96 Fun Facts About US National Parks

Which president signed the 1872 act establishing the first national park in the United States?

Ulysses S. Grant signed the act creating Yellowstone National Park; its first superintendent, Nathaniel Langford, was appointed the same year but Congress gave him no salary, funding or staff.

Yellowstone, the first US national park, lies almost entirely in which state?

Wyoming holds about 96 percent of Yellowstone, with slivers in Montana and Idaho; William Henry Jackson's photographs and Thomas Moran's paintings helped persuade Congress to protect it in 1872.

Which Arkansas national park grew from land Congress reserved in 1832, forty years before Yellowstone?

Hot Springs was reserved by Congress in 1832, yet Washington exercised no direct supervision until 1877, so bathhouses and businesses crowded around and over the springs.

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

Death Valley covers more than 3 million acres, the most of any park outside Alaska; despite the name, tiny pupfish, survivors of a wetter age, still swim in its desert creeks.

Which national park contains the highest mountain peak in North America?

Denali National Park surrounds the 20,310-foot peak, which 'shrank' in 2015 when a GPS survey came in ten feet below the 20,320 feet measured in the 1950s.

The longest known cave system in the world lies beneath which US state?

Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky protects more than 400 miles of surveyed passages; the network has been called the Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System since a 1972 connection was found.

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

Acadia became a national park in 1919; John D. Rockefeller Jr., a keen horseman, paid for 45 miles of carriage roads there so he could travel free of motor cars.

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

Lake Okeechobee overflows south in a sheet so broad and shallow that its water can take months or even years to trickle down to Florida Bay.

Which president signed the Organic Act creating the National Park Service on August 25, 1916?

Woodrow Wilson's signature charged the new agency with conserving park scenery and wildlife so as to leave them unimpaired for future generations.

Which animals carry visitors down the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail to Phantom Ranch?

Mules carry riders from the South Rim to Phantom Ranch at the canyon bottom; they inherit a donkey's sure-footedness and caution, which suits the trail's narrow switchbacks.

Yellowstone holds more than half of the world's examples of which natural feature?

Geysers erupt because constrictions in their underground plumbing let pressure build; Yellowstone holds more than half the world's total, Old Faithful among them.

Which national park drew more than 12 million visits in 2024, the most of any US national park?

Great Smoky Mountains, split almost evenly between North Carolina and Tennessee, is named for the fog that hangs over its ridges and looks like plumes of smoke from a distance.

Which state has the most national parks, with nine?

California has nine national parks; it moved ahead of Alaska's eight only in 2013, when Pinnacles was promoted to a national park.

At over 8 million acres, which Alaskan park is the largest national park in the United States?

Wrangell–St. Elias covers 13.2 million acres with its preserve, yet only two roads lead into it, and both are unpaved.

Which is the smallest US national park?

Gateway Arch is a strip of St. Louis riverfront; the memorial there was created in 1935 to honour the pioneers who headed west from the city, which is why its monument is a gateway.

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

Crater Lake is more than 1,900 feet deep, yet no rivers or streams feed it: rain and snow alone fill the old volcanic caldera.

The lake in Oregon's only national park fills the caldera of which destroyed volcano?

Mount Mazama, once about 12,000 feet tall, destroyed its own summit in an eruption about 7,700 years ago, leaving a deep caldera that rain and snowmelt slowly filled.

Arches National Park sits above what underground layer, the main cause of its arch formation?

A salt bed thousands of feet thick lies beneath Arches; as the salt bulged and shifted, the sandstone above cracked into parallel fins that eroded into more than 2,000 arches.

The General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume, grows in which national park?

General Sherman stands in Sequoia National Park's Giant Forest; in 2021 firefighters wrapped its base in protective foil as a wildfire closed in, and the tree came through unharmed.

Which peak on the edge of a Sierra Nevada national park is the highest point in the contiguous United States?

Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet, stands on its park's eastern boundary, yet no park road offers a view of it: the Great Western Divide blocks the sightline.

The abandoned boomtown of Kennecott, in America's largest national park, mined which metal?

Kennecott's copper, nearly $200 million worth between 1911 and 1938, left by a railway built 196 miles through the wilderness to the port of Cordova.

