What makes for a perfect day in a national park? For some it might be rafting Class IV rapids on Colorado’s Gunnison River snaking between the two-thousand–foot cliffs of Black Canyon, then camping on sandbanks under the stars.
For others: snorkeling the reefs of Biscayne Bay south of Miami and watching the sunrise sparkle across the Atlantic from a sailboat bobbing on the waters.
Or maybe it’s a simple day hike through the brilliant colors and weirdly eroded landscape of a Utah canyon in Capitol Reef, deep in the heart of bandit country, scaring up plenty of quail and lizards but meeting only five other hikers the entire day.
“Somebody looked at our aerial footage of Capitol Reef and said it was computer generated,” said Ken Burns, creator of the popular documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. “They can’t believe there is a place in the United States that looks like that.”
Burns is far from the first to sing the praises of these inspirational but little-known national parks.
“I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” said Theodore Roosevelt of his frontier ranches now incorporated into the park that bears his name. Buffalo, bighorn sheep, and wild horses still roam these Dakota badlands just as they did in Teddy’s day.
There are 58 national parks, and while the marquee ones—Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite—are well worth visiting, they also draw enormous crowds.
An average of 26,542 people visit Yellowstone on a typical July day. That’s more than twice as many visitors than the high Nevada desert of Great Basin National Park sees in the entire month of July—and nearly twice as many as Michigan’s gloriously isolated Isle Royale National Park gets in the entire year.
Barely 200 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains—which, with more than 9 million annual visitors, ranks as the nation’s most popular park—lies Congaree National Park, where the total visitorship for all of 2008 didn’t quite break 105,000—less than a third of what the Smokies saw in its slowest month (January) that year.
What those lucky 105,000 visitors experienced, though, was a pristine tract of old-growth forest creating an unbroken hardwood canopy that has survived virtually unchanged since the days before Columbus.
That’s what guaranteed Congaree, alongside all the other un-famous parks mentioned above, a place among the top 10 unsung parks in the country.
The parks on this list may be little known, but they are singularly spectacular. They incorporate the world’s third biggest coral reef (Biscayne) and the oldest living things on earth (Great Basin), the highest concentration of glaciers in the lower 48 states (North Cascades) and the largest park in the country (Wrangell-St. Elias).
“I have been in wilderness all around the world, but Wrangell St-Elias was something new,” said Stewart Lee, a 35-year veteran Boy Scouts leader from Pennsylvania who has visited all but a handful of the national parks—including many on this list. Even his deep experience with and passion for the outdoors couldn’t prepare him for his first visit to the 13.2 million–acre Alaskan park in 2008. “It was like going back to the period of discovery, well before industrialization or even civilization.”
He talked about spotting a dozen grizzlies from a four-seat prop plane out of Nabesna. He waxed poetic about the quality of the summer light on the mountains while hiking across the Root Glacier. He described watching native fishermen pull salmon from traditional fishing weirs along a braided stream then setting up camp under a phalanx of 16,000-foot mountains.
“For someone who’s spent as much of his life in the outdoors as I have,” said Lee, “I suddenly felt like a babe in the woods.”
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Biscayne National Park, FL
Few people realize there’s a national park at Miami’s doorstep—possibly because 95% of it is underwater. Save for 30 islets, like Boca Chita and Elliott Key, and a mangrove forest fringe on the mainland, Biscayne is 173,000 acres of Caribbean-clear waters washing over the sea-grass shallows of Biscayne Bay and the world’s third largest coral reef.
Don’t miss: Some of the best snorkeling and scuba diving in the United States. The shallows swim with manatees and loggerhead turtles; the reefs swarm with more than 200 species—colorful coral-nibblers, toothy silver barracuda, 500-pound goliath groupers, and sea-green moray eels. (Park concessionaire: www.biscayneunderwater.com).
Cool fact: There are 72 shipwrecks in the park. Six are part of a Maritime Heritage Trail opening later this year. The 112-foot schooner Mandalay (a posh Windjammer cruiser sunk in 1966) is shallow enough for snorkelers.
More: www.nps.gov/bisc
Congaree National Park, SC
Congaree is a slice of the bayou just outside Columbia, South Carolina, 27,000 acres of floodplain (the polite word for “swamp”) set aside to preserve the largest remaining tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the United States.
