170 Fun Facts About National Parks

Which national park surrounds the deepest lake in the United States?

Crater Lake in Oregon fills the basin left when a volcano collapsed about 7,700 years ago; no rivers flow in or out, so its water comes only from rain and snow.

Who policed Yellowstone for three decades before rangers took over?

The U.S. Army sent cavalry in 1886 because the park's civilian superintendents could not stop poachers and souvenir hunters; soldiers ran Yellowstone from Fort Yellowstone until 1918.

Which is the smallest U.S. national park by area?

Gateway Arch in St. Louis became a national park against the Park Service's own advice: its representative told the Senate that so small a city site should be a national monument instead.

Which photographer became famous for black-and-white images of America's national parks?

Ansel Adams took his first Yosemite pictures at 14, on a 1916 family trip, with a Kodak Brownie box camera his parents had given him; the park stayed his chief inspiration for life.

Which California national park contains the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume?

Sequoia National Park crews wrapped the base of the General Sherman Tree in protective foil in 2021, when the KNP Complex wildfire burned towards its grove, the Giant Forest.

Which president signed the 1872 act that created the first U.S. national park?

Ulysses S. Grant signed the act on March 1, 1872, after an 1871 survey brought back photographs and paintings of the region's geysers and canyons that caught the imagination of Congress.

Which park became the 63rd U.S. national park in December 2020?

New River Gorge in West Virginia had been a national river since 1978; in the upgrade less than a tenth became national park, and the rest stayed open to hunters as a national preserve.

Which national park is the largest by area in the United States?

Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska covers 13.2 million acres; it was first protected as a national monument, by presidential proclamation, while Congress was still arguing over Alaska's public lands.

Which national park is the largest by area in the contiguous United States?

Death Valley is also the hottest and driest national park, yet rare rainstorms can carpet its floor with wildflowers, and winter snow frosts the peaks around it.

The Cuyahoga River, which famously caught fire in 1969, now flows through a national park in which state?

Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley became a national recreation area in 1974, after the 1969 river fire had become a symbol of pollution and helped spur clean-water laws; it was made a national park in 2000.

Which South Dakota national park is known for boxwork, a rare honeycomb of thin calcite fins?

Wind Cave is named for the wind at its entrance: air rushes in or out of the small natural opening whenever the pressure outside changes, as if the cave were breathing.

Which New England park is the oldest national park east of the Mississippi River?

Acadia, in Maine, was pieced together from land given by private donors; it became Lafayette National Park in 1919 and took its present name in 1929.

Which national park protects the world's longest known cave system?

Mammoth Cave keeps growing on paper as surveyors connect new passages; the enslaved guide Stephen Bishop explored much of it and drew a celebrated map from memory in 1842.

What national park is famous for its iconic granite formations like El Capitan and Half Dome?

Yosemite's Half Dome was declared 'perfectly inaccessible' in an 1865 survey report, yet George Anderson reached the top in 1875 by drilling iron eyebolts into the granite.

Which Arkansas national park was first set aside as a federal reservation in 1832, four decades before the first national park?

Hot Springs was reserved by Congress in 1832, long before the idea of a national park existed, and grew into a busy bathhouse resort; it was renamed a national park only in 1921.

Which national park did George Bird Grinnell dub the 'Crown of the Continent' in 1901?

Glacier National Park owes much to George Bird Grinnell, who gave the region that nickname in a 1901 description and lobbied until Congress made it a park in 1910.

Which Florida national park is known for vast wetlands, alligators and panthers?

Everglades depends on a slow flow of fresh water that was increasingly diverted during the 20th century to serve South Florida's growth; Congress approved a plan to restore it in 2000.

Which national park is primarily known for its namesake canyon, carved by the Colorado River?

Grand Canyon is far younger than its rocks: the river is thought to have begun cutting it only 5 to 6 million years ago, while the rocks at the bottom are close to 2 billion years old.

Which Washington national park combines rugged mountains, temperate rainforest and coastline?

Olympic's Hoh Rain Forest averages about 140 inches of precipitation a year, because Pacific storms drop their moisture on the mountains and leave the park's eastern side in a rain shadow.

Which national park drew the most visitors in 2024?

Great Smoky Mountains draws around 12 million visits a year; it charges no entrance fee, and a public highway runs through it between Tennessee and North Carolina.

Which national park is known for its dramatic cliff dwellings built by ancient Pueblo people?

Mesa Verde's cliff dwellings were lived in for only about a century before their builders migrated south, leaving them empty by about 1300.

Which national park is famous for Angels Landing and the river hike through The Narrows?

Zion Canyon was cut by the Virgin River, a modest stream that drops so steeply off the plateau that its floods carry away sand and boulders and keep deepening the sandstone gorge.

Which national park is an archipelago of seven islands 70 miles west of Key West, Florida?

