Yosemite: The Valley That Convinced America to Invent National Parks
Yosemite’s granite cliffs and waterfalls proved so overwhelming to early visitors that the valley became, in 1864, the first landscape in American…
Read more →Travel Blog
Scan to visit on mobile
Acadia: The National Park Born From a Millionaire’s Fear of the Automobile
Acadia National Park, on Maine’s rugged Atlantic coast, was established in 1919 as the first national park created east of the Mississippi…
Read more →
Shenandoah: The National Park Rebuilt From Abandoned Farmland
Shenandoah National Park, established in 1935 in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, is unusual among major American national parks for having been created…
Read more →
Rocky Mountain National Park: A High-Altitude Road That Took Decades to Finish
Rocky Mountain National Park, established in 1915 in north-central Colorado, protects a dramatic stretch of the Rocky Mountains including over 100 named…
Read more →
Big Bend: The National Park Where Texas Meets Mexico at a River’s Bend
Big Bend National Park takes its name from the dramatic curve the Rio Grande carves through the Chihuahuan Desert along the Texas-Mexico…
Read more →
Hawai’i Volcanoes: The Park Where You Can Watch New Land Being Made
Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, established in 1916 as one of the earliest national parks in the United States, protects two of the…
Read more →
The Blue Ridge Mountains: An Ancient Range Protected in Pieces, Not as a Whole
The Blue Ridge Mountains, stretching over 550 miles from Georgia to Pennsylvania as part of the wider Appalachian range, are among the…
Read more →
Exmoor: The National Park Where Britain’s Wild Ponies Still Roam Free
Exmoor National Park, straddling the border of Somerset and Devon in southwest England, was one of the first ten national parks designated…
Read more →
South Downs: The National Park Britain Waited Longest to Protect
South Downs National Park, covering rolling chalk hills across Hampshire, West Sussex, and East Sussex in southern England, was only formally designated…
Read more →
The Badlands: A Landscape So Difficult It Named Itself
Badlands National Park in South Dakota takes its English name directly from a translation of the Lakota phrase “mako sica,” meaning bad…
Read more →
Cappadocia: A Landscape Carved Into Homes for Over a Thousand Years
Cappadocia’s distinctive fairy chimney rock formations were formed over millions of years as volcanic ash from ancient eruptions hardened into a soft,…
Read more →
Edinburgh Castle: A Fortress Built on a Volcano’s Dead Heart
Edinburgh Castle sits atop Castle Rock, the plug of an extinct volcano that last erupted around 350 million years ago, its steep,…
Read more →