The Old Courthouse in the St. Louis national park is where which landmark Supreme Court case originated?

Dred Scott first sued for his freedom at the Old Courthouse in 1846; the 1935 memorial was created partly to commemorate the slavery debate his case provoked.

Dry Tortugas National Park, reachable only by boat or seaplane, lies about 70 miles from which city?

Key West is the nearest city to Dry Tortugas, whose Fort Jefferson took nearly thirty years and more than 16 million bricks, yet was never finished nor fully armed.

Isle Royale National Park consists of an island and more than 400 islets in which of the Great Lakes?

Isle Royale lies in north-west Lake Superior; moose reached it in the early 1900s and wolves in the late 1940s, and scientists have studied the pair as predator and prey since 1958.

The name of Maui's Haleakalā National Park is Hawaiian for what?

Haleakalā means 'house of the sun'; in Hawaiian legend the demigod Māui snared the sun there and forced it to slow its journey across the sky, lengthening the day.

Which national park's Big Room is the largest cave chamber in North America?

Carlsbad Caverns was first explored around 1898 by Jim White, a teenager who went to investigate after seeing a cloud of bats pour out of the entrance.

Mesa Verde National Park, home to Cliff Palace, protects sites built by which people?

Ancestral Puebloans lived at Mesa Verde for some 700 years but built most of its cliff dwellings only in the 1200s, then moved south within a few generations after severe droughts.

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

Jackson Hole was bought up ranch by ranch by John D. Rockefeller Jr. through the Snake River Land Company, so that he could later hand the valley floor to the park.

Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous paved road in the United States, crosses which national park?

Rocky Mountain's Trail Ridge Road climbs to 12,183 feet and runs eleven miles above treeline, where it is normally windy and 20 to 30 degrees colder than the towns at either end.

Which highly endangered mammal was reintroduced to the wild in the Badlands Wilderness of South Dakota?

Black-footed ferrets were given up as extinct in 1979, until a small wild population was rediscovered in 1981; their captive-bred descendants now live in the Badlands.

Which historic highway crosses Petrified Forest National Park roughly east to west?

U.S. Route 66 no longer carries traffic here: Interstate 40 now follows much the same line across Petrified Forest, and the park preserves a stretch of the old road.

Which Channel Island, home to Avalon, lies outside Channel Islands National Park?

Santa Catalina is one of three Channel Islands outside the park; chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. took control of it in 1919, and a private conservancy has run most of it since the 1970s.

Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota is named after which group?

Voyageurs honours the French-Canadian fur traders whom the demand for beaver pelts drew along these lakes; the main body of the park can still be reached only by water, or over the ice in winter.

Congaree National Park, the largest old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the US, is in which state?

South Carolina's Congaree owes its protection to a grassroots campaign that began in 1969 and ended with national park status in 2003; its floodplain trees are among the tallest in the eastern United States.

Big Bend National Park in West Texas takes its name from a large bend in which river?

The Rio Grande marks 118 miles of the park's border with Mexico; at the Boquillas Crossing port of entry, visitors carrying passports can cross it to visit a Mexican village.

Skyline Drive runs along the Blue Ridge crest of which national park?

Skyline Drive runs 105 miles through Shenandoah; creating the park in the 1930s displaced at least 500 families, some of whom had refused to sell land held for generations.

Kīlauea shares Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park with which volcano, Earth's largest active volcano?

Mauna Loa makes up about half of Hawaiʻi Island; in November 2022 it erupted for the first time in 38 years, its lava last having flowed toward Hilo in 1984.

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, buried by the 20th century's largest eruption, lies in which park?

Katmai was created in 1918 to protect the valley, which Novarupta buried in ash in 1912; botanist Robert Griggs named it in 1916 for the thousands of steam vents he found there.

Nevada's Great Basin National Park is known for groves of which trees, the oldest known non-clonal living organisms on Earth?

Bristlecone pines here included Prometheus, cut down for research in 1964 and only then found to be about 4,900 years old, the oldest tree known at the time.

Zion Canyon's reddish walls were carved through Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of which river?