Dry Tortugas is almost all open water around seven small keys; Ponce de León named them in 1513 for their sea turtles, and 'Dry' is said to have been added because they have no fresh water.

Which national park encompasses both Kīlauea and Mauna Loa?

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park spans both summits; Kīlauea's 2018 eruption closed the summit area for months, and Mauna Loa is the largest active volcano on Earth.

Which Utah national park is packed with hoodoos, rock spires carved by frost and rain?

Bryce Canyon is not a canyon at all but a series of natural amphitheatres; the Paiute told of hoodoos as 'Legend People' turned to stone by Coyote.

Which national park hosts evening bat-flight viewings from its natural cave entrance?

Carlsbad Caverns' first known explorer was a teenager, Jim White, who climbed down around 1898 on a homemade wire ladder and went on to name many of its rooms.

Which national park is an island archipelago off Southern California, reachable only by boat or plane?

Channel Islands National Park lies off the coast of Southern California, reachable only by boat or plane, and its isolation produced endemic species such as the island fox.

Which Alaska national park is known for giant sand dunes crossed by migrating caribou herds?

Kobuk Valley holds the largest active sand dunes in the Arctic, and caribou swim its river at Onion Portage, where people have hunted them for 9,000 years; no roads lead in, so visitors arrive by air.

Which Alaska national park did John Muir first explore with Tlingit guides in 1879?

Glacier Bay drew John Muir in 1879, guided by Tlingit men; his enthusiastic writings made it a tourist attraction by the late 1880s, and Muir Glacier bears his name.

Which national park offers Blue Ridge waterfalls and overlooks just 75 miles from Washington, D.C.?

Shenandoah was assembled in the 1930s from private farms and homesteads that Virginia bought or condemned; at least 500 mountain families were moved out to make the park.

Which Texas national park has desert landscapes and the Rio Grande forming part of its border?

Big Bend takes its name from the great bend of the Rio Grande, which for more than 100 miles marks both the park's southern edge and the border with Mexico.

Which South Dakota national park is famed for fossil beds of ancient horses and rhinos?

Badlands' fossil beds record animals long gone, but its prairie has brought one back: the black-footed ferret, among North America's rarest mammals, was reintroduced here.

Which Arizona national park includes part of the Painted Desert and old Route 66?

Petrified Forest protects Triassic logs turned to stone; so much of the wood was being hauled away that it was made a national monument in 1906, and removing any is against the law.

Which Michigan national park is a Lake Superior archipelago known for its wolf-moose study?

Isle Royale's wolves arrived over an ice bridge in the late 1940s; by 2018 only two were left, so the Park Service flew in new wolves to restore the balance with the island's moose.

Which is the only U.S. National Park Service unit located south of the equator?

National Park of American Samoa stands on land the Park Service does not own: it leases it from Samoan villages under a 50-year agreement that respects the islands' communal land tradition.

Which national park surrounds the ice-capped volcano that towers over Seattle and Tacoma?

Mount Rainier is an active volcano about 59 miles from Seattle; because it carries so much glacier ice, an eruption could send huge mudflows down the river valleys below.

Which Minnesota national park is a maze of interconnected lakes explored mainly by boat?

Voyageurs is a park you mostly cannot drive into: its heart, the Kabetogama Peninsula, is reachable only by water, and nearly every campsite needs a boat to reach.

Which Utah national park preserves the Waterpocket Fold?

Capitol Reef takes its name from white domes that reminded settlers of a capitol building and from the Waterpocket Fold, a long wrinkle in the Earth's crust that was a barrier, or 'reef', to travel.

Which national park in the Cascade Range surrounds a volcano that erupted repeatedly between 1914 and 1917?

Lassen Volcanic became a national park in 1916, in the middle of those eruptions; the biggest blast, on May 22, 1915, rained ash hundreds of miles away.

Which Alaska national park has the Brooks Falls platform for watching salmon-fishing bears?

Katmai was set aside in 1918 for the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, left by the largest eruption of the 20th century; its bears found wider fame later through Fat Bear Week, an online vote held since 2014.

Which Washington national park has glaciated peaks, deep valleys and over 300 glaciers?

North Cascades holds more than 300 glaciers, and their meltwater carries finely ground 'glacial flour' that turns Diablo Lake a milky turquoise.

Which Utah national park is divided into districts named Island in the Sky, The Needles, and The Maze?

Canyonlands is cut into those districts by the Green and Colorado rivers; no road links them directly, so driving from one district to another takes two to six hours.

Which national park preserves the largest gypsum dunefield on Earth?

White Sands began as gypsum that rain and snowmelt dissolved out of the surrounding mountains; it dried into crystals on an ancient lakebed, and wind broke them into the dunes' white sand.

Which Florida national park, 95 percent water, lies within sight of Miami?

Biscayne was protected in 1968 after developers planned a seaport on the bay and a new city on its islands; as the park idea won out, landowners bulldozed a 'Spite Highway' down Elliott Key.

