141 Fun Facts About National Park

Which U.S. state contains the highest number of national parks?

California has nine national parks, one more than Alaska, though Alaska's are far bigger: the four largest parks in the country are all there.

Africa's highest mountain, a snow-capped volcano, gives its name to which national park?

Kilimanjaro National Park, created in 1973, covers the 5,895-metre volcano above its tree line; the famous summit ice has shrunk by roughly four-fifths since 1912.

Banff, proclaimed in 1885, was the first national park of which country?

Canada's Banff National Park began in 1885 as the Banff Hot Springs Reserve, a 26-square-kilometre tract around the Cave and Basin springs, after rival claims to the springs.

More than a million of which animal make up the bulk of the Serengeti's great migration?

Wildebeest, well over a million of them, circle the Serengeti and Kenya's Masai Mara each year, following the rains to fresh grass, with about a quarter of a million zebra alongside.

Kruger, spanning Limpopo and Mpumalanga, became the first national park of which country in 1926?

South Africa made Kruger its first national park in 1926 by merging two game reserves; the older was proclaimed in 1898 under President Paul Kruger to stop hunters wiping out the game.

The world's largest national park covers the north-east of which island?

Greenland's north-east is a national park of about 972,000 square kilometres, bigger than all but some thirty countries, yet it has no permanent residents.

The Galapagos Islands are protected as the first national park of which country?

Ecuador declared the Galápagos its first national park in 1959, the centenary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, protecting about 97 percent of the islands' land.

Indonesia founded a Lesser Sunda national park in 1980 to protect which reptile?

The Komodo dragon, the world's largest lizard, reached Western science only in the early 1910s, after a Dutch colonial officer followed up rumours of a 'land crocodile' on the island.

Tongariro, whose peaks were conveyed to the Crown in 1887, is the oldest national park in which country?

Tongariro was New Zealand's first national park: Ngāti Tūwharetoa chief Te Heuheu Tūkino IV gifted the sacred peaks to the Crown in 1887, and the Tongariro National Park Act passed in 1894.

Which country is home to the UNESCO-listed Plitvice Lakes national park?

Croatia's Plitvice Lakes are sixteen lakes held back by natural dams of porous rock; mosses and algae trap minerals from the water to build it, so the barriers are still growing today.

The second US national park, created in 1875 and later handed to Michigan, covered much of which island?

Mackinac Island's park lasted twenty years, with soldiers from its fort acting as caretakers; when the Army closed the fort in 1895, the land became Michigan's first state park.

Australia's first national park, proclaimed near Sydney in 1879, got what name in 1955?

Royal National Park was simply called 'National Park' until 1955, when it was renamed after Queen Elizabeth II passed through by train on her 1954 tour of Australia.

Which Nordic country created Europe's first national parks, nine at once, in 1909?

Sweden opened nine parks at once in 1909, Europe's first; one of them, Stora Sjöfallet, soon lost most of its great waterfall when the government allowed a hydropower scheme.

Virunga, founded in 1925 as Africa's first national park, lies in which country?

DR Congo's Virunga began as Albert National Park after American naturalist Carl Akeley, who had shot gorillas there for a museum, urged Belgium's King Albert I to protect them instead.

The United Kingdom's first national park, designated in 1951, was which?

The Peak District was designated in April 1951, nineteen years after ramblers staged a mass trespass on the private moorland of Kinder Scout to demand the right to walk there.

Which English poet called the Lake District a 'sort of national property' in 1810?

William Wordsworth wrote that everyone 'who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy' had a right to the Lakes, yet in the 1840s he campaigned against the railway that would bring crowds to Windermere.

Which wartime president signed the grant that first protected Yosemite Valley as a public park?

Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant on 30 June 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, entrusting the valley to the state of California, which handed it back to federal control in 1906.

Who is known as the 'Father of the National Parks' for his work in Yosemite?

John Muir's articles helped make Yosemite a national park in 1890; in 1903 he took the sitting president camping in its backcountry and persuaded him the valley needed federal protection too.

Nahuel Huapi, grown from land explorer Francisco 'Perito' Moreno donated in 1903, is the oldest national park in which country?