The Virgin River's North Fork cut Zion Canyon up to 2,640 feet deep after uplift of the plateau steepened its course, giving the fast water the power to carry off sediment and boulders.

Which railroad built Glacier National Park's historic hotels and chalets after 1910?

The Great Northern Railway, under Louis W. Hill, built Glacier Park Lodge, Many Glacier Hotel and the backcountry chalets to lure tourists; Going-to-the-Sun Road was finished in 1932.

Bryce Canyon is famous for which spire-shaped rock formations, carved by frost and stream erosion?

Bryce's hoodoos are spires left as frost wedging and runoff erode the Claron Formation limestone; despite its name, Bryce is a string of natural amphitheaters along the Paunsaugunt Plateau.

Olympic National Park shelters the Pacific Northwest's largest wild herd of which animal, a subspecies named for Theodore Roosevelt?

Elk of this subspecies were named for Theodore Roosevelt in 1897, and the wish to protect them was a main reason he set aside the Olympic mountains as president in 1909.

Joshua Tree National Park straddles the low Colorado Desert and which higher, cooler desert, home to its namesake trees?

Mojave Joshua trees rely on a single pollinator, the yucca moth, which lays its eggs in the flowers so that its larvae can feed on some of the seeds.

Which photographer made his name with dramatic black-and-white images of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada?

Ansel Adams took his first Yosemite pictures in 1916, aged 14, with a simple Kodak Brownie his parents gave him on a family visit to the park.

The South Unit of Badlands National Park is co-managed by the National Park Service and which tribe?

Oglala Lakota land on the Pine Ridge Reservation was seized in 1942 for a wartime bombing range; part of it later became the park's South Unit, which the tribe now helps manage.

Hyperion, the tallest known living tree on Earth, grows in which national park?

Redwood National Park kept Hyperion's location quiet after its discovery in 2006, but so many visitors bushwhacked to it and trampled its base that the area was closed in 2022.

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

Tucson lies between the park's two districts, both full of saguaros that grow so slowly they are usually more than half a century old before sprouting a first arm.

About 95 percent of which national park, within sight of Miami, is water?

Biscayne protects a bay, a chain of islands and coral reefs just south of the city; so little of it is land that the park stays open to boats at all hours.

What did Stiltsville, a cluster of shacks on stilts built off Miami from the 1930s, offer its visitors?

Gambling and alcohol drew visitors to the shacks begun by 'Crawfish' Eddie Walker; stories of illegal drinking and betting later brought police raids on the Bikini and Quarterdeck clubs.

Why is the Black Canyon of the Gunnison called 'black'?

Little sunlight reaches its depths because the gorge is so steep and narrow; the walls spend much of the day in shadow, which makes the rock look black.

How wide is the Black Canyon of the Gunnison at its narrowest point down at the river?

40 feet is the gap between the walls at the river, in a gorge up to 2,722 feet deep; its ancient metamorphic rock resists erosion, so the canyon stayed steep and narrow as the Gunnison cut down.

Which president signed the 1964 law creating Canyonlands National Park in Utah?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Canyonlands bill on September 12, 1964; Interior Secretary Stewart Udall had championed the park after flying over the Green and Colorado confluence in 1961.

Which Scottish-born naturalist is known as the 'Father of the National Parks'?

John Muir showed President Theodore Roosevelt around Yosemite in 1903 and told him how badly the state was running the valley; three years later it was returned to federal care.

Capitol Reef National Park preserves most of which long, rocky upthrust in the Earth's crust?

The Waterpocket Fold blocked travel like a reef at sea, which is why early prospectors, many with nautical backgrounds, called it a reef; water collects in the pockets worn into its sandstone.

Ohio’s only national park follows its river between Cleveland and which other city?

Akron and Cleveland share a river that was once so polluted it caught fire in 1969, a blaze that helped spur stronger clean-water laws and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Which national park, with no roads or trails, covers much of Alaska's central Brooks Range?

Gates of the Arctic owes its name to wilderness advocate Bob Marshall, who in 1929 gave it to two facing peaks, Frigid Crags and Boreal Mountain; it is the northernmost US national park.

Which president first protected Alaska's Glacier Bay by proclamation in 1925?