Which California national park is known for its talus caves and a California condor release site?

Pinnacles' rocks are part of an ancient volcano that the San Andreas Fault tore in two; the rest of it lies nearly 200 miles to the south-east, near Lancaster.

Which Texas national park's El Capitan cliff loomed over the Butterfield stagecoach route?

Guadalupe Mountains' El Capitan is limestone built up by marine life in a Permian sea; the Butterfield Overland Mail ran beneath it from 1858, stopping at the nearby Pinery station.

Which South Carolina national park preserves the largest intact old-growth bottomland hardwood forest left in the Southeast?

Congaree's champion trees are fed by floods: the Congaree and Wateree rivers sweep across the forest floor, leaving the nutrients and sediment that help its trees grow so tall.

Which Nevada national park is known for ancient bristlecone pines and Lehman Caves?

Great Basin's bristlecone groves once held Prometheus, a pine nearly 5,000 years old; a researcher had it cut down in 1964, before anyone realised it was the oldest tree then known.

Which Alaska national park protects the central Brooks Range and has no roads or trails at all?

Gates of the Arctic was named by wilderness advocate Bob Marshall, who in 1929 saw two peaks, Frigid Crags and Boreal Mountain, flanking a river like a gateway to the far north.

Which Alaska national park is home to the active Iliamna and Redoubt volcanoes?

Lake Clark's Redoubt volcano made headlines in 1989, when a KLM jumbo jet flew into its ash cloud and all four engines stopped; the crew restarted them and landed safely in Anchorage.

Kakadu National Park, home to saltwater crocodiles and ancient rock art, lies in which country?

Australia's Kakadu, managed jointly with its Aboriginal traditional owners, surrounds an enclave that was never part of the park: the Ranger uranium mine, which operated until 2021.

Banff, proclaimed in 1885, was the first national park of which country?

Canada's Banff began in 1885 as a small reserve around thermal springs on Sulphur Mountain, set aside after railway workers who came upon them in 1883 tried to claim them.

Which animal, well over a million strong, makes up most of the Serengeti's great migration?

Wildebeest follow the rains in a year-long loop: about half a million calves are born in the south between January and March, then the herds move on as the grass there dries out.

Kruger, famed for its safaris, became the first national park of which country in 1926?

South Africa's Kruger began in 1898 as a game reserve between the Sabie and Crocodile rivers, proclaimed by the Transvaal republic of President Paul Kruger, for whom the park was named.

The world's largest national park, founded in 1974, occupies the north-east of which island?

Northeast Greenland National Park is bigger than most countries yet has no permanent residents; only around 40 people staff its weather, research and military stations.

The Galapagos Islands are protected as the first national park of which country?

Ecuador made nearly all of the Galápagos its first national park in 1959, leaving out only the land that settlers already held.

Indonesia founded a national park in 1980 to protect which giant reptile?

The Komodo dragon was long thought to kill with bacteria-laden saliva, but a 2009 study found venom glands in its lower jaw instead.

Tongariro, home to three active volcanoes, is the oldest national park in which country?

New Zealand's Tongariro dates from 1887, when the Ngāti Tūwharetoa chief Te Heuheu Tūkino IV placed its sacred peaks under Crown protection, an act long described as a gift.

The UNESCO-listed Plitvice Lakes, a chain of tufa lakes and waterfalls, are a national park in which country?

Croatia's Plitvice has sixteen lakes held back by natural dams of tufa, a porous limestone that mosses and algae keep depositing, so the barriers are still growing.

Which park, created in 1940, absorbed General Grant National Park and its giant trees?

Kings Canyon took in General Grant National Park, whose star tree Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926, a year after the first Christmas service at its base.

The 20,310-foot centerpiece of Denali National Park, North America's highest peak, crowns which mountain range?

Alaska Range: its highest summit was resurveyed with GPS in 2015 and came out at 20,310 feet, ten feet lower than the figure mapmakers had used since the 1950s.

Mammoth Cave National Park is in which US state?

Kentucky's Mammoth Cave was mined for saltpeter, a gunpowder ingredient, during the War of 1812, when a blockade cut off imports; enslaved workers hauled the cave earth and leached it.

The Everglades are fed by a slow-moving sheet of water flowing out of which body of water?

Lake Okeechobee once spilled over its southern rim in the wet season, feeding a broad, shallow flow toward Florida Bay that Marjory Stoneman Douglas named the 'River of Grass' in her 1947 book.

Which animal appears on the National Park Service's arrowhead emblem?

A bison stands at the foot of the National Park Service arrowhead, below a giant tree and a snow-capped peak; the animal represents the wildlife the parks protect, and the arrowhead shape their history.

Which Yellowstone geyser did early visitors use as a laundry?

Old Faithful erupted so regularly that clothes dropped into its vent were thrown out washed at the next blast; an 1883 guidebook noted that linen and cotton survived but woollens were torn to shreds.

