1 Fact About All 63 U.S. National Parks

In March 1872, Congress designated Yellowstone “a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” It was the first national park of its kind. From there, a flurry of others were established. “Conservation president” Theodore Roosevelt signed bills creating five national parks and also signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, “the first U.S. law to provide general legal protection of cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands.” All that was before Woodrow Wilson established the National Park Service in 1916. The number of parks has continued to grow; today, there are 63 national parks in 30 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa.

Read on for one fascinating fact about each of the 63 U.S. national parks, from the one you’ll need your passport to visit to the one that’s served as the backdrop for some of your favorite films.

1. Acadia National Park
2. National Park of American Samoa
3. Arches National Park
4. Badlands National Park
5. Big Bend National Park
6. Biscayne National Park
7. Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
8. Bryce Canyon National Park
9. Canyonlands National Park
10. Capitol Reef National Park
11. Carlsbad Caverns National Park
12. Channel Islands National Park
13. Congaree National Park
14. Crater Lake National Park
15. Cuyahoga Valley National Park
16. Death Valley National Park
17. Denali National Park and Preserve
18. Dry Tortugas National Park
19. Everglades National Park
20. Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve
21. Gateway Arch National Park
22. Glacier National Park
23. Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
24. Grand Canyon National Park
25. Grand Teton National Park
26. Great Basin National Park
27. Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
28. Great Smoky Mountains National Park
29. Guadalupe Mountains National Park
30. Haleakalā National Park
31. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park
32. Hot Springs National Park
33. Indiana Dunes National Park
34. Isle Royale National Park
35. Joshua Tree National Park
36. Katmai National Park and Preserve
37. Kenai Fjords National Park
38. Kings Canyon National Park
39. Kobuk Valley National Park
40. Lake Clark National Park and Preserve
41. Lassen Volcanic National Park
42. Mammoth Cave National Park
43. Mesa Verde National Park
44. Mount Rainier National Park
45. New River Gorge National Park and Preserve
46. North Cascades National Park
47. Olympic National Park
48. Petrified Forest National Park
49. Pinnacles National Park
50. Redwood National Park
51. Rocky Mountain National Park
52. Saguaro National Park
53. Sequoia National Park
54. Shenandoah National Park
55. Theodore Roosevelt National Park
56. Virgin Islands National Park
57. Voyageurs National Park
58. White Sands National Park
59. Wind Cave National Park
60. Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve
61. Yellowstone National Park
62. Yosemite National Park
63. Zion National Park

Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park on Maine’s coast is home to the highest peak on the eastern seaboard. Cadillac Mountain rises about 1530 feet from the shore of Frenchman Bay, but you can drive or take the park shuttle to the top if your hiking skills aren’t up to the incline. From October 7 to March 6, Cadillac Mountain is the first spot in the U.S. to be bathed in the sun’s rays, making sunrise an especially popular time to visit the summit. 

National Park of American Samoa

Twenty-six-hundred miles southwest of Hawaii and 1800 miles northwest of New Zealand lies the National Park of American Samoa. The South Pacific archipelago’s park preserves infrastructure from World War II along with tropical rainforests, volcanic ridges, and coral reefs. But even though the territory has American in its name, U.S. citizens will still need a passport to visit the park. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has no jurisdiction in American Samoa and visitors must comply with the regulations of the American Samoa Government, which requires travelers to have a valid passport, sufficient money for their stay, and a ticket out.

Arches National Park

As you’re gazing in awe at the rock formations in Arches National Park in Utah, remember to look down once in a while. The ground at your feet is literally alive. Much of the park’s land is covered in a knobbly black substance called biological soil crust, made of lichens, algae, fungi, and cyanobacteria, one of the oldest kinds of life on Earth. These living mats of nutrients prevent soil erosion and give desert plants enough of a foothold to survive in the arid climate. But they’re still pretty fragile, so watch where you step.

Badlands National Park

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park in Arizona has provided the backdrop for countless westerns, but the otherworldly scenery of Badlands National Park in South Dakota has starred in a few flicks, too. It’s the setting of a wagon ride scene in 1990’s Dances with Wolves. The landscape stood in for a planet full of anthropophagic bugs in the 1997 sci-fi movie Starship Troopers. And who could forget the surface of the asteroid that Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck need to blow up in 1998’s Armageddon? Aso the Badlands.

Big Bend National Park

Visitors to Texas’s vast Big Bend National Park, which hugs a big curve of the Rio Grande, might glimpse black bears and bobcats, rattlesnakes and ravens, and other iconic native wildlife. They might also see a lot of odd ungulates that are a long way from home. The park is home to a large population of invasive barbary sheep, which originated in North Africa. People brought them to Texas in the mid-20th century, and now hundreds of the animals are out-competing endangered desert bighorn sheep for water, food, and territory in the park. State and federal wildlife officials are conducting surveys of the animals as part of a plan to control their populations.