Calvin Coolidge acted in 1925 to protect a bay that barely existed in 1794, when a British naval expedition mapped it as filled by a single great glacier; the ice has been retreating ever since.

Which national park holds the tallest sand dunes in North America, rising about 750 feet?

Great Sand Dunes grow tall because the wind there reverses: prevailing winds push sand toward the mountains and storm winds blow it back, so the dunes build upward.

Guadalupe Peak, the centrepiece of Guadalupe Mountains National Park, is the highest point in which state?

Texas's highest point is topped by a steel pyramid that American Airlines put up in 1958 to mark the centenary of the Butterfield stagecoach mail route that ran past the peak.

The South Shore commuter line stops inside Indiana Dunes National Park on its way to which big city?

Chicago's commuter trains stop inside the park, which became a national park in 2019 even though a working steel plant sits on the lakefront between its beaches.

Kenai Fjords National Park is built around which ice field, source of 38-plus glaciers?

The Harding Icefield covers more than 700 square miles; Exit Glacier got its name in 1968, when the first recorded party to cross the icefield came down it.

Under what name was Kings Canyon first established as a national park in 1890?

General Grant National Park was a small grove saved from logging in 1890; Franklin Roosevelt folded it into the new Kings Canyon National Park in 1940 after decades of fighting over dam proposals.

Kobuk Valley National Park protects Arctic dunes and the migration routes of which animal?

Caribou of the Western Arctic herd cross the Kobuk River at Onion Portage on their migrations, where people have gathered to hunt them for thousands of years.

Whose solitary life at Twin Lakes, Alaska, became the film Alone in the Wilderness?

Richard Proenneke built his Twin Lakes cabin with hand tools in 1967 and 1968, making many of the tools himself, and filmed the whole job; the documentary was cut from his own footage.

Lassen Peak is one of the world's largest examples of which type of volcano?

Lassen Peak is a plug dome whose blast of May 22, 1915 rained ash far to the east; its park is one of the few places with all four types of volcano.

Which national park's Paradise area measured a then-record 1,122 inches of snow in 1971–72?

Mount Rainier's Paradise logged 1,122 inches of snow in 1971–72, a world record until 1998; storms off the Pacific still bury it under an average of about 640 inches a year.

Mount Rainier was named for a Royal Navy friend of which British explorer, who also named Puget Sound?

George Vancouver named the peak for his friend Peter Rainier, an admiral who had fought on the British side in the American War of Independence.

Which trail makes a loop of about 93 miles all the way around Mount Rainier?

The Wonderland Trail ends where it starts, yet hikers climb and descend thousands of feet on the way round, as it dips into valley after valley and rises back to the alpine zone.

Which Washington park holds over 300 glaciers, the most in the US outside Alaska?

North Cascades' streams feed the Skagit River, whose three dams help power Seattle.

Pinnacles National Park is a release site for which captive-bred endangered bird?

Pinnacles has released captive-bred California condors since 2003; its spires are the remains of a volcano that the San Andreas Fault has carried nearly 200 miles north.

Which river flows through all three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park?

The Little Missouri links all three units; Roosevelt first came to these badlands to hunt in 1883 and by the end of the trip had bought into a cattle ranch.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park protects badlands where the future president ranched in the 1880s, in which state?

Theodore Roosevelt ranched in the badlands near Medora, North Dakota, retreating there after his wife and mother died on the same day in February 1884.

Which island in a US Caribbean territory has more than half of its land inside a national park?

Saint John became mostly parkland after Laurance Rockefeller's foundation gave its holdings there to the Park Service in 1956, on condition the land be protected from development.

The dunes of White Sands National Park in New Mexico are made of which mineral?

Gypsum dissolved out of the surrounding mountains by rain and snowmelt collected in the basin's lakes; when they dried up, wind broke the crystals into sand, building the largest dunefield of its kind.

White Sands National Park is completely surrounded by what?

A missile range encloses the park, so the only road into the dunes can close for up to three hours during tests; the first atomic bomb was detonated on the same range in 1945.

Which is the only US national park that began as a national recreation area?

Cuyahoga Valley was a national recreation area from 1974 to 2000; unlike most national parks it sits beside two large urban areas and takes in small towns, a railroad and private businesses.

