Jun 04 2026
Shenandoah National Park stretches along Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, protecting nearly 200,000 acres of hardwood forest, waterfalls, mountain summits, rocky overlooks, wildlife habitat, and more than 500 miles of hiking trails. Yet unlike many mountain parks where the greatest scenery requires hours of backcountry travel, Shenandoah makes much of its landscape remarkably accessible. The reason …
Jun 03 2026
Canyonlands National Park protects a vast wilderness of deeply carved canyons, towering mesas, sandstone spires, natural arches, sheer cliffs, desert basins, and two of the American Southwest’s great rivers. Spread across more than 337,000 acres of southeastern Utah, the park is so rugged that the Colorado and Green rivers divide it into districts that appear …
Jun 02 2026
Bryce Canyon National Park protects one of the most unusual landscapes in the American Southwest: an enormous natural amphitheater filled with thousands of orange, pink, white, and red rock spires known as hoodoos. No other place on Earth contains a greater concentration of these irregular stone columns. Despite its name, Bryce Canyon is not really …
Jun 01 2026
Biscayne National Park protects a landscape that looks almost nothing like the traditional image of an American national park. There are no mountains, deep canyons, geysers, or long scenic highways. More than 95 percent of the park is water, and most of its greatest attractions lie beneath the surface or beyond the mainland shoreline. Mangrove …
Jun 01 2026
Big Bend National Park protects more than 800,000 acres of mountains, desert, river canyons, volcanic formations, fossil beds, historic ranches, mining landscapes, and Chihuahuan Desert wilderness along the sweeping curve of the Rio Grande in far West Texas. It is one of the largest and most isolated national parks in the contiguous United States, a …
May 31 2026
Badlands National Park protects one of the most otherworldly landscapes in the Great Plains: a maze of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, spires, ravines, colorful sedimentary layers, and open mixed-grass prairie stretching across roughly 244,000 acres of southwestern South Dakota. The formations seem almost dropped into the middle of the grasslands, where soft gray, tan, red, …
May 30 2026
Arches National Park protects one of the most concentrated collections of natural stone arches anywhere on Earth. More than 2,000 documented arches rise from a high-desert landscape of red sandstone fins, balanced rocks, narrow passages, massive monoliths, pinnacles, mesas, and broad desert washes just north of Moab, Utah. Some openings are barely large enough to …
May 30 2026
Camping inside Yellowstone National Park can completely change the experience of visiting the park. Instead of beginning and ending every day with a long drive from a gateway town, you can wake beneath lodgepole pines, hear elk calling after dark, watch bison moving through nearby meadows, and reach famous destinations before many day visitors have …
May 29 2026
National Park of American Samoa protects tropical rainforest, volcanic mountains, coral reefs, secluded beaches, dramatic sea cliffs, and thousands of years of Samoan cultural history across some of the most remote islands in the National Park System. Located roughly 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaiʻi in the South Pacific, it is the only National Park Service …
May 28 2026
Acadia National Park brings mountains, forests, freshwater lakes, rocky Atlantic shoreline, islands, historic carriage roads, granite summits, and working coastal communities together within one relatively compact corner of Maine. Rather than protecting a single geological wonder, Acadia preserves an entire coastal landscape where pink granite mountains rise directly above the sea and glacial valleys hold …
