Almost 70 miles (110 km) west of Key West, past the last of the road and most of the boat traffic, seven small islands of coral and sand sit in open water. Dry Tortugas National Park is about 99 percent ocean, and its centrepiece is Fort Jefferson, one of the largest masonry forts ever built…
Torngat comes from the Inuktitut Torngait, the place of spirits, and the park protects 3,700 square miles (9,700 km²) of Inuit homeland at the northern tip of Labrador. There are no roads, no trails, no campgrounds and no cell coverage. There are fjords running deep into mountains that rise straight from the sea, small glaciers…
Forillon sits at the very tip of the Gaspe Peninsula, where the Appalachian chain finally runs out of land and drops into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The park calls it land’s end, and standing at the Cap-Gaspe lighthouse with water on three sides, it is hard to argue. Limestone cliffs, pebble beaches, seals hauled…
Twice a day the Bay of Fundy moves more water than every river on earth combined, and the shoreline at Fundy National Park rises and falls by up to 39 feet (12 m) with it. You can walk on the ocean floor in the morning and watch boats float over the same ground by afternoon….
Waterton is where the prairie stops and the mountains start, with almost nothing in between. There are no foothills here: grassland runs flat to the base of thousand-metre limestone peaks, and that abrupt collision is what makes the park look like nowhere else in the Canadian Rockies. It is also half of the world’s first…
Zion is a canyon of soaring sandstone cliffs, hanging gardens and the emerald-green Virgin River winding through it all, one of the most spectacular and beloved parks in the American Southwest. From the paved valley floor beneath 2,000-foot (600 m) walls to the vertigo-inducing spine of Angels Landing and the river-walking adventure of the Narrows,…
Yellowstone is the world’s first national park and still one of its most extraordinary, a vast volcanic plateau where half the planet’s geysers erupt, hot springs blaze in impossible colors, and one of the largest intact temperate ecosystems on Earth teems with bison, wolves, grizzlies and elk. Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,…
Wind Cave is two parks in one, below ground, one of the longest and most complex caves in the world, famous for its rare, honeycomb-like “boxwork” formations; above ground, a rolling expanse of mixed-grass prairie and ponderosa forest in the Black Hills, roamed by bison, elk and prairie dogs. Named for the wind that rushes…
White Sands is one of the world’s great natural wonders, a dazzling 275-square-mile sea of pure white gypsum sand rolling across the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico. The largest gypsum dune field on Earth, its wave after wave of blinding-white dunes create a surreal, beautiful landscape where visitors hike, sled and watch some of the…
Vuntut, “among the lakes” in Gwich’in, protects a vast, roadless expanse of the far northern Yukon, including part of the extraordinary Old Crow Flats, a wetland of thousands of lakes teeming with life. Unglaciated and ancient, rich in fossils and central to the Vuntut Gwitchin way of life and the Porcupine caribou herd, it is…