Argentina had rewarded Moreno with land around the Patagonian lake for his frontier surveys; in 1903 he gave part of it back to become a park, citing the example of the United States.

New River Gorge, the newest US national park as of 2025, lies in which state?

West Virginia's New River Gorge became a national park and preserve in December 2020; despite its name, the New River is considered one of the oldest rivers in North America.

The word Yosemite comes from a Miwok term meaning what?

'They are killers' (yohhe'meti) was what neighbouring Miwok called the valley's Ahwahneechee people; the name was long confused with a similar Miwok word for grizzly bear.

Which president signed the act making the Grand Canyon a national park in 1919?

Woodrow Wilson signed the Grand Canyon National Park Act on 26 February 1919, ending a wait of nearly four decades: park bills had been failing in Congress since 1882.

Kruger National Park's long eastern boundary is also an international border with which country?

Mozambique's Limpopo National Park was linked to Kruger in a cross-border peace park in 2002; fences began to come down, and elephants were moved across to restock land emptied by war.

Which Fiordland bird, presumed extinct, was rediscovered in the Murchison Mountains in 1948?

The takahē had gone unseen since 1898 when Geoffrey Orbell, an Invercargill doctor leading a planned search, found the last wild population in a valley above Lake Te Anau.

Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal, established in 1976, tops out at the summit of which peak?

Mount Everest is Sagarmatha in Nepali; the park climbs from 2,845 metres to the 8,848-metre summit and stops there, because the border with China crosses the very top.

Which country's park lies directly across the river from Argentina's Iguazú National Park?

Brazil's Iguaçu National Park, spelled the Portuguese way, faces Argentina's across the river; most of the falls are on the Argentine side, though the river runs through Brazil for most of its course.

Chitwan, Nepal's first national park, was created mainly to save which animal?

The one-horned rhinoceros had crashed from about 800 animals in Chitwan in 1950 to 95 by the late 1960s as settlers cleared the valley and poachers moved in, so Nepal made it a park.

Which Northern Territory park, about the size of Wales, was a filming location for Crocodile Dundee?

Kakadu is mostly Aboriginal land, leased back by its traditional owners so that it can be run as a national park, and they manage it jointly with Parks Australia.

Which uranium mine, shut down in January 2021, is surrounded by a Northern Territory national park?

The Ranger mine near Jabiru processed its last ore in January 2021 after four decades; its Mirarr traditional owners had told the operator in 2015 that they would not support any extension.

Under what name did President Taft protect the future Zion National Park as a monument in 1909?

Mukuntuweap, thought to be the canyon's Paiute name, lasted nine years: in 1918 the monument was renamed Zion, partly from a belief that visitors would skip a place they could not pronounce.

Which US national park drew more than 12 million visits in 2024, the most of any?

Great Smoky Mountains has led the visitor count every year since 1944 and drew more than double the Grand Canyon's total in 2024, though it lies in the eastern mountains, far from the famous parks of the West.

Glacier (Montana) and Waterton Lakes (Alberta) were together designated the world's first what, in 1932?

International Peace Park status came in 1932 after Rotary clubs from Alberta and Montana met at Waterton's Prince of Wales Hotel and lobbied both governments to join the two parks.

Glacier National Park's glaciers reached their greatest recent extent around 1850, at the end of which cool period?

The Little Ice Age ended around 1850 and the park's ice has been shrinking since: between 1966 and 2015 every named glacier got smaller, some by more than 80 percent.

What is the Welsh name of Snowdonia National Park?

Eryri is the park and Yr Wyddfa the mountain Snowdon; in November 2022 the park authority announced it would use only the Welsh names, even when writing in English.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, chartered by Congress in 1934, straddles which two states?

Tennessee and North Carolina each put up $2 million in the late 1920s to buy the land from its private owners, and many mountain families had to leave their homes when the park was created.

Which peak, the highest in the contiguous United States, lies in Sequoia National Park?

Mount Whitney, 14,505 feet, stands on Sequoia National Park's eastern boundary; the stone hut on its summit was built in 1909 with Smithsonian money so astronomers could look for water on Mars.

Hale Tharp, the first non-Native settler in today's Sequoia National Park, made his summer cabin from what?

