Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is a front-row seat to the raw creation of the Earth, home to Kīlauea, one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, and Mauna Loa, the largest. Here you can walk across still-warm lava, peer into a glowing summit caldera, and watch new land being born, all within a park…
Haleakalā, “house of the sun”, rises more than 10,000 feet (3,000 m) above Maui, a dormant volcano whose vast, cinder-strewn summit basin looks more like Mars than a tropical island. From a world-famous sunrise above the clouds to the lush waterfalls and bamboo forest of the coastal Kīpahulu district, the park spans an astonishing range…
The Everglades is like nowhere else, a vast, slow-moving “River of Grass” that spreads across the southern tip of Florida in a shallow sheet, blending sawgrass marsh, mangrove coast, cypress swamp and pine rockland into a single subtropical wilderness. It is the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles coexist, and a haven for…
Biscayne is a national park you experience mostly from the water. 95% of its 173,000 acres (700 km²) lie beneath Biscayne Bay, protecting living coral reefs, clear turquoise shallows, mangrove shoreline and the northernmost Florida Keys. Just south of Miami yet a world away, it is a place for snorkelers, paddlers and boaters to explore…
Rocky Mountain National Park is the Colorado high country at its most accessible and its most sublime, a realm of glacier-carved peaks, alpine lakes and vast tundra where more than a third of the park sits above treeline. Trail Ridge Road climbs past 12,000 feet (3,700 m), letting almost anyone stand in the alpine world,…
Mesa Verde is unlike any other national park. It protects not a landscape but a civilization, the cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloan people who built elaborate stone villages into the canyon walls some 700 to 1,400 years ago. Cliff Palace, Balcony House and hundreds of other sites make this one of the most significant…
Great Sand Dunes protects the tallest dunes in North America, a 30-square-mile sea of sand piled against the base of the rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. The improbable pairing of star dunes rising 750 feet (230 m), snow-capped 13,000-foot (4,000 m) peaks behind them, and a seasonal creek that ripples across the…
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is one of the steepest, deepest and most dramatic gorges in North America, a narrow chasm so sheer and shadowed that parts of its floor see barely half an hour of sunlight a day. In places the walls plunge over 2,000 feet (600 m) to the roaring Gunnison River,…
Death Valley is a land of superlatives, the hottest, driest and lowest place in North America, where summer air temperatures have topped 130°F (54°C) and the salt flats of Badwater Basin sink to 282 feet (86 m) below sea level. Yet this vast desert is also achingly beautiful: sculpted badlands, rolling dunes, wildflower spring blooms…
Sequoia is the park of giants, home to the General Sherman Tree, the largest single-stem tree on Earth by volume, and grove after grove of the massive sequoias that give it its name. Behind the big trees rises a wilderness of the highest Sierra Nevada, including Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48….
