Jun 28 2024
Kenai Fjords National Park protects a spectacular meeting place of mountains, glaciers, and the North Pacific Ocean on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Here, the enormous Harding Icefield spills between rugged peaks, glaciers descend toward deep fjords, whales and sea otters feed in cold coastal waters, and narrow valleys reveal what happens when thousands of years of …
Jun 27 2024
Katmai National Park and Preserve protects one of the wildest landscapes in Alaska, a place where enormous brown bears gather beside salmon-filled rivers, active volcanoes rise above glacier-carved valleys, and the remains of the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century stretch across an ash-filled wilderness known as the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Located …
Jun 26 2024
Joshua Tree National Park protects nearly 800,000 acres of desert mountains, broad valleys, sculpted granite boulders, palm oases, historic ranches, abandoned mines, cactus gardens, and forests of the strangely beautiful plant that gives the park its name. Located in southern California east of Los Angeles, the park sits where two major North American deserts meet, …
Jun 25 2024
Isle Royale National Park protects a remote archipelago in the cold waters of Lake Superior, far from highways, cities, and the conventional sightseeing routes that define many American national parks. There are no roads connecting the island’s destinations, no private cars, and no quick roadside overlooks. Reaching Isle Royale requires crossing Lake Superior by ferry, …
Jun 24 2024
Indiana Dunes National Park protects one of the most biologically diverse landscapes in the National Park System along just 15 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline in northwestern Indiana. At first glance, the park may seem centered almost entirely on sandy beaches and towering dunes, but its relatively small footprint contains an astonishing collection of habitats: …
Jun 23 2024
Hot Springs National Park is unlike almost any other national park in the United States. Instead of surrounding visitors with vast wilderness far from civilization, it rises directly from the center of Hot Springs, Arkansas, where grand early 20th-century bathhouses stand beneath forested Ouachita Mountain slopes and naturally heated water still emerges from the ground …
Jun 22 2024
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park protects one of the most dynamic landscapes on Earth, a place where molten rock continues building the island of Hawaiʻi while tropical rainforest, high-elevation shrubland, desert, lava tubes, coastal cliffs, and centuries of Native Hawaiian culture surround two of the world’s most remarkable volcanoes. The park extends from the Pacific Ocean …
Jun 21 2024
Haleakalā National Park protects one of the most dramatic elevation changes in the National Park System, rising from the lush Pacific coast of eastern Maui to the 10,023-foot summit of Haleakalā. Within that vertical range, visitors move through tropical coastal vegetation, rainforest, cloud forest, shrubland, high-elevation desert, volcanic cinder fields, and a summit landscape that …
Jun 19 2024
Great Smoky Mountains National Park protects more than half a million acres of ancient Appalachian mountains, rushing streams, old-growth forest, wildflower-covered slopes, historic cabins, waterfalls, high-elevation spruce-fir forest, and some of the greatest biological diversity found anywhere in the temperate United States. Straddling the border between Tennessee and North Carolina, the park is consistently the …
Jun 18 2024
Great Sand Dunes National Park protects a landscape that seems almost impossible: the tallest sand dunes in North America rising directly in front of the snow-covered Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The immense dunefield spreads across roughly 30 square miles of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, but the dunes are only the centerpiece of a much larger …