A hollow fallen log, a giant sequoia burned out by fire for most of its length, became Tharp's cabin once it had a door, a window and a fireplace; it still lies in the Giant Forest.

The oldest legally protected areas in the world include a 1776 forest reserve on which Caribbean island?

The Tobago Main Ridge Forest Reserve was set aside to protect farmland from drought, not for recreation.

Which US president signed the act creating Yellowstone National Park in 1872?

Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act on 1 March 1872, passed by the 42nd Congress after the Hayden Survey's reports, photographs and paintings of the region.

Which arm of the US government ran Yellowstone from 1886 until the Park Service took over?

The U.S. Army sent cavalry into Yellowstone in 1886 because its civilian managers had neither the money nor the legal power to stop poachers and vandals; soldiers stayed until 1918.

Yellowstone lies mostly in which US state?

Wyoming holds about 96 percent of Yellowstone, with slivers in Montana and Idaho; when the park was created in 1872 all three were still territories, years away from statehood.

Nathaniel Langford, who helped name Old Faithful in 1870, later held which unpaid post at Yellowstone?

Superintendent Langford was the park's first, serving from 1872 to 1877 with no staff or budget; he had to earn his living elsewhere and entered the park only twice in those five years.

Which Yellowstone geyser, far taller than Old Faithful, is the tallest active geyser in the world?

Steamboat Geyser can hurl water more than 300 feet but keeps no schedule: it slept from 1911 to 1961, then erupted a record 48 times in both 2019 and 2020.

Yellowstone's geysers owe their name to a famous spouting spring in which country?

Iceland's Geysir, whose name comes from a verb meaning 'to gush', gave English the word; its own eruptions are now infrequent, while its neighbour Strokkur goes off every few minutes.

Yellowstone's 308-foot Lower Falls is taller than which famous waterfall, though it carries far less water?

Niagara Falls drops under 200 feet, but its Horseshoe crest is about 2,600 feet wide, while the Yellowstone River is only some 70 feet across where it goes over the brink.

Which tree, whose sealed cones open in fire, reseeded Yellowstone after the 1988 blazes?

Lodgepole pine is thin-barked, so the 1988 fires, which reached 36 percent of the park, killed many of the trees; the same heat opened their cones and sowed the next forest.

The 1904 Old Faithful Inn is among the world's largest buildings made of what?

Logs and local stone went up over the winter of 1903–04 to architect Robert Reamer's design; in 1988 firefighters kept its roof wet as a firestorm swept past, and the inn survived.

Which cartoon bear's home, 'Jellystone', was based on Yellowstone?

Yogi Bear first appeared in 1958 as a supporting act on The Huckleberry Hound Show, raiding picnic baskets in Jellystone Park; by January 1961 he had been given a series of his own.

Which Indiana senator and future president first proposed a Grand Canyon national park?

Benjamin Harrison's 1882 bill failed, as did his retries in 1883 and 1886; once president, he protected the canyon anyway by declaring it a forest reserve in 1893.

Which president proclaimed the Grand Canyon a national monument in 1908?

Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law written mainly to protect ancient ruins, because a monument, unlike a national park, needed no vote in Congress.

The Grand Canyon is a gorge carved by which river?

The Colorado River is thought to have begun carving the Grand Canyon five to six million years ago; it has cut about a mile down, exposing rocks at the bottom that are nearly two billion years old.

Who led the first known boat expedition through the Grand Canyon?

John Wesley Powell, who lost his right arm at Shiloh, set out in 1869 in a party of ten in four wooden boats; only six finished, and three who hiked out near the end were never seen again.

Zion Canyon's reddish walls are cut from which sandstone by the Virgin River?

Navajo Sandstone is the remains of a vast sand sea: dunes that covered the region about 180 million years ago hardened into cliffs over 2,000 feet thick at Zion.

Which small town is the main gateway to Zion National Park?

Springdale sits at the park's South Entrance, beside Zion Canyon; traffic into the narrow canyon grew so heavy that since 2000 visitors have ridden shuttle buses there for much of the year.

Which Zion National Park trail ends on a knife-edge rock spine where hikers grip bolted chains above sheer drops?