Biscayne National Park

Biscayne National Park, located along the Atlantic coast just south of Miami, is 95 percent water—and one of the coolest ways to explore it is on its Maritime Heritage Trail, a string of six actual shipwrecks and one lighthouse accessible to snorkelers and scuba divers. The sunken wrecks include cargo steamers, a wooden sailing vessel, and schooners, all of which met their end on the coast’s reefs between the late 19th century and mid-20th century. 

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Even among non-geologists, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park should elicit awe. This Colorado canyon’s incredibly steep sides reveal more than a billion years of Earth’s history. Layers of metamorphic rocks called gneiss and schist, pegmatite rock faces streaked with pink feldspar, and the fossil-rich Morrison Formation date from the Precambrian to the present day. The Gunnison River at the very bottom of the canyon continues to wear away rock at a rate of about an inch per century.

Bryce Canyon National Park

Speaking of rock, Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah is known for its unusual geology of a totally different kind. The park contains the world’s largest concentration of hoodoos, which are rock spires carved by wind and water. About 50 million years ago, a vast lake deposited sediments in the present-day park, creating a whole bunch of different sedimentary rocks that over the years would all erode at slightly different rates. The movement of Earth’s tectonic plates then lifted the lakebed up to a higher elevation, exposing it to rain and ice. Over thousands of years, these forces carved the rock into the oddly shaped columns we see today.

Canyonlands National Park

Not too far from Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands National Park is home to dazzling desert scenery as well as legends of Old West outlaws who traveled among its vast networks of canyons. Just west of the park’s Maze District, train and bank robber Butch Cassidy and his gang made their hideout at the Robber’s Roost along the Dirty Devil River. If you lack the hiking and canyoneering skills to visit the remote redoubt, you can get a feel for Canyonlands’s rugged terrain in the Needles District, which offers more developed trails and roads for four-wheel drive vehicles. Though it’s still not easy—the National Park Service warns that “inexperienced drivers should not attempt these roads. There is a high risk of vehicle damage, and towing costs usually exceed $1500.” Even worse, a camping site on one of the roads requires you to BYOT—bring your own toilet.

Capitol Reef National Park

Parts of southern Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, which is best known for its rocky vistas caused by a geological wrinkle in Earth’s surface, actually started out as an agricultural enterprise. Mormon settlers founded the town of Fruita in 1880 with the idea of planting fruit orchards and vegetable gardens and selling the produce. Visitors can explore the Fruita Historic District today and even pick their own apples, plums, apricots, and other fruits at various times of the year from the historic trees, now owned and managed by the National Park Service. 

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

In New Mexico’s Chihuahuan desert, Carlsbad Caverns National Park provides a rich habitat for 17 species of bats, including the hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats that fly out from Carlsbad cavern at dusk each night from April through October. In December 1941, a dentist/inventor saw this incredible site and in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor came up with an idea—use the bats to carry bombs. Much of their work on the project was done at the nearby Carlsbad Army AirField. The idea was that the sleeping bats could be collected during the day and fitted with tiny explosives, then set free at night over Japan to roost in the country’s traditional wood-and-paper buildings, and eventually start fires across a city. A 1943 test run at the air base proved successful (for the military, not for the bats). But the project was ultimately canceled.

Channel Islands National Park

The Channel Island foxes are conservation success stories. The diminutive canines are endemic to Channel Islands National Park, off the coast of southern California. In the 1990s, their populations plummeted due to disease and especially being preyed upon by invasive golden eagles. Conservation groups were alarmed and took action to restore a more natural balance to the islands’ fragile ecosystems, such as removing feral livestock and replanting native vegetation. Three of the four island fox subspecies recovered so quickly that they were removed from the Endangered Species List in 2016.

Congaree National Park

Congaree National Park in central South Carolina is one of the least-visited east of the Mississippi. It encompasses the floodplain of the Congaree River and acres of old-growth forest barely touched by human hands—difficult terrain that, from the colonial period on, provided a refuge for Black people who had escaped enslavement and lived in free settlements thereafter. They were known as Maroons, and they formed at least one village within the present-day park that was largely hidden from the racist society around it. Though living in the wilderness was challenging, the residents chose the path of resistance.

