National Parks in North America

The world’s first national park sits atop a giant volcanic caldera fueling roughly half the planet’s geysers, from clockwork Old Faithful to rainbow-ringed Grand Prismatic Spring. Bubbling mud pots feel alive, while the Lamar and Hayden valleys offer world-class wildlife watching: bison, wolves, elk and grizzlies.

A mile-deep, 277-mile chasm carved by the Colorado River, its banded walls exposing nearly two billion years of Earth’s history. Most take in the panoramas from the South Rim, but the true scale reveals itself only to those who descend by trail or river raft. Sunrise sets the buttes ablaze.

The glacier-carved valley that launched the American conservation movement is hemmed by sheer granite walls, thundering waterfalls and ancient sequoias. El Capitan and Half Dome test climbers, while spring snowmelt sends Yosemite Falls plunging 2,400 feet. Come in late spring for the waterfalls and ride the shuttle to skip the crush.

A soaring sandstone canyon in southern Utah where the Virgin River glows in cream, rust and rose. Its signature hikes are legendary: the chained ascent of Angels Landing and the Narrows, where you wade upstream through a slot canyon closing overhead. A car-free shuttle keeps the main canyon peaceful.

Canada’s oldest park is a realm of impossibly turquoise glacial lakes, hanging glaciers and jagged Rockies peaks. Lake Louise and Moraine Lake look too photogenic to be real, while Banff town offers hot springs and gondola rides. The Icefields Parkway to Jasper ranks among the world’s great scenic drives.

Six million acres of raw Alaskan wilderness crowned by Denali, North America’s highest peak at 20,310 feet. A single unpaved road, travelled by shuttle bus, offers the continent’s best odds of spotting grizzlies, wolves, caribou and moose. The great peak hides in cloud most days, so a clear view feels earned.

Montana’s ‘Crown of the Continent’ is a wilderness of glacier-carved valleys, alpine meadows and mirror-still lakes on the Continental Divide. The Going-to-the-Sun Road climbs past hanging valleys to Logan Pass, one of America’s great mountain drives. Over 700 miles of trails cross country roamed by grizzlies and mountain goats.

Three worlds meet in one park on Washington’s rugged peninsula: glacier-capped mountains, sea-stack-strewn Pacific beaches, and the emerald, moss-draped Hoh Rain Forest, one of Earth’s few temperate rainforests. In a single day you can watch sunrise from Hurricane Ridge, wander giant trees and tide-pool along Rialto Beach.

This surreal red-rock landscape near Moab holds over 2,000 natural stone arches, the greatest concentration on the planet, alongside balanced rocks and soaring fins. Freestanding Delicate Arch, on Utah’s licence plates, glows deep orange at sunset after a three-mile hike. A timed-entry reservation is now required in peak months.

Not a true canyon but a series of vast amphitheatres filled with thousands of hoodoos, delicate spires of orange, pink and white rock sculpted by frost. Sunrise from Inspiration Point sets the basin glowing, while the Navajo Loop drops you among the columns. Perched at 8,000 feet, it offers superb dark-sky stargazing.

The Teton Range erupts abruptly from the Wyoming valley floor with no foothills, a jagged wall of 13,000-foot peaks mirrored in the Snake River. Jenny Lake is the scenic heart, with a boat shuttle to Hidden Falls. Moose, bison and bears roam the flats; Oxbow Bend is legendary at dawn.

Colorado’s high-altitude showpiece is defined by Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous paved road in any US national park, climbing above 12,000 feet through fragile alpine tundra. Over 300 miles of trails reach glassy lakes beneath jagged peaks, and elk bugle across the meadows each autumn. Acclimatise before hiking high.

New England’s coastal gem sits on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, where pink granite peaks tumble to the Atlantic among spruce forest and tidal pools. Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on the eastern seaboard, is among the first US spots to catch sunrise. Car-free carriage roads make it a joy by bike.

A vast, slow-moving ‘river of grass’ spreads across the tip of Florida, the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles coexist. Airboat rides and boardwalk trails like Anhinga bring you within feet of wading birds, gators and manatees. The dry winter season, December to April, is by far the best time.

Guardian of the largest living things on Earth, this park protects the Giant Forest, including General Sherman, a single tree weighing over 1,200 tons. Walking beneath the cinnamon-barked trunks, some 2,000 years old, is humbling. Beyond the groves the park climbs to Mount Whitney, the highest summit in the lower 48.

Straddling the Maui volcano whose name means ‘house of the sun’, this park protects a vast, cinder-strewn summit crater more lunar than tropical. Watching sunrise above a sea of clouds from the 10,000-foot rim is a Hawaiian rite of passage, now requiring a reservation. Bring warm layers for the frigid summit.

A remote, wildly beautiful sweep of West Texas where the Rio Grande carves deep limestone canyons and the Chisos Mountains rise like an island from the Chihuahuan Desert. Hike the Window trail, drift through Santa Elena Canyon, or soak in riverside hot springs. Some of the country’s darkest skies make stargazing extraordinary.

A UNESCO marvel on Newfoundland’s west coast, where you walk across the Tablelands, a rust-orange slab of the Earth’s mantle thrust to the surface and left barren. Fjord-like Western Brook Pond is the showpiece, its billion-year-old cliffs best seen by boat beneath cascading waterfalls. This landscape helped confirm plate tectonics.

Costa Rica’s most popular park packs astonishing life into a small space, where white-sand beaches backed by rainforest meet the warm Pacific. Sloths, capuchin and squirrel monkeys, iguanas and toucans are almost guaranteed along easy coastal trails. Hiring a guide with a spotting scope and arriving at opening greatly improve the experience.

Beneath the sun-baked New Mexico desert hides one of Earth’s deepest, most decorated cave systems, a subterranean fantasyland of stalactites and soaring columns. The Big Room, the size of several football fields, loops on a self-guided walk. In summer, hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats spiral out at dusk.