Angels Landing's final half-mile follows a chain-lined ridge; queues on the chains grew so long that since 2022 hikers have needed a permit to go beyond Scout Lookout.

Which Yosemite wall did Alex Honnold climb without ropes for the film Free Solo?

El Capitan rises about 3,000 feet; in 2017 Honnold topped out in 3 hours 56 minutes, on a wall whose first ascent in 1958 took 47 days of siege climbing.

Which volunteer force entered Yosemite Valley in 1851 while pursuing the Ahwahneechee people?

The Mariposa Battalion, a state militia raised under James Savage, captured Chief Tenaya and his people; its members' accounts are the first well-documented reports of outsiders entering the valley.

Which Yosemite dome, once called 'perfectly inaccessible', has a cable route to its summit?

Half Dome was judged never to be 'trodden by human foot' until George Anderson drilled bolts up it in 1875; steel cables have let hikers follow his line since 1919.

Which book and film tells of Christopher McCandless, who died in 1992 in an abandoned bus near Denali?

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's 1996 book, grew out of a magazine article; the bus on the Stampede Trail became a shrine for visitors, and in 2020 it was moved to a university museum in Fairbanks.

What is the longest glacier in Denali National Park?

The Kahiltna Glacier, 44 miles long, is the longest in the whole Alaska Range; climbers bound for North America's highest summit fly in to a seasonal airstrip and base camp on its ice.

Which nonnative snake, confirmed as breeding in the Everglades in 2000, preys heavily on its mammals?

Burmese pythons, descended from escaped or released pets, were first seen in the park in the 1990s; studies link them to steep declines in its raccoons, opossums, bobcats and rabbits.

The Everglades' 'river of grass' flows out of which lake toward Florida Bay?

Lake Okeechobee's overflow once spread south in a slow sheet of water 60 miles wide; canals later diverted so much of it that Congress approved a vast restoration plan in 2000.

Which postwar president dedicated Everglades National Park?

Harry Truman dedicated the park on 6 December 1947, the year Marjory Stoneman Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass, her case that the so-called swamp was a river worth protecting.

The endangered Florida panther of the Everglades is a population of which widespread American cat?

Cougar and puma are two names for the same species; Florida's panthers had dwindled to 20 or 30 animals when eight females from Texas were released in 1995 to refresh the inbred population.

How far below sea level is Badwater Basin in Death Valley, the lowest point in North America?

Badwater Basin lies 282 feet below sea level; stories say it got its name when an early surveyor's mule refused to drink from the spring-fed pool beside today's boardwalk.

Which aptly named Death Valley spot logged the world-record 134 °F?

Furnace Creek's 1913 reading regained the world record in 2012, when the World Meteorological Organization threw out a higher 1922 figure from Libya, probably an inexperienced observer's misreading.

Which mineral was hauled out of Death Valley by the famous twenty-mule teams?

Borax from the Harmony works was hauled 165 miles across the desert to the railhead at Mojave; the famous 'twenty-mule teams' were in fact eighteen mules and two horses.

The lost travellers who named Death Valley, only one of whom died there, were hurrying toward what?

Gold fields drew the party onto what they thought was a shortcut in the 1849 rush; as the survivors climbed out, one of them is said to have looked back and said, 'Goodbye, Death Valley.'

Which Maine mountain in Acadia is the tallest on the US Atlantic coast?

Cadillac Mountain, 1,530 feet, sees the first sunrise in the continental US for part of the year; cars now need a reservation to drive its summit road from late May to late October.

Who financed Acadia's historic carriage road system, closed to motor vehicles?

John D. Rockefeller Jr., heir to the Standard Oil fortune, built the roads from 1913 to 1940 because he wanted to drive horse-drawn carriages through the island free of motor cars.

Under what Frenchman's name did Acadia become a national park in 1919, a decade before its renaming?

Lafayette National Park was renamed in 1929 to secure a gift of land on the Schoodic Peninsula: the donor's heirs, admirers of all things English, are said to have balked at the French general's name.

About how many natural stone arches have been documented in Arches National Park?

About 2,000: the park lists more than 2,000 arches, the densest concentration in the world, because its sandstone cracked into rows of thin fins that erosion then wears through.