Grand Teton National Park includes most of the northern part of which valley?

Jackson Hole was made a national monument by presidential proclamation in 1943; the 1950 law that folded it into Grand Teton also barred presidents from creating any new monuments in Wyoming without Congress.

Trail Ridge Road, which tops 12,000 feet, crosses which national park?

Rocky Mountain National Park built Trail Ridge Road to replace the Fall River Road, a single-lane track of steep grades and tight curves; the newer road tops out at 12,183 feet, with eleven miles above treeline.

Joshua Tree National Park spans which two deserts?

Mojave and Colorado deserts meet inside Joshua Tree, protected in 1936 after Minerva Hoyt, a South Pasadena gardener, campaigned against the digging up and burning of desert cacti and Joshua trees.

What is the name of the world's tallest known living tree, found in Redwood National Park?

Hyperion, a coast redwood found in 2006, stands about 380 feet tall; so many visitors trampled the ground around it that in 2022 the park closed the area, and trespassers risk a fine or jail.

What does the Hawaiian name Haleakalā mean?

Haleakalā means 'House of the sun'; in Hawaiian legend the demigod Māui captured the sun there to slow its crossing and lengthen the day, and visitors still gather on the summit for sunrise.

Which ice mass forms the heart of Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska?

The Harding Icefield sends nearly 40 glaciers down toward the sea; only Exit Glacier lies at the end of the park's single road, where rangers show visitors how far the ice has retreated.

Saguaro National Park's two districts lie on either side of which Arizona city?

Tucson scientists, led by University of Arizona president Homer Shantz, campaigned to save the cactus forest east of the city, and Herbert Hoover proclaimed it a national monument in 1933.

North America's tallest sand dunes rise over 700 feet at the foot of the Rockies in which state?

Colorado's Great Sand Dunes pile up where prevailing winds sweep sand across the San Luis Valley to the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and storm winds blowing back the other way stack it ever higher.

Which park along Lake Michigan became the 61st US national park in February 2019?

Indiana Dunes was first proposed as a 'Sand Dunes National Park' at hearings in Chicago in 1916; it took until 1966 to protect the shore as a national lakeshore, and until 2019 to win the park title.

Virgin Islands National Park covers about 60% of which island?

Saint John, the smallest of the three main U.S. Virgin Islands, got its park in 1956, when a conservation group donated the land it had bought up there on condition that it stay undeveloped.

Denali National Park originally bore the name of which US president?

William McKinley had no direct connection to Alaska: a gold prospector who admired him put his name on the peak in the 1890s, the park took it in 1917, and Congress renamed the park Denali in 1980.

Badwater Basin lies about 85 miles from which peak, the highest in the lower 48?

Mount Whitney stands so close to Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level, that an ultramarathon is run each July from the basin floor to the trailhead on the mountain's flank, 135 miles away by road.

Earth's highest officially recognised temperature, 134 °F in July 1913, was measured at which Death Valley settlement?

Furnace Creek logged 134 °F on July 10, 1913; it became the world record only in 2012, when a higher 1922 reading from Libya was ruled a mistake.

Which president signed the Yosemite Grant, handing Yosemite Valley to California as a public park?

Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant on June 30, 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, giving the valley and the Mariposa Grove to California; a 1906 law passed them back into federal hands.

Which one-armed Civil War veteran led a pioneering 1869 boat expedition through the Grand Canyon?

John Wesley Powell, who lost his right arm at Shiloh, set out with a ten-man party in 1869; six came through about three months later, and three who walked out of the canyon were never seen again.

Which is Yellowstone's largest hot spring?

Grand Prismatic Spring shows the pure blue of deep, clear water at its centre, while mats of heat-loving microbes tint its cooler edges green, yellow, orange and red.

Yellowstone lies mainly in Wyoming with small portions in which two other states?

Yellowstone lies mostly in Wyoming, with strips of Montana along its north and west edges and of Idaho in the south-west corner, a boundary drawn before any of the three became states.

Glacier National Park's famous 1932 motor route across the mountains is called what?

Going-to-the-Sun Road is one of the hardest roads in North America to plough: snow up to 80 feet deep buries Logan Pass each winter, and crews need about ten weeks every spring to dig the route out.

Glacier and Canada's Waterton Lakes together formed the world's first what, in 1932?

The International Peace Park was the idea of Rotary clubs in Alberta and Montana, whose members met at a Waterton hotel in 1931 and pressed both governments; each passed a law creating it within a year.

Crater Lake fills the basin left by the collapse of which volcano?

Mount Mazama emptied its magma chamber in a huge eruption about 7,700 years ago and its summit fell in; people were there to see it, for sandals have been found buried beneath the ash.

Which national park's Painted Wall is its state's tallest cliff?

Black Canyon of the Gunnison is so steep and narrow that sunlight struggles to reach its depths, which is said to be how it got its name; its Painted Wall drops 2,250 feet from rim to river.

