 2018 eruption the floor of Halemaumau dropped more than 1,600 feet in about three months as the summit caldera collapsed on itself.

Set aside in 1906 to protect the works of people rather than scenery, a first for the park system, it holds roughly 4,800 archaeological sites including some 600 cliff dwellings. Cliff Palace alone contains about 150 rooms and more than 20 kivas.

Two districts flank Tucson, protecting stands of the saguaro cactus, which may not grow its first arm until it is 50 to 70 years old. Proclaimed a national monument in 1933, it was raised to national park status in 1994.

Elevators drop 754 feet to the Big Room, an 8.2-acre chamber and the largest readily accessible cave room in North America. More than 119 caves lie within the park boundary, among them Lechuguilla, which stays closed to all but researchers.

At least 450 bird species have been recorded here, more than in any other national park, drawn by the meeting of Chihuahuan Desert, Rio Grande floodplain, and the Chisos Mountains. Santa Elena Canyon walls climb 1,500 feet straight off the water. Established in 1944.

Skyline Drive runs 105 miles along the Blue Ridge crest with 75 overlooks facing the valley and the Piedmont. Established in 1935, the park was assembled from farmland that had been logged and grazed for generations, and the forest that returned now hides Old Rag's boulder scramble.

The Green and Colorado rivers meet at the center and split the park into three districts with no direct road between them: Island in the Sky, The Needles, and The Maze. Established in 1964, it is the largest of Utah's five national parks and the least developed.

A hundred-mile buckle in the Earth's crust called the Waterpocket Fold defines the park, tipping up rock layers laid down across roughly 200 million years. Mormon settlers planted the Fruita orchards in the late 1800s, and the Park Service still tends them for public picking.

Hyperion, the tallest known living tree at roughly 381 feet, stands here, though its location was closed to visitors in 2022 to protect the ground around it. The national and state parks together protect close to half of all remaining old-growth coast redwood.

Eroding buttes expose one of the richest late Eocene and Oligocene fossil beds known, with ancestral horses, rhinos, and saber-toothed predators weathering out of the layers. The park also holds the largest protected mixed-grass prairie in the system and took black-footed ferrets back in 1994.

Roosevelt ranched in these North Dakota badlands in the 1880s, and the park named for him remains the only one honoring a single person. His Elkhorn Ranch site sits on a remote Little Missouri bottom, while bison, feral horses, and prairie dog towns hold the broken ground.

Painted Wall drops 2,250 feet, the tallest cliff in Colorado, and parts of the gorge get only about 33 minutes of direct sunlight a day. The Gunnison falls an average of 34 feet per mile through here, against 7.5 for the Colorado in the Grand Canyon.

Surveyors have mapped more than 426 miles of connected passage, making this the longest known cave system on Earth by a margin of hundreds of miles. Guided tours have run here since the early 1800s, and the surface park was established in 1941.

Fossil logs here come from Late Triassic conifers roughly 220 million years old, locked in the Chinle Formation beside the banded badlands of the Painted Desert. It is also the only national park holding a stretch of the original Route 66 alignment, marked by a rusting 1932 Studebaker.

Roughly 95 percent of the world's known boxwork, a honeycomb lattice of calcite fins, hangs inside this cave, and surveyors have mapped more than 165 miles of passage. Theodore Roosevelt signed it into being in January 1903, the first cave anywhere protected as a national park.

All four types of volcano found on Earth occur within this one park: shield, cinder cone, composite, and plug dome. Lassen Peak erupted repeatedly from 1914 to 1917, with a May 1915 blast that threw an ash column miles up and stripped the valley below it bare.

More than 300 glaciers sit inside this complex, more than any other national park outside Alaska. Established in 1968, it is skirted rather than crossed by State Route 20, and nearly all its acreage is managed as designated wilderness.

Water covers about 40 percent of the park, and Rainy, Kabetogama, Namakan, and Sand Point lakes make a boat the practical way in. Named for the French Canadian fur traders who paddled these routes, it was established in 1975 and draws aurora watchers through the dark months.

When George Vancouver charted this coast in 1794 the bay did not exist; the ice has since pulled back about 65 miles, one of the fastest documented glacial retreats on record. John Muir paddled in by canoe in 1879, and the park now anchors a transboundary World Heritage Site.

At 13.2 million acres this is the largest unit in the National Park System, roughly the size of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Switzerland combined. Mount St. Elias reaches 18,008 feet, and the Kennecott copper mill still stands above the Kennicott Glacier.

Novarupta's June 1912 eruption was the largest anywhere in the twentieth century, burying a valley in ash and leaving the fumaroles that named the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Brooks Falls now draws one of the densest gatherings of coastal brown bears on the planet.

The Harding Icefield spans more than 700 square miles and feeds at least 38 glaciers grinding down toward the Gulf of Alaska. Exit Glacier is the only one reachable by road from Seward, which makes the tidewater faces a boat-or-nothing proposition.