Arches National Park's entrance lies just north of which Utah town?

Moab is the nearest town to the park entrance; the arches themselves formed above a buried salt bed, which bulged upward and cracked the sandstone that erosion later pierced.

Which landmark arch, pictured on its state's license plates, did Dean Potter free-solo in 2006, prompting a park climbing ban?

Delicate Arch: the rules of the day turned out not to forbid Potter's climb in enforceable words, so the park soon rewrote them to ban climbing on any arch named on official maps.

Which river's two dams, removed in 2011–14, restored salmon runs into Olympic National Park?

The Elwha's lower dam went up without the fish passage that Washington state law required, and the hatchery offered in its place was abandoned in 1922, so salmon stayed shut out of the upper river for a century.

Which native elk does Olympic National Park exist partly to protect?

Roosevelt elk, the largest elk in North America, were the reason Mount Olympus was first set aside in 1909, to preserve the habitat of their herds; the park now holds the Pacific Northwest's largest wild herd.

Which river did Ansel Adams photograph winding below the Tetons in a famous 1942 image?

Snake River: Adams took The Tetons and the Snake River for an Interior Department mural commission; the Second World War halted the murals for good, but the photographs survived in the National Archives.

What was the 1943 monument later merged into Grand Teton National Park called?

Jackson Hole National Monument was proclaimed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943; Congress voted to abolish it the next year, but he vetoed the bill, and in 1950 it was merged into an enlarged Grand Teton National Park.

Which road corridor links Grand Teton National Park to Yellowstone, just to its north?

Rockefeller Memorial Parkway, a 24,000-acre corridor set aside by Congress in 1972, joins the two parks, so the drive from the Tetons to Yellowstone's south gate never leaves Park Service land.

Which Rocky Mountain National Park road climbs across the alpine tundra to a high point of 12,183 feet?

Trail Ridge Road climbs past the treeline near 11,500 feet to crest at 12,183 feet; winter snow is so deep that its upper section stays closed from about October to May.

What is the highest peak in Rocky Mountain National Park?

Longs Peak towers above every other summit in the park; its popular Keyhole Route is a climb, not a hike, crossing narrow ledges where the Park Service warns an unroped fall would likely be fatal.

Taliesin Associated Architects, designers of Rocky Mountain National Park's headquarters, carried on which architect's practice?

Frank Lloyd Wright's apprentices founded the firm after his death in 1959; their Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, built of weathering steel, stone and glass in 1967, is now a National Historic Landmark.

Bryce Canyon is famous for spire-shaped rock formations called what?

Bryce's hoodoos, spires eroded from the Claron Formation by frost wedging, fill natural amphitheaters cut into the Paunsaugunt Plateau; despite its name Bryce is not a canyon.

Bryce Canyon, named for a pioneer who homesteaded below it, lies in which state?

Utah: Ebenezer Bryce settled below the cliffs in the mid-1870s and built a road into them to haul out timber; neighbours called the amphitheater where it ended Bryce's Canyon, and the name outlasted his move away in 1880.

Joshua Tree National Park is slightly larger than which US state?

Rhode Island is slightly smaller than the 795,000-acre park, protected in 1936 after Pasadena socialite Minerva Hoyt campaigned against collectors who were digging up and burning its desert plants.

The Joshua tree, namesake of a California national park, is a species of which plant genus?

Yucca: the Joshua tree is Yucca brevifolia, and it relies on a single pollinator, the yucca moth, which carries pollen between flowers while laying eggs inside them; its larvae then eat some of the seeds.

The Chisos range rises from the Chihuahuan Desert at the heart of which Texas national park?

Big Bend holds the whole Chisos range, which tops out at Emory Peak, 7,825 feet; its cool wooded heights are the one corner of the United States that the Colima warbler, a Mexican songbird, reaches.

Big Bend National Park is named for a bend in which river?

The Rio Grande swings from southeast to northeast around the park, the 'big bend'; at Boquillas Crossing visitors can still ride a rowboat across it to a Mexican village through an official port of entry.

Unlike most limestone caves, Carlsbad Caverns was dissolved by which acid?