Crater Lake National Park

A dead tree has been floating upright in Crater Lake for over 100 years. Called “The Old Man of the Lake” by its many admirers, the deceased hemlock fell into the lake sometime before 1896, when a scientist came upon it. He published his observation in 1902, the same year that Crater Lake National Park was established in southern Oregon. The bleached and gnarly stump floats about three feet above the surface and 27 feet below it. Most trees that float in lakes eventually sink—but not the Old Man, and people aren’t sure why. It’s possible that the dried-out stump above water counterbalances the part below the surface, and that the lake is cold enough to prevent decomposition. Even today the weatherbeaten wood makes its rounds, propelled by winds or waves from one quadrant of the clear blue lake to another. There is no talk of removing him. In fact, when scientists tied him down to the shoreline in 1988, the skies allegedly turned dark and swirling winds suddenly kicked up. The scientists unleashed the Old Man, the skies cleared, and all was right again.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park

The Cuyahoga River, winding through northeastern Ohio to Cleveland and Lake Erie, was once one of America’s most polluted waterways. It even caught fire multiple times, thanks to the huge amount of oil-based industrial crud in it, and after news of a 1969 blaze made it into a widely seen issue of TIME magazine, the neglected river became the symbol of how bad America’s environmental problems were. But in the decades since, thanks to environmental activism and regulation, it now represents progress. Since 2000, Cuyahoga Valley National Park has protected a stretch of the river and its recovering biodiversity, historic sites, and natural landmarks.

Death Valley National Park

Death Valley National Park in California (and a bit in Nevada) is notorious for being hot. An area now appropriately named Furnace Creek recorded the world’s hottest known temperature—134 degrees Fahrenheit—on July 10, 1913. A few factors in the park come together to cause thermometers to soar. For instance, the narrow valley is surrounded by tall mountain ranges and its floor is a couple hundred feet below sea level, which creates a “bucket” to trap hot air. Despite cooler temps at night, the hot air can’t rise fully out of the valley. It just sinks back down to toast tourists for another day.  

Denali National Park and Preserve

Rising 20,310 feet in the Alaska Range, Mount McKinley—also known by its Indigenous name, Denali, meaning “the high one”—is North America’s tallest mountain. Whether bathed in alpenglow or frosted with fresh snow, the peak’s beauty enthralled visitors long before Denali National Park was established in 1917. The mountain is also covered in poop. Park researchers said in 2019 that thanks to climate change, once-permanent ice may soon be melting down Mount McKinley’s sides—and with it, approximately 66 tons of human excrement left behind by decades of climbers and explorers. Fortunately, today’s mountaineers have adopted a climate-friendly policy of packing out their poo.

Dry Tortugas National Park

The small, sandy islands that make up Dry Tortugas National Park lie 70 miles west of Key West, Florida. Initially, the ring-shaped fortress on Garden Key, known as Fort Jefferson, was designed to protect American interests in the Gulf of Mexico, which came in handy during the Civil War: During and after the conflict, Fort Jefferson was turned into a military prison. Its most famous inmate was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was convicted of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Mudd, who claimed innocence, was pardoned after saving many lives during a yellow fever outbreak at the prison.

Everglades National Park

When Spanish and American colonizers invaded present-day southern Florida, the Calusa and Seminole used the Everglades’ wilderness to their advantage: They knew how to survive amid the thick vegetation and maze of waterways, giving them an upper hand against the unprepared white occupiers. Those lands in and around Everglades National Park still represent the largest designated wilderness in the eastern U.S.

Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve

Maybe there should be a sign at the entrance to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve that says “visit at your own risk.” This immense wilderness in northern Alaska has no roads, no trails, no campgrounds, no services—and no one nearby to call for help, even if the park did have Wi-Fi, which it doesn’t. But what you will get at Gates of the Arctic is 7.5 million acres of breathtaking mountains, valleys clothed in Arctic flora, herds of caribou and musk ox, and a closer connection to nature without a crowd of tourists jostling for a picture. The park receives about 10,000 visitors per year, compared to, say, Yellowstone’s 3 million-plus visitors a year.

Gateway Arch National Park

Eero Saarinen’s iconic steel arch on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri, marks America’s “gateway to the west” and the nation’s complicated legacy of westward expansion. Ironically, it’s also the smallest national park at a mere 91 acres—substantially less than one square mile—that includes the arch and visitor center, gardens, riverfront trails, and a historic courthouse where Dred and Harriet Scott, an enslaved couple, sued for their freedom in the 1840s. Fun fact: You can go all the way to the top of the arch via a one-of-a-kind tram designed in a mere two weeks by a guy named Dick Bowser, who had dropped out of engineering school to join the Navy and never got his degree. 

