Gwaii Haanas, at the wild southern tip of Haida Gwaii, is one of the most remote and culturally profound places in the national park system, a mist-wrapped realm of temperate rainforest, storm-battered coast and ancient Haida village sites. Jointly managed by Parks Canada and the Haida Nation, it protects everything from mountaintop to sea floor,…
Gulf Islands National Park Reserve protects a scattered archipelago in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the mainland, a mosaic of forested islets, sandstone shorelines, quiet coves and one of Canada’s rarest ecosystems, the coastal Douglas-fir. It is a paddler’s and boater’s park, best explored by kayak among seals, eagles and the warm, sun-dappled…
Glacier National Park in British Columbia is the wild, snowy heart of the Columbia Mountains, straddling the Trans-Canada Highway at Rogers Pass. It is a park of deep rainforest valleys, more than 130 glaciers and some of the most active avalanche terrain in North America, a place of serious mountain beauty that demands equally serious…
Hot Springs is the national park system’s most unusual member, a park woven into a working town, built around the 143°F (62°C) thermal waters that have drawn people to bathe here for centuries. Its centerpiece is the elegant Bathhouse Row, backed by forested hills laced with quiet trails, making it a rare place where a…
Saguaro National Park guards the giant cactus that has become the emblem of the American West, the towering, many-armed saguaro that grows only in the Sonoran Desert. Split into two districts on either side of Tucson, the park pairs easy cactus-forest drives and walks with a surprisingly rugged high country that climbs from desert floor…
Petrified Forest protects one of the world’s largest and most colorful concentrations of petrified wood, 200-million-year-old logs turned to quartz, scattered across the banded badlands of Arizona’s Painted Desert. Compact and largely explored from a single scenic road, it rewards the curious with fossils, ancient petroglyphs and a stretch of historic Route 66, all in…
The Grand Canyon is one of the world’s great landscapes, a mile-deep, 277-river-mile gorge that the Colorado River has carved through nearly two billion years of rock. It is also deceptively demanding: the same rim views that draw more than four million visitors a year sit above an inner canyon where summer temperatures top 100°F…
The National Park of American Samoa is the only U.S. national park south of the equator, a scatter of paleotropical rainforest, coral reef and volcanic coastline across three remote South Pacific islands. Unusually, the land isn’t owned by the federal government; it is leased from the Samoan villages who have lived here for 3,000 years,…
Wood Buffalo is Canada’s largest national park and the world’s largest Dark Sky Preserve, more than 17,000 square miles (44,000 km²) of boreal wilderness straddling northeastern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories. Established in 1922 to protect free-roaming bison, it now safeguards half the world’s wood bison, the only natural nesting grounds of the whooping…
Jasper is the wild heart of the Canadian Rockies, at 4,197 square miles (10,870 km²), the largest national park in the range, and one of the world’s great dark-sky preserves. Towering peaks, more than 250 glaciers, over 5,000 lakes and ponds, and 1,550 miles (2,500 km) of trail make it a place to lose yourself…