No road reaches this park, so floatplanes out of Anchorage handle nearly every arrival. Two active volcanoes, Redoubt and Iliamna, stand above salmon streams feeding Bristol Bay, and Dick Proenneke's hand-built cabin at Twin Lakes is preserved as a historic site.

Fifteen miles of Lake Michigan shoreline sit against steel mills and a working port, a juxtaposition no other national park offers. Botanist Henry Cowles studied ecological succession in these dunes in the 1890s, work foundational to modern ecology. Redesignated a park in 2019.

Twenty-two miles of the Cuyahoga River between Cleveland and Akron form the spine of this park, a stretch whose pollution helped drive the Clean Water Act. The Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail follows the whole length, and Brandywine Falls drops 65 feet. National park since 2000.

Federal protection of these thermal springs dates to 1832, four decades before Yellowstone, making it the oldest federally protected land now in the system. Bathhouse Row preserves eight historic bathhouses, and 47 springs still run hot. National park in 1921.

Five islands off the Southern California coast make up the park, reachable only by boat or small plane, with no lodging and no services. The island fox went from near extinction to delisting in 2016, the fastest recovery of any mammal under the Endangered Species Act.

Redesignated a national park in January 2013, it protects rock that traveled roughly 195 miles northwest along the San Andreas Fault from a volcanic field near Lancaster. It is also the only Park Service unit running its own California condor release program.

Named the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926, the General Grant Tree is the second largest on Earth by volume and was also declared a national shrine in 1956. The 1940 park surrounds a granite gorge ranking among the deepest in North America, far emptier than adjacent Sequoia.

Bristlecone pines below 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak include trees over 4,000 years old. One of them, Prometheus, was at least 4,862 years old when it was cut for research in 1964, a loss that helped push Congress to protect the mountain and Lehman Caves as a park in 1986.

Star Dune and Hidden Dune rise roughly 740 feet above the San Luis Valley floor, the tallest in North America, piled against the Sangre de Cristo range. Medano Creek runs in surges along the dune edge for a few weeks each spring. It became a national park in 2004.

Sunrise crowds gather at a 10,023-foot summit above an erosional basin more than seven miles long, commonly called a crater though water carved it. Haleakala silverswords grow nowhere else, flower once and die, and the park separated from Hawaii National Park in 1961.

Texas tops out at 8,751 feet on Guadalupe Peak, which sits on the exposed Capitan Reef, a Permian fossil reef roughly 260 million years old. McKittrick Canyon turns gold with bigtooth maple each fall, an anomaly in the surrounding Chihuahuan Desert.

Wolves and moose on this Lake Superior island have been counted every year since 1958, the longest continuous predator-prey study anywhere. The park shuts completely from November into mid-April, and reaching it means a ferry or a seaplane across open water.

Congress redesignated it in December 2020, making it the 63rd and newest national park after four decades as a national river. The New River Gorge Bridge carries traffic 876 feet above the water on a 3,030-foot span, opened to BASE jumpers one day each October.

Wave-like dunes of gypsum sand cover 275 square miles of the Tularosa Basin, the largest such dunefield on Earth. Fossilized human footprints found on an ancient lakebed here have been dated to roughly 23,000 years ago. The monument became a national park in December 2019.

Established in 1947 to protect an ecosystem rather than scenery, this 1.5-million-acre wetland is the only US site listed as a World Heritage Site, a Biosphere Reserve, and a Ramsar wetland at once. It is also the only place where alligators and crocodiles overlap in the wild.

About 95 percent of this park lies underwater, covering the northernmost Florida Keys and living coral reef within sight of Miami. Its Maritime Heritage Trail links six shipwrecks and is the only underwater archaeological trail in the National Park System.

This is the largest remaining tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the Southeast, with a canopy averaging over 100 feet and champion specimens of several species. Floodwaters from the Congaree River enrich the soil roughly ten times a year. National park since 2003.

Fort Jefferson sits 70 miles west of Key West, built from over 16 million bricks and never finished, the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere. Almost 99 percent of the park is open water, and the only way in is by boat or seaplane.

Lying entirely north of the Arctic Circle, this 8.4-million-acre park has no roads, no maintained trails, and no campgrounds. Access means a bush plane or a long walk in from the Dalton Highway, which keeps it among the least visited parks in the system.

Eero Saarinen's stainless steel catenary curve stands 630 feet tall and 630 feet wide, the tallest arch in the world, finished in 1965. At about 91 acres it is the smallest national park, redesignated from a national memorial in February 2018.

Great Kobuk Sand Dunes cover 25 square miles above the Arctic Circle, glacial grit left over from the last ice age. Caribou of the Western Arctic herd swim the Kobuk River at Onion Portage, a hunting site used for some 9,000 years. No road reaches the park at all.