Sep 14 2024
Hiking is the best way to understand just how enormous Grand Canyon National Park really is. From the rim, the canyon can look almost like a vast painted landscape, but descending even a short distance reveals layer after layer of cliffs, ridges, side canyons, desert vegetation, and changing rock formations that cannot be appreciated from …
Sep 07 2024
Small enough to be mistaken for an unusually large house cat, the island fox is one of the most remarkable animals found in Channel Islands National Park. It trots through coastal scrub, searches campgrounds for opportunities to scavenge, hunts insects and deer mice, eats fruit from native plants, and sometimes wanders casually past hikers as …
Sep 07 2024
Canyonlands National Park is famous for immense sandstone canyons, needles, mesas, natural arches, and the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers, but some of its most extraordinary features are much smaller and far older in human terms. Across canyon walls and sheltered alcoves, Indigenous people painted and pecked images into the rock, leaving a …
Sep 02 2024
Thunder Hole is one of the most famous stops along the rocky coastline of Acadia National Park, where Atlantic waves surge into a narrow granite inlet and sometimes produce a deep, booming sound powerful enough to resemble distant thunder. When the tide, waves, and wind align, seawater rushes into the constricted opening, traps and forces …
Sep 02 2024
The hot springs of Yellowstone National Park are among the most colorful, unusual, and scientifically important natural features in the United States. Brilliant blue pools seem to glow from within, orange and yellow microbial mats spread across steaming ground, mineral terraces grow and change almost before visitors’ eyes, and clouds of vapor rise from water …
Sep 02 2024
Lake McDonald is the largest lake in Glacier National Park and one of the most recognizable landscapes in Montana. Stretching for approximately 10 miles through a deep glacial valley on the park’s west side, the lake is surrounded by densely forested mountains that rise toward the Continental Divide. Its clear water, colorful shoreline stones, historic …
Aug 03 2024
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is one of Alaska’s most spectacular combinations of glaciers, mountains, ocean, rainforest, and wildlife. Located in southeastern Alaska west of Juneau, the park protects more than 3.2 million acres of fjords, tidewater glaciers, snow-covered peaks, coastal forests, rocky shorelines, and remote wilderness. Unlike national parks centered around scenic highways, …
Jul 02 2024
Mammoth Cave National Park protects a landscape that exists on two completely different levels. Above ground, forested hills surround the Green and Nolin rivers, hiking trails cross sinkhole country, deer and wild turkeys move through hardwood woodland, and historic churches and cemeteries preserve traces of communities that once filled the countryside. Beneath that landscape lies …
May 25 2024
Glacier National Park may be famous for challenging backcountry routes and all-day mountain adventures, but you do not have to hike ten or fifteen miles to experience its waterfalls, alpine meadows, wildlife, forests, and dramatic mountain scenery. Some of the park’s most memorable places can be reached on hikes measuring less than five miles. Short …
Jan 27 2024
Petrified Forest National Park is one of the most unusual landscapes in the American Southwest. Spread across the high plains of northeastern Arizona, the park protects vast deposits of brilliantly colored petrified wood, striped badlands, sweeping grasslands, ancient petroglyphs, historic buildings, fossils, and a surviving piece of Route 66. The name can be slightly misleading …