Glacier National Park

The glaciers that occupy what is now Montana’s Glacier National Park have been melting away since the end of the Little Ice Age nearly 175 years ago. In 1850 the area was home to roughly 80 glaciers, and by 2015 only 26 named glaciers remained. In recent decades, their retreat has been hastened by climate change; from 1966 to 2015, all of the park’s named glaciers shrank by 40 percent on average. Earlier in the 21st century, exhibits at the park predicted that all of the glaciers could be gone as soon as 2020. Though they’re no longer in their prime, Glacier National Park’s couple dozen glaciers have survived into the 2020s, and the exhibits predicting their expiration date have been updated.

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve

Eighty percent of visitors to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska arrive by cruise ship, and the park’s vibrant blue waters are the first thing they see. Glacial water has a unique turquoise hue, but it's not because that’s the color of melting glaciers. The frozen masses that give Glacier Bay its name are constantly shifting, and as they move, they grind the earth below them into a fine sediment. This “glacial flour” then runs off into the bay, where it stays suspended in the water and means that blue and green wavelengths hit your eyes. Water with high concentrations of the powdery substance is sometimes called “glacial milk.”

Grand Canyon National Park

If you’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon, remember to layer up. The canyon is deep enough to create distinct pockets of weather, and temperatures at the highest and lowest points can vary by as much as 25ºF. Where exactly the temperature falls depends on the time of year: a record low of –22°F was recorded in February 1985, and the record high of 120°F has been recorded multiple times in the summer. The wide range in elevation also impacts humidity levels. A station on the North Rim is the coldest and wettest point in the park, and Phantom Ranch—the hottest point and one of the driest—is located only 8 miles away. 

Grand Teton National Park

Many remote national parks are difficult to access, but that’s not the case with Grand Teton. It’s home to the Jackson Hole Airport—the only commercial airport located within a U.S. national park. Originally situated just outside the official property, it became part of Grand Teton when the national park expanded to absorb the Jackson Hole National Monument in 1950. Today it’s the busiest airport in Wyoming, though it doesn’t crack the top 100 for U.S. airports overall.

Great Basin National Park

National parks are ideal for star-gazing, and Great Basin in Nevada is especially known for its dark skies. Every September, the park hosts the Great Basin Astronomy Festival for visitors looking to get better acquainted with the cosmos. The multi-night event includes night sky photography workshops, observatory tours, and telescope viewing parties. Just be sure to pack a red light—regular flashlights are banned to maintain the low-light conditions. 

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado is perfect for people who love snowboarding but hate the cold. Sandboarding, sledding, and skiing are permitted on any of the dunes separate from the park’s plant life. Though Great Sand Dunes doesn’t provide equipment to visitors, several businesses in the area rent sleds and boards designed to glide on sand. You’ll want to avoid hitting the dunes in the middle of a hot day, though: The surface of the sand can reach 150°F.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

The Great Smoky Mountains are home to one of the only synchronous firefly species in North America. For a few weeks in May or June, the male insects flash patterns in sync as part of a mating display. The result is a pulsing, synchronized spectacle that lights up the forest. The annual phenomenon attracts viewers from around the world. Each spring over 20,000 people apply for vehicle passes to see the light show, and fewer than 1000 are distributed through a lottery system.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

Standing 8751 feet tall, Guadalupe Peak in Guadalupe Mountains National Park is the highest point in Texas. The mountain has enticed many adventurers over the years, including a group of wheelchair users in the early ’80s. Dave Kiley, Joe Moss, and Donny Rogers were members of POINT, or Paraplegics on Independent Nature Trails. The goal of their trek was to boost visibility of people with disabilities in outdoor spaces while raising money for a local rehabilitation center. After crawling through rocks and cacti for the last several hundred feet of the trail, the three men reached their goal on July 16, 1982. Though space in their bags was limited, they had the foresight to pack a bottle of champagne to celebrate the accomplishment.

Haleakalā National Park

Located on the island of Maui, Haleakalā National Park is home to many species that aren’t found anywhere else. Many of those plants and animals are also at risk of dying out. As of 2018, Haleakalā hosted 103 endangered species—more than any other national park in the country. With such a small native area, these organisms are especially vulnerable to threats that are more easily weathered in the mainland U.S. Everything from habitat loss to feral cats have been blamed for the decline of Maui’s endemic plants and wildlife. 

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park

The barren lava fields in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park resemble another planet, making them the perfect training grounds for NASA’s astronauts. The alien terrain around Mauna Loa has been used to simulate missions to the moon, and more recently life on Mars. In 2013, six NASA researchers spent four months living in a small dome on the slope of the volcano, during which they could only venture outside wearing space suits. One goal of the project was to develop recipes that could be recreated on future missions. Many meals included SPAM—a popular ingredient with people in Hawaiʻi who aren’t necessarily preparing for space travel.

