US National Parks
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96 free US National Parks trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
11 free US National Parks trivia questions with answers. US National Parks trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is National Parks trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which president signed the 1872 act establishing the first national park in the United States?
Ulysses S. Grant
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.
Q 02Yellowstone, the first US national park, lies almost entirely in which state?
Wyoming
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.
Q 03Which Arkansas national park grew from land Congress reserved in 1832, forty years before Yellowstone?
Hot Springs
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.
Q 04Which is the largest national park in the contiguous United States?
Death Valley
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.
Q 05Which national park contains the highest mountain peak in North America?
Denali
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.
Q 06The longest known cave system in the world lies beneath which US state?
Kentucky
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.
Q 07Which is the oldest national park east of the Mississippi River?
Acadia
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.
Q 08The Everglades are fed by a slow-moving sheet of water flowing out of which body of water?
Lake Okeechobee
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.
Q 09Which president signed the Organic Act creating the National Park Service on August 25, 1916?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson's signature charged the new agency with conserving park scenery and wildlife so as to leave them unimpaired for future generations.
Q 10Which animals carry visitors down the Grand Canyon's Bright Angel Trail to Phantom Ranch?
Mules
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.
Q 11Yellowstone holds more than half of the world's examples of which natural feature?
Geysers
Geysers erupt because constrictions in their underground plumbing let pressure build; Yellowstone holds more than half the world's total, Old Faithful among them.
Q 12Which national park drew more than 12 million visits in 2024, the most of any US national park?
Great Smoky Mountains
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.
Q 13Which state has the most national parks, with nine?
California
California has nine national parks; it moved ahead of Alaska's eight only in 2013, when Pinnacles was promoted to a national park.
Q 21The abandoned boomtown of Kennecott, in America's largest national park, mined which metal?
Copper
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.
Q 22The Old Courthouse in the St. Louis national park is where which landmark Supreme Court case originated?
Dred Scott
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.
Q 23Dry Tortugas National Park, reachable only by boat or seaplane, lies about 70 miles from which city?
Key West
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.
Q 14At over 8 million acres, which Alaskan park is the largest national park in the United States?
Wrangell–St. Elias
Wrangell–St. Elias covers 13.2 million acres with its preserve, yet only two roads lead into it, and both are unpaved.
Q 15Which is the smallest US national park?
Gateway Arch
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.
Q 16Which national park protects the deepest lake in the United States?
Crater Lake
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.
Q 17The lake in Oregon's only national park fills the caldera of which destroyed volcano?
Mount Mazama
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.
Q 18Arches National Park sits above what underground layer, the main cause of its arch formation?
A salt bed
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.
Q 19The General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume, grows in which national park?
Sequoia
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.
Q 20Which peak on the edge of a Sierra Nevada national park is the highest point in the contiguous United States?
Mount Whitney
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.
Q 24Isle Royale National Park consists of an island and more than 400 islets in which of the Great Lakes?
Lake Superior
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.
Q 25The name of Maui's Haleakalā National Park is Hawaiian for what?
House of the sun
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.
Q 26Which national park's Big Room is the largest cave chamber in North America?
Carlsbad Caverns
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.
Q 27Mesa Verde National Park, home to Cliff Palace, protects sites built by which people?
Ancestral Puebloans
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.
Q 28Grand Teton National Park includes most of the northern sections of which valley?
Jackson Hole
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.
Q 29Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous paved road in the United States, crosses which national park?
Rocky Mountain
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.
Q 30Which highly endangered mammal was reintroduced to the wild in the Badlands Wilderness of South Dakota?
Black-footed ferrets
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.