US National Parks

Visiting every US national park

There are 63 national parks in the United States — the headline units, as opposed to the 400-plus monuments, seashores, historic sites, and battlefields the Park Service also runs. Visiting all 63 has become a mainstream travel goal in the last decade, helped along by the annual passport stamp books and a wave of "every park" road-trip blogs. It's a bigger project than it looks: the parks are spread across 30 states and two territories, and eight of them are in Alaska.

Most people start in the West. Utah's Mighty Five — Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches — can be done in a single week's loop from Las Vegas or Salt Lake City. Yellowstone and Grand Teton share a border. Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon are a California week. By the time you've added Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain, and Glacier, you're past twenty and the list starts to feel possible.

The hard ones

Then it gets expensive. Gates of the Arctic and Kobuk Valley, north of the Arctic Circle, have no roads and no trails; you fly in by bush plane from Bettles or Kotzebue. Isle Royale in Lake Superior is a ferry or seaplane. Dry Tortugas is a boat from Key West. American Samoa is a flight from Honolulu to Pago Pago, and it's the park that ends most people's streaks. The National Park of American Samoa and the three Alaska fly-in parks are usually the last four on any finisher's list.

Click a park badge or its pin to mark it visited, again for want-to-go. The map includes New River Gorge, the newest park (2020), and treats Sequoia and Kings Canyon as separate parks, as the Park Service does. Canada's are on their own national parks map.

Passes, passports, and timed entry

An America the Beautiful pass covers entry to every park on this map for a year and costs less than three separate visits. A growing number of parks — Arches, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Yosemite in summer, Zion's Angels Landing — require timed-entry reservations through recreation.gov, booked weeks to months ahead, so spontaneous road trips need a little more planning than they used to. The Passport to Your National Parks stamp book, sold at every visitor center, is the analogue version of this map, and plenty of people run both.