Which is the largest of New Zealand's national parks?

Fiordland, at more than 1.2 million hectares, hid the takahē, a flightless bird believed extinct until it was rediscovered in the park's Murchison Mountains in 1948; that area is still closed without a permit.

Which sacred landmark closed to climbers in 2019?

Uluru's climb closed for good on 26 October 2019, 34 years to the day after the national park was handed back to the Anangu, who had long asked visitors not to climb their sacred rock.

Torres del Paine National Park is in the Patagonian region of which country?

Chile's Torres del Paine, named for three granite towers, lost about 150 square kilometres to a fire a backpacker started by accident in 2005, as it had to another tourist's fire in 1985; the Czech government helped pay for replanting.

Which Argentine national park, created in 1934, protects famous waterfalls on the Brazilian border?

Iguazú National Park faces Brazil's own park across the falls, where about half the river pours into a narrow chasm called the Devil's Throat; the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca came upon them in the 1540s.

Which Nepalese national park, established in 1976, includes Mount Everest?

Sagarmatha is the Nepali name for Mount Everest, so the park carries the mountain's own name; its Tengboche monastery burned to the ground in 1989 and was rebuilt by monks and local Sherpa with help from abroad.

Which was Nepal's first national park, established in 1973?

Chitwan was a hunting ground for Nepal's rulers; after forest clearance and poaching cut its rhinos from about 800 in 1950 to 95 by the late 1960s, armed patrols and then the 1973 park were set up to save them.

India's first national park (1936) is named after which hunter-turned-conservationist?

Jim Corbett played a leading role in founding the park, yet it opened in 1936 as Hailey National Park, after the provincial governor, and took the name of the tiger hunter turned naturalist only in the 1950s.

Which Indian national park holds the world's largest population of Indian rhinoceros?

Kaziranga owes its protection to Mary Curzon, wife of India's viceroy: visiting in 1904 she failed to see a single rhino in country famous for them and pressed her husband to act, and a reserve followed in 1905.

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda is home to about half the world's what?

Mountain gorillas number just over 1,000, 459 of them counted at Bwindi in 2018; in the early 1980s probably fewer than 400 were left, and the recovery saw them moved from critically endangered to endangered in 2018.

Virunga, created in 1925, is a national park in which country?

The Democratic Republic of the Congo's Virunga began in 1925 as Albert National Park, the Congo's first; its rangers work among armed rebel groups, and many have been killed protecting it.

Etosha National Park, proclaimed a game reserve in 1907, is in which country?

Namibia's Etosha was about four times larger when it was proclaimed in 1907, reaching all the way to the Skeleton Coast; boundary changes in 1958 and 1970 cut it back to about 22,270 km².

Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania is the world's largest inactive, intact and unfilled what?

A volcanic caldera, Ngorongoro formed when a huge volcano erupted and collapsed on itself two to three million years ago, leaving a bowl about 600 metres deep where some 25,000 large animals now live.

Which national park became the United Kingdom's first in April 1951?

The Peak District was designated on 17 April 1951; nineteen years earlier some 400 ramblers had staged a mass trespass on its highest moor, Kinder Scout, to demand access to open country, and six were arrested.

Which is Canada's largest national park, bigger than Switzerland?

Wood Buffalo, straddling Alberta and the Northwest Territories, was created in 1922 to protect the world's largest free-roaming herds of the animal it is named for, and its wetlands shelter nesting whooping cranes.

The name Serengeti is often attributed to a Maasai word meaning what?

Endless plains is the usual gloss of a Maasai word, 'siringet', though the derivation is tradition rather than settled fact; in 1959 the park's eastern part was split off so that the Maasai could go on grazing there.

Which borax millionaire became the first director of the US National Park Service?

Stephen Mather complained to Washington in 1914 about the state of the parks and, the story goes, was told to come and run them himself; he did, at times paying staff out of his own pocket.

John Muir was born in 1838 in which country?

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838 and crossed to Wisconsin with his family as a boy in 1849; the 'Father of the National Parks' went on to co-found the Sierra Club in 1892.

Which president signed the law creating most of Alaska's national parks?

Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in December 1980, weeks before he left office; it roughly doubled the land set aside in America's national parks and wildlife refuges.

Which philanthropist gave $5 million in 1928 toward creating Great Smoky Mountains park?

John D. Rockefeller Jr. matched, through his mother's memorial fund, the $5 million that Tennessee, North Carolina and private donors, schoolchildren among them, had raised to buy out farms and timber companies.

Which peak in Acadia is the tallest on the US Atlantic coast?

Cadillac Mountain, about 1,530 feet high, was plain Green Mountain until 1918, when it was renamed for Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the French explorer who went on to found Detroit.

Which road runs the full 105-mile length of Shenandoah National Park?

Skyline Drive was pushed by Herbert Hoover, who kept a summer camp nearby; ground was broken in 1931, and Civilian Conservation Corps crews did much of the building along the mountain crest.