Don’t miss: Free, ranger-guided weekend canoe tours on Cedar Creek, which flows slowly around the knuckles of ancient bald cypress and tupelo garlanded with Spanish moss.
Cool fact: This is serious forest, including some of the tallest trees (the loblolly pines can reach nearly 170 feet) in the Eastern United States, forming one of the highest natural canopies in the world.
More: www.nps.gov/cosw
Isle Royale National Park, MI
Who would’ve guessed the deepest heart of true wilderness was in Michigan? This gorgeous park is the largest island in the world’s largest fresh water body, Lake Superior—just offshore from Thunder Bay, Canada, but technically still in U.S. territory—yet ranks as the fifth least visited park in the nation (and the other four languish in the hinterlands of Alaska and American Samoa). It’s accessible only by boat (from Houghton, MI, Cooper Harbor, MI, or Grand Portage MN) or seaplane (from Houghton), and is one of few National Parks to close in winter (Nov 1–Apr 16).
Don’t miss: A boat tour around some of the park’s 400 satellite islands, and a backcountry camping trip. Though its sees barely 14,000 visitors annually, Isle Royale has the highest backcountry use of any national park.
Cool fact: The isolation makes this a unique bio-preserve. Isle Royale has freshwater clams, sponges, snails, and insects in sizes and densities not seen elsewhere since the 1800s (bring DEET), and is the only place where moose and wolves coexist without bears to balance atop the predator pole.
More info: www.nps.gov/isro
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, CO
The Gunnison thunders down the steepest mountain descent of any river in the United States through one of the most spectacular and deepest canyons in the country. The North Rim drive is far less trafficked than the South Rim—and has a better campground, right at the lip of a nearly 2,000-foot plunge into the gorge.
Don’t miss: Rafting the Gunny itself—a raging river of Class III to IV rapids sluicing though a canyon that’s often only 40 feet wide between mighty rock walls rising hundreds of feet—in the adjacent Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area (for more info and a list of outfitters: www.blm.gov/co/st/en/nca/ggnca.html).
Cool fact: Stack the Empire State Building atop the Willis Tower (a.k.a. Sears Tower) and you’d still be two stories short of the canyon rim at Warner Point, 2,722 feet above the river.
More: www.nps.gov/blca
Theodore Roosevelt National Park, ND
This landscape of mythic western history, where Sitting Bull fought and General Custer hounded the Sioux in the month before the Battle of Little Bighorn, has the same eerily eroded badlands, shaggy buffalo, and bighorn sheep that draw crowds to Badlands National Park in South Dakota—but with half the visitors. Also: wild horses.
Don’t miss: A horseback ride through the hills and badlands, splashing across the Little Missouri River (official outfitter: Peaceful Valley Ranch, home.ctctel.com/peacefulvalley).
Cool fact: In 1883, a 25-year-old politician from back East arrived in these parts to hunt buffalo. He fell in love with the badlands, started the first of several ranches (now part of the park), and began his extreme image makeover from scrawny New Yorker to strapping western adventurer (and future president) Teddy Roosevelt.
More info: www.nps.gov/thro
Capitol Reef National Park, UT
Deep in the heart of Utah’s frontier-era bandit country, Capitol Reef was established around a massive, 100-mile-long wrinkle in the earth’s crust called the Waterpocket Fold (the “reef” in the park name). This awesome and colorful mountainous layer cake showcases 10,000 feet—and 270 million years—of sedimentary history.
Don’t miss: The spectacular drive to the park from the west along Rte. 12, and the 1,400-year-old Indian petroglyphs on the roadside cliffs above the orchards of Fruita, a historic hamlet where mule deer graze under the shade of cottonwoods along the Fremont River (nominal fee for picking fruit).
Cool fact: The most popular day hike—”Capitol Gorge” down a twisting dry-wash canyon, past a majestic dome-like outcropping (the “Capitol” in the park’s name), to a series of natural water cisterns—takes you through the hills that were once the hideout of Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch.
More info: www.nps.gov/care
Great Basin National Park, NV
The oldest living thing ever recorded—a bristlecone pine at least 5,000 years old—was discovered in this remote desert of east-central Nevada in 1964…and promptly chopped down for study. (We have matured. The new oldest thing—another bristlecone, 4,700 years old and nicknamed Methuselah—grows at an scrupulously undisclosed location in the nearby White Mountains of California.) That sad case aside, the park still has plenty of groves of gnarled bristlecone clocking in at more than 4,000 years old (the needles alone can be 25–40 years old) as well as prickly pear, aspen, sagebrush, jackrabbits, mountain lions, and alpine wildflowers spread over 77,000 acres that range from the basin floor at 5,000 feet above sea level to peaks topping 13,000 feet.