Sulfuric acid: hydrogen sulfide rising from deep oil deposits met oxygen in the groundwater and turned into an acid far more aggressive than the weak carbonic acid in rainwater that carves most limestone caves.

Carlsbad Caverns sits in which mountain range of southeastern New Mexico?

The Guadalupe Mountains are the remains of Capitan Reef, built by sponges and algae along the edge of a Permian sea; uplift later exposed the reef, and the caverns were dissolved inside its limestone.

Stephen Bishop, an enslaved guide, explored and mapped which famous American cave in the 1840s?

Mammoth Cave: Bishop, brought there in 1838 aged 17, crossed the Bottomless Pit to open miles of new passages and in 1842 drew a map of the cave from memory that stayed the standard for over forty years.

Mammoth Cave holds which world record among known cave systems?

Longest: more than 400 miles of passages have been surveyed; it took the record in 1972, when cavers found the link between Mammoth Cave and the Flint Ridge system to its north.

Which two active volcanoes lie within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park?

Kīlauea and Mauna Loa both lie in the park; Kīlauea's 2018 eruption drained its summit lava lake and destroyed more than 700 homes beyond the park, and Mauna Loa erupted in 2022 for the first time since 1984.

Which other Hawaiian park was split from the original 1916 Hawaii National Park?

Haleakalā on Maui became its own national park in 1961; the nēnē, Hawaii's native goose, had died out there, and a release programme begun in 1962 brought it back to the crater.

Which president first proclaimed Glacier Bay a national monument in 1925?

Calvin Coolidge proclaimed Glacier Bay National Monument in February 1925 after ecologist William S. Cooper, who studied how plants return behind retreating ice, won the Ecological Society of America to the cause.

Which lake is the deepest in the United States?

Crater Lake, more than 1,900 feet deep, has no rivers flowing in or out: rain and snow alone keep it filled, leaving its water famously clear and blue.

Crater Lake occupies the caldera of which collapsed volcano?

Mount Mazama, a Cascade volcano about 12,000 feet tall, collapsed after a huge eruption some 7,700 years ago; rain and snow then filled the caldera to form Crater Lake.

What is the cinder cone rising inside Crater Lake called?

Wizard Island began erupting on the caldera floor before rain and snow filled the lake, so the island is only the tip of a much taller cone; the other cones from those eruptions never broke the surface.

What is the name of the world's tallest living tree, found in Redwood National Park in 2006?

Hyperion, a coast redwood about 380 feet tall, was found in 2006 by naturalists Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor; so many visitors trampled its base that the park closed the area around it.

Which president's wife has an old-growth grove named for her in Redwood National Park?

Lady Bird Johnson gave her name to a grove of ancient redwoods near Orick that the new park protected in 1968, an honour for her work as First Lady to preserve the country's natural resources.

What is the main scenic road running the length of Shenandoah National Park?

Skyline Drive runs 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains; it is the only public road through the park, so drivers can join it at just four entrance points.

Which movies were partly filmed in Badlands National Park?

Dances with Wolves and Thunderheart both shot scenes in the Badlands; Thunderheart is loosely based on the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which holds the park's South Unit.

Which highly endangered mammal was reintroduced to the wild in Badlands National Park?

Black-footed ferrets were believed extinct by 1979, until a small wild colony turned up near Meeteetse in 1981; its captive-bred descendants were later released in the Badlands Wilderness.

On Isle Royale, scientists have tracked moose and which predator in the world's longest-running predator–prey study?

Wolves reached the island over an ice bridge from the mainland in the late 1940s; by 2016 inbreeding had cut them to just two, so the Park Service relocated 19 new wolves there.

Isle Royale National Park lies in which Great Lake?

Superior surrounds Isle Royale, the lake's largest island, which sits about 15 miles off the mainland to its north; winters are so harsh that the park shuts completely from November to mid-April.

Fort Jefferson, a huge 19th-century fortress that was never finished, is the centerpiece of which Florida national park?

Dry Tortugas National Park lies almost 70 miles west of Key West and can be reached only by boat or seaplane; the fort, begun in 1846 to guard busy Gulf shipping lanes, was never fully armed.

Which doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth was imprisoned at Fort Jefferson?