Hot Springs National Park

Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas attracts history and nature buffs alike. In addition to the natural thermal springs, it includes the historic bathhouses in the adjacent city of Hot Springs, making it one of the most accessible national parks in the system. It’s also home to the only on-site national park brewery. The Superior Bathhouse Brewery opened in the former site of the Superior Bathhouse in 2014. The beer itself features thermal spring water as the main ingredient, which is something no other brewery in the world can say.

Indiana Dunes National Park

Encompassing part of Lake Michigan’s coastline, Indiana Dunes National Park is one of the best places to enjoy a beach day in the Midwest. The sand looks similar to what you’d find near the ocean, but if you listen closely you’ll hear a major difference. The sand is famous for “singing” as it shifts, a phenomenon that’s only observed in a handful of places on Earth. The song is more of a whisper than a belt, so avoid visiting the beach at peak busy times if you want to hear it.

Isle Royale National Park

Isle Royale National Park is made up of a cluster of islands in Lake Superior only accessible by watercraft or seaplane. From November 1 until April 15, it isn’t accessible at all; Isle Royale is the only national park in the country that fully closes for the winter. Lake Superior sees extreme weather in the colder months that would make flying or boating to the islands dangerous. Other national parks like Gates of the Arctic in Alaska also have extreme winters, but their open terrain makes them slightly easier to access. The fact that it’s closed for nearly half the year is one reason why Isle Royale is one of the least-visited national parks in the system.

Joshua Tree National Park

If you plan to celebrate your birthday in Joshua Tree National Park, leave the balloons at home. Inflated balloons aren’t allowed inside the California park because they’re officially categorized as litter, and therefore banned to protect the wildlife that might ingest them. There is one way around the rule, however. If you successfully secure the right permit, you can bring your balloons into Joshua Tree with you. Of course, you’ll still be expected to use them responsibly and take them with you at the end of your visit. 

Katmai National Park and Preserve

Even if you haven’t been to Katmai National Park and Preserve, you may recognize its rotund residents. Every year in October, the Alaska park hosts Fat Bear Week: an online competition to decide which of its brown bears packed on the most pounds in preparation for winter. The March Madness-style bracket includes pictures plus a livestream of Katmai’s bears gorging on salmon around the clock. In 2023, a hefty mama bear named Grazer claimed the title for the second year running.

Kenai Fjords National Park

Kenai Fjords National Park is home to part of the Harding Icefield, the largest icefield located fully within the U.S. The frozen mass spans 700 square miles, with the portion within park boundaries covering around 40 percent of the park. More than 38 glaciers flow from the icy expanse [PDF], and only one of them is accessible by road. There’s a six- to eight-hour hike leading to the top of the icefield, but it’s not recommended for beginners. 

Kings Canyon National Park

General Grant National Park was created in 1890 and clearly honored president and Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, right? No. It was named after and created to protect the General Grant sequoia tree specifically and the grove of trees around it in general. The tree had been named years prior in honor of Grant. And what a tree. In the 1920s it was designated the Nation’s Christmas Tree and in the 1950s it was declared a national shrine “in memory of the men and women of the Armed Forces who have served and fought and died to keep this Nation free.” At the dedication ceremony, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz proclaimed, “today … this shrine takes its place in equal stature with that other great shrine in Arlington Cemetery, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”

You not have heard of General Grant National Park because it was a tiny little thing at four square miles, so when the over 700-square-mile Kings Canyon National Park was created in 1940,  it absorbed the General Grant National Park, which now survives as the General Grant Grove. 

Kobuk Valley National Park

Kobuk Valley in Alaska is one of two U.S. national parks north of the Arctic Circle, but you wouldn’t think that by looking at parts of it. The Great Kobuk Sand Dunes are the largest active sand dunes in the Arctic. They trace their history back tens of thousands of years when the glaciers that once covered the land pulverized the rocks beneath them into a fine sand. Today the dunes are a great place to spot prints of bears, wolves, moose, and other wildlife that pass through the sandy valley.

Lake Clark National Park and Preserve

In addition to the breathtaking natural beauty, visitors come to Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska to admire one man’s inspiring craftsmanship. Richard Proenneke lived in the national park for more than 30 years, and his journals are the basis of the best-selling memoir One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey. One of his most impressive accomplishments was constructing a cabin by hand using mostly local materials. The structure still stands at Upper Twin Lake today, and visitors can explore it in the summer months.

Lassen Volcanic National Park

The earth is home to four different types of volcanoes: shield, plug dome, cinder cone, and composite. Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California is one of the rare places on the planet where you can find all four. In addition to its diverse volcanoes, the park is home to hydrothermal features like boiling mudpots and roaring fumaroles. You don’t need to be a geology expert to know they’re best viewed from a distance.