Don’t miss: The glittering marble caverns of Lehman Caves, and the 3.4-mile round-trip hike to the Lexington Arch, a rare aboveground limestone arch that, at six stories, is one of the largest in the United States.
Cool fact: Remoteness has its benefits. With 99% of Americans living in areas considered to be light polluted (and two-thirds unable to see the Milky Way from their homes), the skies over isolated Great Basin rank among the darkest in the lower 48 states, providing some of the best stargazing in the nation.
More info: www.nps.gov/grba
North Cascades National Park, WA
North Cascades—just 50 miles from Bellingham, hard against the Canadian border—is a picture-postcard Pacific Northwest landscape of dark, sawtooth mountains slung with hammocks of snow. More than 300 glaciers feed some of the country’s highest waterfalls, and black bear, wolves, moose, lynx, wolverines, and the occasional grizzly prowl the park’s old-growth forests.
Don’t miss: A hike on the nearly 400 miles of trails—perhaps the stiff, 12-mile round-trip Cascade Pass-Sahale Arm Trail winding through wildflower fields past waterfalls and glaciers to sweeping panoramas over the mountains and some of the park’s 127 alpine lakes.
Cool facts: North Cascades is one of the snowiest places on Earth, and contains more than half the glaciers in the lower 48 states—but somehow also manages to have the highest number of recorded plant species of any national park in the country.
More info: www.nps.gov/noca
Channel Islands National Park, CA
Just offshore from the glamour of Hollywood, highways of Los Angeles, and Sideways vineyards of Santa Barbara, lie the Channel Islands, five of which are protected as a National Park. Plenty of school groups hit the visitors’ centers in Ventura and Santa Barbara, but fewer than 30,000 people actually leave the mainland to explore the islands themselves, where 175 miles of undeveloped, untrammeled shores make pristine breeding grounds for harbor seals and sea lions.
Don’t miss: A boat tour during whale migrations (blue and humpback in summer, gray from late December to mid-March), and a hike along the Anacapa Loop trail, an easy 1.5-mile figure eight to the view from aptly-named Inspiration Point along the island’s dramatic ridge line: a buckled dragon’s back snaking through the water and plunging steeply down into the Pacific on both sides.
Cool fact: Among the more than 2,000 species of plant and animal on these islands are 145 found nowhere else in the world, including 23 species of animal, from the island fox to the San Miguel Island song sparrow (the islands were also once home to the delightfully named “pygmy mammoth,” which grew only 4.5 to 7 feet tall). The Channel Islands also have one of the best-preserved archeological records on the Pacific coast documenting 10,000 years of continuous human habitation, including the oldest human remains ever found in North America, the Arlington Springs Woman, who died some 13,000 years ago.
More info: www.nps.gov/chis
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, AK
This vast stretch of mountainous Alaskan wilderness is the largest park in the United States by an enormous margin. At 13.2 million acres, it’s six times the size of Yellowstone and larger than nine U.S. states—yet it has only two roads, together barely totaling 105 miles. This park defines backcountry. A full 9.6 million acres of it is designated wilderness (forming 10% of the entire National Wilderness Preservation System) and when paired up with its contiguous neighbor parks (Glacier Bay in the United States, and Kluane and Tatshenshini-Alsek in Canada), it forms the world’s largest international protected area, 24 million acres of parkland that have been proclaimed a U.N. World Heritage Site.
Don’t miss: A tour of the historic Kennecott copper mine buildings, followed by lunch at the New Golden Saloon in the funky former boomtown of McCarthy (pop: 42). More intrepid visitors can raft the Copper River (www.copperoar.com or www.alaskariverwrangellers.com) or enjoy the world-class fishing of Yakutat, a Tlingit village accessible only by boat or air.
Cool facts: The park has North America’s highest concentration of glaciers and encompasses nine of the 16 tallest mountains in the United States—including the second tallest, the 18,008-foot Mt. St. Elias. The park’s other namesake, the 14,163-foot Mt. Wrangell, is one of the world’s largest active volcanoes; on clear days, you can see it smoking.
More info: www.nps.gov/wrst