Samuel Mudd, who set Booth's broken leg, was imprisoned at Fort Jefferson from 1865; Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1869 after he treated prisoners in the 1867 yellow fever outbreak.

Congaree National Park in South Carolina protects the largest US tract of which forest type?

Old-growth bottomland hardwood: floods from the Congaree and Wateree rivers sweep nutrients and sediment through the forest, feeding some of the tallest trees in the eastern United States.

Which is the smallest US national park by area, at under 200 acres?

Gateway Arch National Park covers under 200 acres of the St. Louis riverfront; when Congress renamed it in 2018, the Park Service itself had argued it was too small to be called a national park.

St. Louis's riverfront arch commemorates which chapter of American history?

Westward expansion: the arch honours Thomas Jefferson, whose Louisiana Purchase opened the West, and the pioneers who set out from St. Louis; until 2018 the park was called the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

Which slavery-era case began in the Old Courthouse now inside St. Louis's national park?

Dred Scott and his wife Harriet first sued for their freedom at the Old Courthouse in 1846; the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling that no African Americans were entitled to citizenship hastened the Civil War.

Congress first protected a group of thermal springs in 1832, forty years before Yellowstone, in which state?

Arkansas: Hot Springs Reservation, created in 1832, grew into a famous spa town whose warm climate drew baseball clubs for spring training; it was renamed a national park in 1921.

Which Washington volcano, the most glaciated peak in the contiguous United States, has been a national park since 1899?

Mount Rainier's heavy load of ice feeds five major rivers and makes the volcano dangerous: eruptions and collapses have sent mudflows called lahars as far as the Puget Sound lowlands.

Voyageurs National Park, established in 1975 on the Ontario border, lies in which state?

Minnesota's only national park is named for the voyageurs, the fur-trade canoemen who paddled these border waters; most of it, including the Kabetogama Peninsula, is reached only by boat, or over the ice in winter.

Which abandoned copper boomtown sits at the center of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park?

Kennecott's ore came down the mountain mixed with worthless limestone that cost too much to ship, so a 14-story mill separated the copper first; the last train left in 1938, and the town emptied.

What is the highest point in the largest US national park, in south central Alaska?

Mount Saint Elias stands 18,008 feet high only about ten miles from the Pacific, so the park rises from the ocean's edge all the way to its summit.

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes lies in which Alaska national park?

Katmai: Novarupta's 1912 eruption, the 20th century's largest, filled the valley with ash; botanist Robert Griggs named it in 1916 for its countless steam vents, and his expeditions led to the area's protection two years later.

Katmai National Park hosts which annual online contest each fall?

Fat Bear Week invites online voters to pick, matchup by matchup, the fattest brown bear at Katmai's Brooks River, where the bears gorge on salmon to survive winter hibernation.

Petrified Forest's fossil logs date from a time sometimes called the dawn of what?

The dinosaurs: the trees fell in the Late Triassic, washed into rivers and were buried so fast that they did not rot, and silica from volcanic ash turned the wood to quartz; early dinosaur fossils turn up in the same rocks.

Mesa Verde's name is Spanish for what?

Green table: the first Spanish explorers gave the plateau the name, though geologists call it a misnomer, since a true mesa is flat on top and this one slants to the south, making it a cuesta.

Which two rivers meet at the Confluence inside Canyonlands National Park?

The Green River joins the Colorado at the Confluence; on a 1961 flight a dam-builder showed Interior Secretary Stewart Udall the spot as a reservoir site, and Udall saw a national park there instead.

Which author turned two seasons as a ranger at Arches into the desert classic Desert Solitaire?

Edward Abbey lived in a small government trailer near Balanced Rock in 1956 and 1957; the book he made of those seasons became standard reading for environmental activists.

Which ancient trees in Great Basin National Park are the oldest known non-clonal living organisms?

Great Basin bristlecone pines grow for millennia in Wheeler Peak's cirque; Prometheus, cut there in 1964, had at least 4,862 growth rings, older than California's living Methuselah.

White Sands National Park's dunes are made of which mineral rather than quartz sand?

Gypsum normally dissolves in rain and washes away to the sea, but the Tularosa Basin has no outlet, so it dries into crystals that break down into the world's largest gypsum dunefield.