Mammoth Cave National Park

Mammoth Cave National Park’s most noteworthy residents are easy to miss. Kentucky cave shrimp grow about 1.25 inches long, and their transparent shells make them nearly impossible to see in their dark cave environment. The species is also close to extinction. They’re not found anywhere else on Earth, and the national park along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are in charge of their preservation. Many of them live in underwater cave pockets that humans can’t access, so at least they don’t have to worry about disruptive tourists.

Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park in Montezuma County, Colorado, isn’t just a national park. It’s also the largest archaeological preserve in the country, home to nearly 5000 archaeological sites. Around 600 of those are cliff dwellings. The biggest by far is Cliff Palace, “discovered” and named by a couple of ranchers in the late 19th century. Some 100 people once lived in its 150 rooms. There are visitor tours through the palace, but, no, you can’t book it for your bachelorette trip.

Mount Rainier National Park

While exploring the future Washington State in 1792, Great Britain’s George Vancouver spotted a hulking mountain in the distance. He named it Mount Rainier after his buddy, British rear admiral Peter Rainier. Indigenous peoples of the region already had their own names for the landmark.

But Mount Rainier stuck among settlers, and it’s now the namesake of Mount Rainier National Park. In recent years, there’s been a push to formally restore Mount Rainier to one of its original monikers—a change that plenty of white Americans a century ago fully supported. It’s an amazing story for another time, but some felt that since Rainier fought for the British during the Revolutionary War, his name shouldn’t get immortalized on an American mountain.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve

On a normal day, West Virginia’s New River Gorge is full of whitewater rafters, rock climbers, hikers, and all manner of other nature lovers. But on the third Saturday of October, the adrenaline junkies come out to play. Because that’s Bridge Day—a single-day festival during which the New River Gorge Bridge is closed to traffic and open to BASE jumpers. They parachute 876 feet from the bridge into the gorge below. In general, BASE jumping is banned in national parks, so the founding legislation had to have a special carve-out to allow permits to be created.

North Cascades National Park

In the 1950s, the North Cascades in northern Washington played host to a few key writers from the Beat Generation. Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac each spent a summer or two as fire lookouts—a job that entailed living alone atop a mountain and surveying the landscape for any fires. 

Naturally, they all wrote about their experiences—Snyder and Whalen in verse, and Kerouac in prose. Kerouac didn’t take very well to the extreme isolation. As he wrote in his semi-autobiographical novel Desolation Angels, “Desolation Adventure finds me finding at the bottom of myself abysmal nothingness worst {sic} than that no illusion even—my mind’s in rags—” He didn’t reapply for the gig the next summer.

Olympic National Park

The word rainforest might evoke lush greenery in a sweltering, equatorial locale. That’s a tropical rainforest. But there are temperate rainforests, too—and Olympic National Park on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is home to one of them. The forest boasts many a Roosevelt elk and plenty of massive, centuries-old trees—Sitka spruce and western hemlock among them. Not to mention that the place is crawling with vampires. Just kidding, Twilight isn’t real. And even if it was, the Cullen family wouldn’t hunt wildlife in Olympic National Park: It’s illegal.

Petrified Forest National Park

The Petrified Forest sounds like something spit out by a Harry Potter term generator. In fact, it’s a real place in northeastern Arizona—but not a “forest” in the traditional sense. More than 200 million years ago, the region’s fallen trees got ferried off by floodwaters and buried beneath tons of sediment and other mineral-rich materials. In this oxygen-less tomb, the minerals sort of hijacked the logs’ decaying process: seeping in and blooming into colorful quartz.. As the National Park Service describes it, “Each piece is like a giant crystal, often sparkling in the sunlight as if covered by glitter.”

The logs were unearthed as the landscape changed, a process that caused them to snap into pieces. And because of how quartz naturally breaks, the chunks look like they met the business end of Paul Bunyan’s ax. 

Pinnacles National Park

The California red-legged frog was once so ubiquitous in its home state that people generally agree it’s the species at the center of an 1865 short story by Mark Twain: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” But human interference caused the frog’s population to plummet dramatically during the 20th century, and conservationists have spent the last couple of decades working hard to revive it. 

One successful attempt involved turning Pinnacles National Park’s Bear Gulch Reservoir into a breeding ground for the creatures. There, it’s a frog’s world, and humans just live in it. You’re not allowed to swim in the water so as not to disturb the spawning hoppers, and it’s against the law to “harass or harm them in any way,” per the NPS. “Approaching so closely that they jump is a form of harassment.” Maybe the only place where jump scares are quite literally illegal.

