Virgin Islands National Park cloaks roughly two-thirds of the island of St. John in the Caribbean, a tropical paradise of powder-white beaches, turquoise bays, coral reefs and forested hills. Protecting both a stunning marine world and the historic landscape of sugar plantations and ancient petroglyphs, it offers world-class snorkeling and hiking in one of the…
Ukkusiksalik surrounds Wager Bay, a great saltwater inlet reaching deep into the tundra of the Kivalliq region of Nunavut. A remote Arctic wilderness rich in wildlife, especially a high density of polar bears, and dotted with more than 500 archaeological sites recording centuries of Inuit life, it offers a rare, guided window into a living…
Tuktut Nogait, “young caribou” in Inuvialuktun, protects the calving grounds of the Bluenose West caribou herd on the tundra of the northwestern Arctic. A roadless wilderness of rolling barrens cut by dramatic river canyons and waterfalls, above the Arctic Circle near the community of Paulatuk, it is one of Canada’s least-visited parks, offering pure, remote…
Thousand Islands National Park scatters across the storied St. Lawrence River, where the ancient granite of the Frontenac Arch breaks the water into a maze of pine-clad islands. Canada’s smallest national park by land, it is a paddler’s paradise of granite-and-pine islets, hidden coves and rich biodiversity, easily reached yet feeling a world away among…
Theodore Roosevelt National Park preserves the rugged badlands of western North Dakota that shaped the conservation ethic of the president it honors, who ranched here in the 1880s. A striking landscape of banded buttes and coulees carved by the Little Missouri River, roamed by bison, wild horses and prairie dogs, it is the wild heart…
Thaidene Nëné, “Land of the Ancestors” in Denesǫłıné, protects a magnificent transition zone at the east arm of Great Slave Lake, where the northern boreal forest gives way to the open tundra of the Barrenlands. Co-managed with the Łutsël K’e Dene, it is a vast, pristine wilderness of deep clear lakes, waterfalls and wildlife, and…
Terra Nova is the easternmost national park in Canada, a gentle, accessible slice of Newfoundland’s boreal coast where sheltered fjords and island-dotted sounds meet rolling forest, bog and pond. Easily reached right off the Trans-Canada Highway, it offers a welcoming introduction to the island’s wild character, from paddling quiet inlets to spotting icebergs and whales…
Sirmilik, “place of glaciers”, is a breathtaking High Arctic park spanning northern Baffin Island and Bylot Island in Nunavut. A landscape of glaciers, jagged red-and-black peaks, and sea-ice-fringed fjords, it hosts spectacular seabird colonies and abundant marine mammals, offering some of the most dramatic Arctic scenery and wildlife in Canada to those who reach it…
Shenandoah is a long, green ribbon of the Blue Ridge Mountains just west of Washington, DC, a park defined by the 105-mile (169 km) Skyline Drive that rides its crest, past overlook after overlook of the rolling Virginia Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley. Cascading waterfalls, wildflower-filled hollows, abundant black bears and blazing fall color make…
Sable Island is a thin crescent of windswept sand adrift in the North Atlantic, some 190 miles (300 km) from the Nova Scotia coast, a place of legend known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” for its centuries of shipwrecks. Today it is famous for its herd of wild horses roaming the dunes, vast grey-seal…
