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98 free US National Parks trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
11 free US National Parks trivia questions with answers. US National Parks trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is National Parks trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which U.S. President signed the act establishing the first national park in the United States?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant signed the act creating Yellowstone National Park; its first superintendent, Nathaniel Langford, was appointed the same year but Congress gave him no salary, funding or staff.
Q 02In what year was the first national park in the United States officially established?
1872
Yellowstone was established in 1872 by the Act of Dedication, which set the land apart as a 'public park or pleasuring-ground'; about 300 people visited that first year.
Q 03What was the 1832 Arkansas thermal-water reserve officially called before it became a national park in 1921?
Hot Springs Reservation
Congress set aside Hot Springs Reservation on April 20, 1832, the oldest federally protected land in the park system; it was redesignated Hot Springs National Park in 1921.
Q 04Which is the largest national park in the contiguous US, also its hottest and lowest?
Death Valley
Death Valley covers about 3.4 million acres, the largest national park outside Alaska; its floor at Badwater Basin lies 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in North America.
Q 05What is the summit elevation of Denali, the highest mountain peak in North America?
20,310 feet
A 2015 US Geological Survey GPS survey put Denali's summit at 20,310 feet, ten feet below the 20,320-foot figure obtained by photogrammetry in 1952.
Q 06The park protecting the longest known cave system in the world is in which US state?
Kentucky
Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky protects more than 400 miles of surveyed passages; the network has been called the Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System since a 1972 connection was found.
Q 07Which is the oldest national park east of the Mississippi River?
Acadia
Acadia, on Maine's Mount Desert Island, became a national park in 1919, well before Great Smoky Mountains (1934) and Shenandoah (1935).
Q 08The Everglades are fed by a slow-moving sheet of water flowing out of which body of water?
Lake Okeechobee
The water creeps south-west at about a quarter of a mile per day toward Florida Bay.
Q 09Which president signed the Organic Act creating the National Park Service on August 25, 1916?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson's signature charged the new agency with conserving park scenery and wildlife so as to leave them unimpaired for future generations.
Q 10The Grand Canyon is a gorge cut by which river?
Colorado
The Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon, cutting down through its bed over millions of years as the Colorado Plateau was uplifted around it.
Q 11Old Faithful, perhaps the most famous geyser in the world, erupts in which national park?
Yellowstone
Old Faithful is in Yellowstone; the 1870 Washburn Expedition named it after finding it erupted on a dependable schedule, roughly every 60 to 90 minutes.
Q 12Which national park was the most visited in the US every year from 1944 through 2024?
Great Smoky Mountains
Great Smoky Mountains topped 12 million visitors in 2024, helped by having no entrance fee and sitting within a day's drive of much of the eastern US.
Q 13Which state has the most national parks, with nine?
California
California has nine: Channel Islands, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Kings Canyon, Lassen Volcanic, Pinnacles, Redwood, Sequoia and Yosemite; Alaska is second with eight, Utah has five.
Q 21Which peak inside a Sierra Nevada national park is the highest point in the contiguous United States?
Mount Whitney
Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet, rises on the eastern boundary of Sequoia National Park, which spans nearly 13,000 feet of vertical relief.
Q 22The abandoned boomtown of Kennecott, in America's largest national park, mined which metal?
Copper
Kennecott's mines produced copper, roughly $200 million worth, between 1911 and 1938; the derelict mill buildings are a National Historic Landmark inside the park.
Q 23The Old Courthouse in the St. Louis national park is where which landmark Supreme Court case originated?
Dred Scott
Q 14At over 8 million acres, which Alaskan park is the largest national park in the United States?
Wrangell–St. Elias
Wrangell–St. Elias covers about 13.2 million acres including its preserve, larger than Switzerland and than each of the nine smallest US states; the next three largest parks are also in Alaska.
Q 15At under 193 acres, which is the smallest US national park?
Gateway Arch
Gateway Arch, about 193 acres in St. Louis, is roughly 3.5% the size of the next-smallest park, Hot Springs; it was Jefferson National Expansion Memorial until redesignated in 2018.
Q 16How many national parks did the United States have at the end of 2024?
63
The 63 national parks are only a slice of the more than 400 units of the National Park System, most of which carry other designations such as monument or seashore.
Q 17Which national park protects the deepest body of water in the United States, at 1,949 feet?
Crater Lake
Crater Lake, Oregon's only national park, is 1,949 feet deep, the deepest lake in the United States; its caldera formed in a volcanic collapse about 7,700 years ago.
Q 18The lake in Oregon's only national park fills the caldera of which destroyed volcano?
Mount Mazama
Mount Mazama collapsed after a colossal eruption about 7,700 years ago, leaving a caldera roughly 4,000 feet deep that filled with rain and snowmelt to form Crater Lake.
Q 19Arches National Park sits above what underground layer, the main cause of its arch formation?
A salt bed
A thick salt bed, the Paradox Formation, lies beneath Arches; as the salt shifted and dissolved, the sandstone above fractured into fins that eroded into more than 2,000 arches.
Q 20The General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume, grows in which national park?
Sequoia
General Sherman stands in Sequoia National Park's Giant Forest, which holds five of the ten largest trees in the world; its trunk volume is about 52,500 cubic feet.
Dred Scott first sued for his freedom at the Old Courthouse in 1846; the 1935 memorial was created partly to commemorate the slavery debate his case provoked.
Q 24Dry Tortugas National Park, reachable only by boat or seaplane, lies about 68 miles from which city?
Key West
Dry Tortugas lies about 68 miles west of Key West; its centerpiece, Fort Jefferson, is the largest brick masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere, built from more than 16 million bricks.
Q 25Isle Royale National Park consists of an island and more than 400 islets in which of the Great Lakes?
Lake Superior
Isle Royale sits in the north-west of Lake Superior; it is the fifth-largest lake island in the world and the second-largest in the Great Lakes after Manitoulin.
Q 26The name of Maui's Haleakalā National Park is Hawaiian for what?
House of the sun
Haleakalā means 'house of the sun'; legend says the demigod Maui snared the sun there to lengthen the day, and the park was split from Hawaii National Park in 1961.
Q 27Which national park's Big Room is the largest cave chamber in North America?
Carlsbad Caverns
Carlsbad Caverns' Big Room is almost 4,000 feet long and 255 feet high, covering about 8 acres; visitors can reach it by elevator from the visitor center.
Q 28Mesa Verde National Park, home to Cliff Palace, protects sites built by which people?
Ancestral Puebloans
Ancestral Puebloans built Mesa Verde's dwellings between about 600 and 1300 CE; the park holds nearly 5,000 sites, including 600 cliff dwellings, and is Colorado's only World Heritage Site.
Q 29Grand Teton National Park includes most of the northern sections of which valley?
Jackson Hole
Jackson Hole is the valley east of the Teton Range; Grand Teton lies just 10 miles south of Yellowstone, linked to it by the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway.
Q 30Which federal agency oversaw construction of Rocky Mountain's Trail Ridge Road from 1929 to 1932?
Bureau of Public Roads
The Bureau of Public Roads supervised Trail Ridge Road's construction from 1929 to 1932, a year before the Civilian Conservation Corps existed; the park also holds the Colorado River's headwaters.