White Sands National Park is completely surrounded by what?

A missile range: White Sands Missile Range completely surrounds the park, and during its tests the only road into the dunes can be closed for up to three hours.

On Bridge Day each October, what is uniquely allowed at the New River Gorge Bridge?

BASE jumping from the 876-foot bridge is allowed only on Bridge Day, the third Saturday of October, when the highway closes to traffic and pedestrians may walk across the span.

Which national lakeshore became a national park in 2019?

Indiana Dunes became a national lakeshore in 1966 through a compromise: industry got the new port it wanted on the same shore, and conservationists got the dunes beside it protected.

Cuyahoga Valley, between Cleveland and Akron, was first protected in 1974 as what kind of park unit?

A recreation area: residents fought suburban development in the valley, and in 1974 Gerald Ford signed it into being as a national recreation area; Congress renamed it a national park in 2000.

The Cuyahoga River, which runs through Ohio's only national park, became infamous in 1969 for doing what?

Catching fire: the polluted river burned in Cleveland on 22 June 1969, just north of today's park, and the publicity made it a national symbol of the need for environmental protection.

A 1994 distemper outbreak killed hundreds of which big cat in the Serengeti?

Lion: canine distemper, a virus better known in dogs, swept the Serengeti's prides in 1994 and killed hundreds; samples from the dead lions closely matched the strain carried by domestic dogs.

Which Tanzanian conservation area was split from Serengeti National Park in 1959?

Ngorongoro was carved out of the park as a multiple-use area, so that Maasai herders could go on grazing their cattle there alongside the wildlife.

Which is New Zealand's largest national park, in the South Island's southwest?

Fiordland takes its name from the ice-carved fiords along its coast; when a power scheme proposed raising its Lake Manapouri by up to 30 metres, nationwide protests led the government to drop the plan in 1972.

Which Rockies park, Banff's northern neighbor, began in 1907 as a 'Forest Park'?

Jasper Forest Park was created in 1907 as two new transcontinental railways were planned through Yellowhead Pass; it was renamed a national park in 1930 and joined the Rockies World Heritage Site in 1984.

Etosha National Park in Namibia takes its name from what feature?

A large salt pan: the Etosha pan covers nearly a quarter of the park; usually dry, it fills with water briefly after good rains and draws flamingos in their thousands.

Khao Yai, established in 1962, was the first national park of which Southeast Asian country?

Thailand opened Khao Yai in 1962; in 2020 the park began mailing litter back to the visitors who had left it, tracing them through the addresses they register on entering.

Which Scottish park, established in 2003, is the largest national park in the United Kingdom?

The Cairngorms cover 4,528 square kilometres and are home to about 18,000 people; the sub-arctic plateau supports Britain's only free-ranging reindeer herd, brought over by herder Mikel Utsi in 1952.

Newfoundland's Gros Morne belongs to the Long Range Mountains, an outlying range of which larger mountain system?

Gros Morne's Long Range Mountains are an outlier of the Appalachians; UNESCO listed the park in 1987 for the Tablelands, where deep ocean crust and mantle rock lie exposed, a rare window on plate tectonics.

Millions of bats pour out of Deer Cave each dusk in Gunung Mulu National Park, on which Southeast Asian island?

Borneo: Mulu lies in Malaysia's Sarawak state; Deer Cave, named for the deer that came in to lick its salty rocks, has a passage a 1978 survey measured at 174 metres wide and 122 metres high.

Hwange, between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls, is the largest national park in which country?

Zimbabwe's Hwange began as a game reserve in 1928; the park, some 14,600 square kilometres, keeps many of its waterholes supplied through the dry season with water pumped from underground.

Which river carved the Black Canyon, a national monument upgraded to a national park in 1999?

Gunnison: the river drops an average of 34 feet per mile through the canyon, which is how it cut a gorge so steep and narrow that sunlight struggles to reach the bottom.

Under what name was Kings Canyon originally established in 1890?

General Grant National Park, just four square miles, was created days after neighbouring Sequoia, as loggers were felling the Sierra's giant sequoias; in 1940 it was absorbed into the new Kings Canyon National Park.