Redwood National Park

It’s no secret that the Redwood National and State Parks in Northern California are full of ridiculously tall trees. The world’s tallest tree is one of them—and its precise location is a secret. The tree, named Hyperion, is somewhere between 600 and 800 years old and over 380 feet tall. For reference, that’s a full 75 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, base included. Hyperion’s exact whereabouts are intentionally unpublicized to protect it from the compacted soil, trampled understory, and other damage that too much foot traffic could cause.

Rocky Mountain National Park

In August 1917, a 20-year-old Michigan college student named Agnes Lowe traipsed off to Rocky Mountain National Park to spend a week in the Colorado wilderness without anything but the clothes on her back. She was barefoot, dressed as a cavewoman, and christened a “modern Eve” by The Denver Post. Anyway, readers across the country were captivated by newspaper reports of the escapade. When Lowe emerged after seven days—sunburned and mosquito-bitten, but otherwise healthy as a wild horse—she had more than 60 marriage proposals waiting for her in the mail.

But park superintendent Claude Way soon confessed that it was all a publicity stunt. The Denver Post had led the charge with Way’s help, and Lowe had actually just spent the week in a lodge. Way got dragged, of course, but he stood by his actions by arguing that the charade did bring tons of national attention to the park—and besides, nobody got hurt.

Saguaro National Park

For thousands of years, the people of the Tohono O’odham Nation has lived in the Sonoran Desert and harvested the fruit of the saguaro cactuses that grow there. They even have special permission to do it in Arizona’s Saguaro National Park, where interacting with the cactuses is otherwise prohibited.

It’s tough work: Harvesting season is usually in mid-June, when the heat is blistering and the monsoons haven’t yet arrived. And it’s not low-hanging fruit, either. To reach it, harvesters use a 20-foot-long pole called a kuipad. The tools are made from the cactuses themselves. As Tanisha Tucker, one of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s leading harvesters, told the Trust for Public Land, “there’s not really anything else in the desert that’s tall enough to reach the top of a cactus, but another cactus.”

Though the sweet red fruit makes for a tasty raw snack, it doesn’t stay fresh for very long. So Tucker boils much of it into a syrup, which she jars for later use on everything from pancakes and tortillas to ice cream and barbecue. They even ferment it into ceremonial wine.

Sequoia National Park

What Sequoia National Park lacks in cactus wine it more than makes up for in sequoia trees that make you feel like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. The largest is the General Sherman Tree, which measures 275 feet tall and boasts a base diameter of over 36 feet. That means its circumference is over 113 feet: You’d have to run around it about 47 times to hit a mile.

Sequoia National Park was formed in 1890 to preserve giant sequoias, making it the first national park created for the express purpose of protecting a living organism. The woody behemoth’s scientific name is Sequoiadendron giganteum.

Shenandoah National Park

In the 1920s and ’30s, Virginia officials hoping to create Shenandoah National Park collected around 3000 tracts of privately owned land in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It seems like a nice idea to buy back uninhabited land and transform it into a federally protected environmental haven. But not all the territory was uninhabited: Some 500 families—roughly 2000 people—lived there, mostly descendants of 19th-century German and British immigrants.

Officials forced these so-called “hollow folk” to leave, soon torching houses in their wake and generally trying to rid the land of any evidence of human habitation. Ethnographic reports had painted the hollow folk out to be illiterate and primitive in their technology and societal structures; one especially persuasive book from 1933 described one community as “almost completely cut off from the current of American life.” All this helped the government market the forced migration as a humanitarian endeavor—a chance for “uncivilized” communities to assimilate into “civilized” society.

But while there was poverty in some of the mountain communities—like there is in many communities—the portrait of hollow folk as backwoods bums centuries behind the rest of the country was patently false. As the historian Audrey Horning explains in a piece on the NPS website, “Throughout the hollows, the universal presence of an array of kitchen and dining wares, pharmaceutical glass, military items, mail order toys, 78 RPM record fragments, specialized agricultural tools, store-bought shoes, and even automobiles all suggest that mountain residents were as equally bombarded by mass consumer culture as were other early 20th-century rural Americans.” Not that the lack of mass consumer culture is a good justification for booting thousands of people from their homes, anyway.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

It’s only fitting that Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most important conservationists in American history, would have a national park of his own. Theodore Roosevelt National Park stretches across the badlands of North Dakota—Roosevelt’s happy place and the spark that lit the flame of all his conservation efforts.

On park grounds, behind the South Unit Visitor Center, to be exact, is the Maltese Cross Cabin, where Roosevelt lived briefly during his cattle ranching days. The cabin is surprisingly well-traveled for a house that should have been anchored to the ground. It was displayed at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and then made an appearance at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon. The itinerant edifice then returned to North Dakota, spending time in Fargo and Bismarck, before eventually relocating to TR’s park in 1959. 