Unlike most limestone caves, Carlsbad Caverns was dissolved by which acid, formed from gas rising from oil deposits?

Sulfuric acid formed where hydrogen sulfide rising from oil deposits met oxygen-rich water; it ate out chambers as large as the Big Room and left thick beds of gypsum behind as evidence.

Vatnajökull National Park, covering about 14 percent of the country, is in which nation?

Iceland's Vatnajökull ice cap hides active volcanoes, Grímsvötn the busiest of them, and huge glacial floods long ago carved the canyon of Jökulsárgljúfur at the park's northern end.

Which nonprofit owns most of Channel Islands National Park's largest island?

The Nature Conservancy owns the western 76 percent of Santa Cruz Island; clearing feral sheep and pigs from the island helped its native fox come back from the brink of extinction.

Voyageurs National Park is named after which group of people?

French-Canadian fur traders known as voyageurs worked this border country for beaver pelts, pushing ever farther north-west as trapping emptied the lands to the east.

Which massive, unfinished coastal fortress is the centrepiece of Dry Tortugas park?

Fort Jefferson became a prison whose best-known inmate was Dr. Samuel Mudd, jailed for setting John Wilkes Booth's broken leg; he was pardoned after treating the garrison through a yellow fever epidemic in 1867.

Which national park has a single 92-mile road, mostly closed to private vehicles?

Denali's Park Road runs 92 miles to the old mining camp of Kantishna; when a new highway made the park easy to reach in 1972, private cars were held to the first 15 miles and everyone else put on buses.

Which is the largest national park in the United Kingdom?

The Cairngorms, a national park since 2003, cover 4,528 km²; a Swedish herder brought reindeer here in 1952, and the herd is still Britain's only free-ranging one.

White Sands National Park sometimes closes during tests at what neighbouring facility?

A missile range borders the dunes, and its tests can shut the park's only road for up to three hours; captured German V-2 rockets were test-fired there after World War II.

Triglav, in the Julian Alps, is the only national park of which country?

Slovenia puts Triglav on its flag, and in 1895 a village priest bought the mountain's summit for a single gulden so that he could put up the small metal tower that still stands on top.

Teide National Park, centred on Spain's highest mountain, is on which island?

Tenerife's Teide, Spain's highest peak, rises from volcanic terrain so like Mars that researchers use the park to test instruments built for missions to the red planet.

Kenya's Tsavo region, now home to two national parks, is infamous for a pair of man-eating what in 1898?

Lions: two maneless males preyed on crews building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River for nine months, until the engineer in charge shot them; they are now on display at Chicago's Field Museum.

Which big cat, Sri Lanka's apex predator, lives at one of the world's highest densities in Yala National Park?

The leopard rules Yala, first protected as a wildlife sanctuary in 1900; with no bigger cat on the island, the Sri Lankan leopard may have grown larger than its mainland cousins.

Malaysia's Gunung Mulu National Park, home to the vast Sarawak Chamber, lies on which island?

Borneo: a 1977-78 Royal Geographical Society expedition kept over 100 scientists in Mulu's rainforest for 15 months, and cavers who followed found the Sarawak Chamber, the largest known cave chamber by area.

How does outgoing mail leave Phantom Ranch, the lodge at the bottom of Arizona's mile-deep canyon?

By mule is how letters and postcards have traditionally left the ranch, which has no official mail service. When it was built in 1922, everything except rock was hauled down the same way.

Which climber scaled El Capitan without ropes in 2017, a feat filmed for the documentary Free Solo?

Alex Honnold finished the 2,900-foot Freerider route in 3 hours and 56 minutes, alone and with no protection. Nobody had ever climbed a full route up the granite wall that way.

Which 1980 horror film modeled its haunted hotel's interiors on the Ahwahnee, a 1927 national park lodge?

The Shining was shot almost entirely on English sound stages, where the Ahwahnee's Great Lounge became the model for the Overlook's main lounge. The exterior is Oregon's Timberline Lodge.

What slides across Racetrack Playa, a dry lakebed in America's hottest national park, leaving long trails?

Heavy rocks get shoved along when a shallow winter pond freezes and wind pushes thin sheets of ice against them. Nobody caught it on camera until the winter of 2013–14.

Which animals has the national park around North America's highest peak used for winter patrols since 1922?

Sled dogs are raised and trained there, in the only sled-dog kennel owned by the federal government. Their first job was to help rangers stop poachers.

Which insects' synchronized mating display is rationed by lottery at a Tennessee national park each spring?

Fireflies of one species, Photinus carolinus, flash in unison there, and nobody fully knows why. One theory is that males sync up so the much dimmer females can answer in the dark pauses.

What gives Grand Prismatic Spring, a Wyoming national park's largest hot spring, its orange and yellow rings?