Which South Dakota park, created in 1903, was the first underground site made a national park?

Wind Cave is named for the air that rushes in or out of its entrance as the pressure outside changes; it is famous for boxwork, delicate fins of calcite on its ceilings.

The National Park of American Samoa is the only National Park Service unit located where?

American Samoa lies well south of the equator; because Samoan land is held communally under village chiefs, the Park Service could not buy it and leases the park from the villages instead.

Stephen Mather, the first National Park Service director, made his fortune in what?

Stephen Mather became a millionaire selling borax, then led the publicity campaign that won Congress over to a single agency for the parks, which he ran from 1917 to 1929.

The 1906 Antiquities Act lets a president proclaim which kind of protected area?

The Antiquities Act lets presidents proclaim national monuments on federal land; Theodore Roosevelt signed it in 1906 to stop 'pot hunters' looting Southwestern ruins and used it first for Devils Tower.

Which president signed the 1864 Yosemite Grant, protecting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove?

Abraham Lincoln signed the grant on June 30, 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, handing the land to California to run as a state park rather than keeping it in federal hands.

The dammed Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite supplies drinking water to which city?

San Francisco's O'Shaughnessy Dam flooded the valley in 1923 after a bitter fight that conservationists lost; the water travels about 167 miles by aqueduct to the Bay Area.

Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses the Continental Divide at which pass?

Logan Pass, at 6,646 feet, can lie under as much as 80 feet of snow, so ploughing the road takes about ten weeks and it is typically not fully open until early July.

Which Yosemite peak, once declared 'perfectly inaccessible', was first climbed in 1875 by drilling iron eye bolts into the rock?

Half Dome was written off as 'perfectly inaccessible' by the state geological survey; George Anderson proved otherwise in 1875, and today hikers need a lottery permit to climb its cables.

Which predator, wiped out of Yellowstone by the 1920s, was brought back in 1995?

Gray wolves were hunted out of the park by 1926, in part by the Park Service's own hunters; federal biologists began releasing wolves there again in January 1995.

What kind of giant geological feature lies beneath Yellowstone?

A supervolcano lies under the park: its last giant eruption, more than 600,000 years ago, left the Yellowstone Caldera, and the magma still close to the surface keeps the ground hot.

What creates the rings of orange, yellow and green around Grand Prismatic Spring?

Heat-loving microbes form the coloured mats; different kinds thrive at different temperatures, so each band of colour marks a step in the cooling of the water as it flows from the centre.

Who directed the 2009 PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea?

Ken Burns made the series with writer Dayton Duncan; the 'best idea' of the title is that a nation's most special places should be kept for everyone, not for royalty or the rich.

Which Arches National Park landmark is pictured on Utah licence plates?

Delicate Arch was once known to cowboys as 'the Chaps'; its present name dates only from 1934, and in 2002 the Winter Olympic torch relay passed through it.

Maine's national park was first designated a national park in 1919 under what name?

Lafayette National Park, created in 1919, honoured the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution; it had been Sieur de Monts National Monument since 1916 and was renamed again in 1929.

The Hoh Rain Forest, drenched by about 140 inches of precipitation a year, lies in which national park?

Olympic's mountains force Pacific storms to drop their moisture on the western valleys, so the Hoh is soaked while the eastern side of the same park sits in a rain shadow.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 book gave the Everglades which lasting nickname?

River of Grass came out in 1947, the year the park was established, and recast the Everglades in the public mind as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp.

Glacier and Canada’s Waterton Lakes were joined in 1932 as the world’s first what?

Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park grew out of a 1931 joint meeting of Rotary clubs from both sides of the border, who petitioned their governments to link the two parks.

Glacier National Park, whose glaciers have been shrinking since about 1850, lies in which state?

Montana's park counts a body of ice as a glacier only if it covers about 25 acres, enough to flow under its own weight; the number that still qualify has been falling since the 1800s.

Yellowstone National Park holds the oldest and largest public herd in the United States of which animal?

Bison have lived here continuously since prehistoric times, the only place in the United States where they have; yet by 1902 poachers had cut the herd to about two dozen animals.