Virgin Islands National Park

The Virgin Islands National Park, which covers about two-thirds of Saint John, features centuries-old petroglyphs—rock carvings—that were likely made by the island’s early occupants: the Taíno people, who lived throughout much of the Caribbean.

The petroglyphs, possibly dating as far back as 900 CE, can be seen on the rocks around Reef Bay along the island’s southern coast. Among the images are bats, which, paired with ceramic evidence, supports some scholars’ belief that the winged mammals were an important religious symbol to the Taíno people. And Reef Bay is no stranger to bats: They come out at dusk to feed on the insects that fly around the water.

Voyageurs National Park

The only formal lodging in Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park is Kettle Falls Hotel, whose tagline is this: “Tough place to get to ... But well worth it once you get there!” Maybe not the catchiest way to say that, but points for accuracy: You can only get there by boat or floatplane. The hotel opened in 1913 and was sold in 1918 to one Robert Williams. The price tag?: $1000 and four barrels of whiskey. 

White Sands National Park

The majestic dunes of New Mexico’s White Sands National Park comprise a special kind of sand: gypsum. If you want to see it for yourself, though, make sure to check road conditions. While that’s a good idea in general because of weather or construction, White Sands ups the ante by closing for missile testing. It sits right next to White Sands Missile Range, which advertises itself as the “largest fully instrumented, open-air test range in the Department of Defense.” And to keep everyone safe, the road to the dunes is closed during said testing. But don’t worry, it’s usually only for a couple hours—and the gift shop remains open.

Wind Cave National Park

The eponymous wind cave of South Dakota’s Wind Cave National Park is exactly what it sounds like: a windy cave. Or, more precisely, around 150 miles of explored passages in a windy, winding cave system. The wind is caused by changes in barometric pressure. Basically, the air pressure in the cave is always trying to stabilize with the air pressure outside. So when there’s high pressure outside, air rushes into the cave—making it windy. When there’s low pressure outside, air rushes out of the cave … also making it windy, but in the opposite direction.

While white settlers first stumbled upon the cave in the 1880s, the Lakota people had already known about it for centuries. In fact, for many Lakota it’s a key part of their origin story. The version the National Park Service gives is that the wind cave was the passage to Earth’s surface from a spirit lodge, where humans lived in their pre-Earth days. 

The first group of humans to make the trip through the passage were convinced to do so prematurely by a couple of trickster spirits. The Creator then punished the party by transforming them into Earth’s first bison. The next group journeyed to Earth with the Creator’s permission, and they became the Lakota.

Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve

Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska is called “the mountain kingdom of North America” because it’s the meeting point of three mountain ranges: Wrangell, St. Elias, Chugach, and some even throw in the Alaska Range. And at 13.2 million acres, the park and preserve combine to be the largest NPS site by a landslide. That’s roughly the same size as four Yellowstones.

Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone itself, located mostly in Wyoming, is a great place for humans who want to go off the grid. Partially within its bounds is the most isolated spot in the contiguous U.S.: Thorofare, a cheekily named patch of land that can be 30 miles plus from any road or building. You’re not even allowed to get there using a motor vehicle—it’s horseback or your own two feet. There’s no cell service, either.

Yosemite National Park

One of Yosemite National Park’s most famous sights is Horsetail Fall, a waterfall located on the eastern face of the rock formation known as El Capitan. When the light hits the waterfall just right, it looks like blazing bright fire is cascading down the rock face.

It’s a dazzling optical illusion—and a harmless one. But Yosemite was once known for an actual firefall, when people chucked a bonfire from the top of an overlook called Glacier Point. The owners of a hotell first did it in 1872, and spectators gathered to watch the fire hurtle down the cliff, with some extended gaps, until 1968. That’s when National Park Service director George Hartzog put an end to the practice.

Zion National Park

In some parks, you should stop and smell the flowers. In southwest Utah’s Zion National Park, you should stop and search for snails. The Zion snail, which lives in the park and nowhere else in the world, can be found among the flora that grows along wet canyon walls. You might need a magnifying glass, though—Zion snails are less than one-eighth of an inch long. But they do boast the biggest feet of any animal in the kingdom … relative to their body size, of course.

National parks aren’t just geographic areas; they’re a specific classification that, according to the National Park Service, “contains a variety of resources and encompasses large land or water areas to help provide adequate protection of the resources.” There are other classifications within the system, like national preserves, monuments, lakeshores, historical parks, a national park for the performing arts, and many more. (According to NationalParks.org, “the National Park System encompasses 433 national park sites in the United States” spanning “more than 85 million acres.”)

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This story was adapted from an episode of The List Show on YouTube. Subscribe to Mental Floss for new videos every week.