Heat-loving microbes grow in mats around the edge, and their pigments shift with the water temperature. The center stays deep blue because it is sterile, showing only the color of deep water itself.

Which Wyoming landmark, the first US national monument, do aliens visit in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Devils Tower saw its visitors and climbers surge after the 1977 film used it for the climactic scenes. The monument around the butte covers just 1,347 acres.

Which filmmaker made the 2009 PBS documentary series The National Parks: America's Best Idea?

Ken Burns made the series with writer Dayton Duncan, and it won two Emmy Awards in 2010. Tom Hanks, George Takei and John Lithgow were among the actors who voiced figures from park history.

Which environmental group did John Muir found in San Francisco in 1892, serving as its first president?

The Sierra Club kept Muir as its president for 22 years, until his death in 1914.

The Joshua tree, namesake of a desert national park, belongs to which plant genus?

Yucca brevifolia is its scientific name. Mormon settlers are commonly said to have named it after the biblical Joshua, seeing a man at prayer in its upraised limbs.

Which peak, the highest in the contiguous United States, has its west slope in a national park of giant trees?

Mount Whitney reaches 14,505 feet, and a 211-mile hiking route named for John Muir ends at its summit.

Which photographer was hired by the US government in 1941 to shoot national parks for office murals?

Ansel Adams took a 180-day contract and set off by road with his son and a friend. On that trip he made Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, one of his most famous images.

Which nickname does Horsetail Fall on El Capitan earn each February, when the setting sun lights the water?

Firefall is borrowed from a man-made show: until 1968, a hotel crew pushed burning embers off a cliff 3,000 feet above the valley on summer nights.

Which one-armed Civil War veteran led the 1869 boat expedition through Arizona's greatest canyon?

John Wesley Powell had lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, yet he spent three months on the river. He went on to run the US Geological Survey for 13 years.

Which cinder cone rises above the water in Oregon's only national park, named by William Steel in 1885?

Wizard Island got its name from William Gladstone Steel, who also called the hollow at its summit the Witches Cauldron. It grew from smaller eruptions after the old volcano collapsed.

Which architect of the TWA terminal at JFK also designed the 630-foot arch in St. Louis's national park?

Eero Saarinen drew the arch in 1947 but died in 1961, four years before it was finished. It is exactly as wide as it is tall.

Which painter's sketches from an 1871 survey helped persuade Congress to create the first US national park?

Thomas Moran spent forty days with the Hayden survey and recorded more than 30 sites. His art and the survey's photographs showed lawmakers a place that words had failed to describe.

Which rare plant of Maui's Haleakalā volcano flowers just once, after decades, and then dies?

Silversword rosettes can live more than 50 years before sending up one tall stalk of maroon flowers. Grazing cattle and goats, plus vandalism by people, had nearly wiped the plant out by the 1920s.

Which animals fatten up for a public vote in the online bracket an Alaska national park has run since 2014?

Brown bears there can eat 120 pounds of salmon a day before hibernation, and fans vote for the fattest. A ranger started it in 2014 as a one-day contest called Fat Bear Tuesday.

Which US cabinet department, also home to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, runs the National Park Service?

Interior has so broad a range of duties that it is often jokingly called the Department of Everything Else. It was created in 1849 to gather offices that sat oddly in other departments.

Which San Francisco Bay site, held by Native American activists for 19 months from 1969, is preserved by the NPS?

Alcatraz Island had closed as a federal prison in 1963, and the protesters claimed it as abandoned surplus land. It joined Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1972, the year after they were removed.

Which long-distance footpath through 14 states is managed as part of the National Park System?

The Appalachian Trail runs almost 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine, and 31 trail clubs share the upkeep.

The White House grounds, the Ellipse and Lafayette Square together make up which unit managed by the NPS?

President's Park was originally the name of Lafayette Square alone. The unit also takes in the Treasury Building and the White House Visitor Center.

Which Philadelphia building, where the Constitution was debated, anchors an NPS historical park?

Independence Hall was completed in 1753 as the Pennsylvania State House, long before it earned its modern name. It became a World Heritage Site in 1979.

Which national military park, kept by the Park Service, was the site of the Civil War's bloodiest battle?

Gettysburg cost more than 50,000 casualties over three days in July 1863. The park's visitor center shows the fighting in a 19th-century painting in the round, the Cyclorama.

Smokey Bear, often mistaken for a national parks mascot, actually belongs to which federal agency?

The Forest Service has run his wildfire campaign since 1944, longer than any other public service announcement campaign in US history. It began when planners feared that wildfires would harm the war effort.

Which New Deal program housed young men in camps to build trails and lodges in national parks from 1933?

The Civilian Conservation Corps took unemployed, unmarried men aged 18 to 25, and the War Department ran its camps. Women got a far smaller counterpart, nicknamed the She-She-She Camps.

Which nickname belonged to the Black Army regiments who were among the first national park rangers?

Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th Cavalry and 24th Infantry spent summers on patrol in the parks from 1899. One of their officers, Charles Young, served as acting superintendent of a whole park in 1903.

Which 1906 law lets a US president create national monuments by proclamation, without a vote in Congress?

The Antiquities Act was written to stop pot hunters stripping ancient ruins in the Southwest, but presidents soon used it for whole landscapes. It has been invoked more than a hundred times.

Which future US president spent the summer of 1936 as a seasonal ranger in the oldest US national park?

Gerald Ford worked out of the park's Canyon Station before law school. At Yale he went on to coach football and even began working as a model.

Which president signed the 1980 Alaska lands act that more than doubled the size of the National Park System?

Jimmy Carter signed it on December 2, 1980, weeks after losing his bid for re-election. The act protected over 157 million acres, the largest single expansion of protected land in history.

Which state had no unit of the National Park System at all until a national monument arrived in 2013?

Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution, was the last to get a park unit. One of its senators had spent more than a decade holding hearings and collecting ideas for sites.

Which reservoir behind Hoover Dam gives its name to the first national recreation area in the United States?

Lake Mead began filling in 1935, and its shores were protected first as a bird refuge. The recreation area later grew to take in a second reservoir downstream.

Wolf Trap in Virginia, a farm donated by Catherine Filene Shouse, is a national park devoted to what?

Performing arts were the whole idea when Congress accepted her gift in 1966. The Park Service runs the grounds, while a foundation she set up produces the shows.

Which laundry mineral, hauled from the desert by wagon teams, made the first Park Service director rich?

Borax made him a millionaire, and the fortune let him retire from business in his mid-forties to take up the cause of the parks.

Which national park valley was dammed for San Francisco's water after a fight John Muir lost?

Hetch Hetchy went under a reservoir when the dam was finished in 1923, a decade after Congress approved it. The water travels 167 miles west to reach the city.

Which Michigan tourist spot, known for banning cars, was the second US national park from 1875 to 1895?

Mackinac Island was run by the commander of its Army fort, whose troops served as caretakers. When the fort closed, the land went to Michigan as its first state park.

Who became the second director of the National Park Service in 1929, after a decade running its oldest park?

Horace Albright had already run the whole agency as acting director at 27, when his boss fell ill. As director he won battlefields and historic sites over from the War Department.

Which Utah national monument was named the world's first International Dark-Sky Park in 2007?

Natural Bridges earned the title for some of the darkest, clearest skies in the country and for its efforts to keep them that way. It was also Utah's first national monument.

Which waterfall, the world's tallest, drops off a tabletop mountain in Venezuela's Canaima National Park?

Angel Falls is named after Jimmie Angel, an American pilot who flew over it in 1933 while hunting for ore. Four years later he wrecked his plane trying to land on the summit above.

Lonesome George, the Galápagos National Park's most famous resident, was the last of which animal?

The Pinta Island tortoise had been hunted almost to nothing by whalers before feral goats stripped the island's vegetation. George was spotted there alone in 1971 and lived at a research station until his death in 2012.

What fills the valleys between the dunes of Brazil's Lençóis Maranhenses National Park for part of each year?

Freshwater lagoons form in the rainy season because impermeable rock under the sand stops the water draining away. One fish species waits out the dry months buried in wet mud.

Manú National Park, which climbs from Amazon rainforest to Andean grassland near Cusco, is in which country?

Peru protected it in 1973, and UNESCO later made it both a Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site. Its wettest corner gets 8,000 mm of rain or more a year.

Which capital of Argentina's Tierra del Fuego Province lies 11 km from the country's southernmost national park?

Ushuaia is linked to the park by a tourist railway called the End of the World Train. The Pan-American Highway also reaches its southern end inside the park.

Which wild relative of the llama is one of the most common mammals in Torres del Paine National Park?

Guanaco herds are prey for the park's pumas, a hunt researchers have studied there. The continent's only other wild camelid, the vicuña, keeps to higher ground.

Which outdoor brand did Douglas Tompkins found before buying Patagonian wilderness for new national parks?

The North Face began with a $5,000 bank loan, and the Grateful Dead played at the opening of its first store. He and his wife Kris later bought more than 2 million acres to conserve.

Which peak in Argentina's Los Glaciares National Park is named after the captain of Darwin's ship, HMS Beagle?

Fitz Roy was named in 1877 by the explorer Francisco Moreno. Its Tehuelche name, Chaltén, means smoking mountain, after the cloud that usually wraps the summit.

Which active volcano about 50 km south of Quito gives its name to the national park around it?

Cotopaxi has erupted more than 80 times on record, and mudflows from those eruptions carved the valleys around it. Only Chimborazo stands taller in its country.

Kaieteur Falls, a single 741-foot drop over four times the height of Niagara, anchors a national park in which country?

Guyana's great waterfall is also about twice the height of Victoria Falls. The park around it is widely counted as the country's only national park.