Let’s take a whirlwind tour through America’s national parks
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with stories about the world. And this summer, we’re focusing on daily life in the U.S. And for a lot of people, a great road trip vacation includes a visit to a national park. Not everyone lives near a national park, but a lot of people get to visit at least once in their lives. And these visits make a great impression on those of us who have been fortunate to do them.
So today’s episode is about the 63 National Parks in the United States. In the second half of the episode, I’ll show you what it means to be “one of a kind.”
This is—can you believe this—this is episode number seven hundred. Seven hundred! We have done seven hundred of these. Well, you know what that means. JR, the producer, has uploaded our full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/700.
A tour through America’s national parks
America’s National Parks are areas protected and owned by the government.
The idea of a national park formed slowly. In 1864, a senator from California proposed an act to protect and preserve the Yosemite Valley in California. A few years later, an army post was created at Yellowstone to protect that area from development . An island in the Great Lakes, Mackinac Island, was similarly preserved and administered by the army .
And so it continued , with individual sites being protected one by one , without a national program. But in 1916, the U.S. government officially established the National Parks Service and designated twenty parks for protection.
What is a national park? Speaking in general, a national park is an area, usually a large area, of some kind of natural beauty or significance . Development in the park is strictly controlled so that the natural beauty can be enjoyed by future generations . Most parks protect unique plants and animals that live within the park boundaries .
Many parks have some roads ; some parks have limited places to stay overnight , including campsites . The campsites can be reserved online ; they’re often sold out in the busiest months. Many visitors stay overnight in hotels in the towns near the parks’ entrances.
Many parks have hiking trails ; some have mountain biking , boating , cross-country skiing , and snowmobile trails . The Parks Service has lots of guides to help visitors enjoy and understand what they’re seeing.
Today, there are 63 national parks in total ; to see them all, you’d have to visit 31 states, plus two territories: American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Here are some of the highlights .
The most popular destination is Great Smoky Mountains National Park: over 13 million people visited in 2023. This park is in the southeast , in the states of Tennessee and North Carolina. This puts it within a day’s drive of the biggest cities in the east, southeast, and Midwest .
The Smoky Mountains are part of the larger Appalachian Mountain chain. A popular hiking trail —the Appalachian Trail—passes through the park.
So that’s the most popular. But what about the biggest? The largest national park by land area is the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve. It’s in southeastern Alaska, near the border with Canada. This is a country-sized park : it’s bigger than Costa Rica, bigger than Denmark.
It attracts only about 70,000 visitors per year. That’s because it’s much more of a preserve than a park. It includes vast, vast areas of untouched wilderness , with an abundance of wildlife .
Many national parks include unique or beautiful landscapes in the mountains. There are too many to list here, but Rocky Mountain, Glacier, Denali, and Grand Teton National Parks fit this description .
Yellowstone National Park is one of a kind. Not only does it include mountains and canyons, but it also has geysers , hot springs , and open vents that release steam from inside the earth.
Some parks protect unique geological formations that let us get a glimpse of nature’s work through the ages . At the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and the Badlands National Parks, for example, you can see horizontal stripes of rock that show millions of years of gradual erosion .
Other parks show delicate ecosystems. The Joshua Tree National Park in California is where two different desert ecosystems come together. The Redwood Forests and Sequoia National Parks in California protect some of the largest trees on earth. The biggest reach 100 meters in height and are up to 2,000 years old.
The U.S. has a lot of coastline , so you’ll find national parks on the coasts, too. Acadia National Park in Maine includes forests , rocky beaches , and the highest mountain on the east coast. It protects moose and bear on land and whales at sea. The Virgin Islands National Park and American Samoa National Park have stunning white-sand beaches with protected coral reefs .
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park has one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Visitors can hike from the beach— sea level —to an elevation of over 13,000 feet, in just one hike. In this one park, visitors can see lava fields , rainforest , tundra , and even desert.
Not every park is above ground . Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico is a network of 117 caves , one of which is almost 200 kilometers long. Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is the world’s longest cave system .
The smallest national park isn’t an area of natural beauty at all, and not much wildlife lives there. It’s next to downtown St. Louis, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. The Gateway Arch National Park features a large metal arch , constructed in the 1960s, to commemorate westward expansion .
A few others. Death Valley National Park is the hottest, lowest, and driest place in the United States. Daytime temperatures can hit 50 degrees. Florida’s Everglades National Park is the largest tropical wilderness in the U.S. Panthers , crocodiles , and manatees live there.
Jeff’s take
I have had the tremendous good fortune to have visited ten of these parks. And I am embarrassed to say that for many years—actually for most of my life—I lived within a day’s drive of about five more and have never visited.
They really are a treasure . Each park is different. Some are free, but others charge a fee, maybe $15 to $30 per person or per car. And once you’re inside, some parks have built-up attractions, others are just complete wilderness . But most are somewhere in between, with a mixture of easy, accessible attractions and opportunities to really get off the grid .
And I should also point out that the national parks are areas protected by the U.S. Congress and administered by the federal government. States have their own state parks, which are often just as good. There are 10,000 of those.
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