Q: How many national parks are in the United States?

A: There are 59 national parks, all of which are maintained and operated by the National Park Service.

Acadia National Park, on and around Mount Desert Island, is the only national park in New England.

The only other national park on the East Coast is South Carolina’s Congaree National Park, a swampy park that is home is the largest tract of old growth bottomland hardwood forest in North America. It also hosts one of the highest deciduous forest canopies in the world.

Maine’s Acadia welcomes an estimated 2.5 million visitors every year, many of whom are there to climb or drive up Cadillac Mountain to view the earliest sunrise on the East Coast.

The state with the most parks is California, with eight parks, including the Redwood National Park with its towering redwood trees, the Sequoia National Park with its giant sequoia trees (including five of the 10 largest trees in the world),  and Yosemite, with “1,200 square miles of towering waterfalls, giant sequoias, broad meadows, narrow canyons and rugged mountains,” according to the NPS.

Yosemite is considered the birthplace of the modern conservation movement.

California is also home to the Joshua Tree National Park in the Mojave Desert, a place where natives once hunted mammoths and mastodons before the land dried up and gave way to desert palms and cactus.

Alaska is the state with the second most national parks, including the wild and open Denali National Park and Preserve, a 4.7 million acre preserve accessible by a single road, and Glacier Bay National Park, a marine sanctuary that is accessible only by boat. Cruise ship passengers often see humpback whales breaching in the bay there.

The Gates of the Arctic National Park is also in Alaska, and it is the northernmost park of the National Park Service, located entirely north of the Arctic Circle. There are no roads. No visitor centers. Just wilderness.

What may be the most recognizable national park is Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It is also this country’s first national park, established in 1872.

Yellowstone is home to “Old Faithful,” a natural geyser that — very faithfully — spews up a torrent of up to 8,400 gallons of boiling water every 90 minutes.

Katmai National Park in Alaska, has the highest concentration of brown bears in the parks system, according to National Geographic. Some 2,000 brown bears live there, and each July they head to the Brooks River to feast on the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, returning in September to catch the spawned fish returning to the sea. Two observation platforms were built to let visitors view the feedings safely.

The biggest bat colony in the national parks system is in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, where — according to National Geographic — every evening from May to October, 400,000 Mexico free-tail bats pour out of Carlsbad Caverns to feed on insects. The following morning, visitors can hear the “seething river of wings and chirps” as the bats return to the caves.

According to the National Park Service, “most of the formations — or speleothems (stalactites and stalagmites) — found inside Carlsbad Cavern today were active and growing during the last ice age when, instead of having a desert above the cave, there were pine forests.”

There are 119 known caves in the caverns, which certainly explains the large bat population.

The southernmost national park is the Virgin Islands National Park in the Caribbean Sea. The park was established in 1956, a gift of Laurance Rockefeller, who had visited the area and was so taken with its beauty that he purchased the land and donated it to the federal government, which later turned the land over to the National Park Service.

Rockefeller, who died in 2004 when he was 94 years old,  was a third-generation member of the conservation-minded and philanthropic Rockefeller family that donated land to Acadia and other national parks across the country.

* Source: National Park Service

Waiting for permission to reprint National Park Service Conservation graphic “100 years at a glance” of significant dates in national park history.

Q: Which park welcomes the most visitors?

A: According to CNN, the 10 most visited parks in 2014 were:

1. Great Smoky Mountains National Park: 10 million visitors

2. Grand Canyon National Park: 4.8 million

3. Yosemite National Park: 3.9 million

4. Yellowstone National Park: 3.5 million

5. Rocky Mountain National Park: 3.4 million

6. Olympic National Park: 3.2 million

7. Zion National Park: 3.2 million

8. Grand Teton National Park: 2.8 million

9. Acadia National Park: 2.6 million

10. Glacier National Park: 2.3 million

Do you want to learn more about national parks, maybe even build your own park?

Go to: education.nationalgeographic.org

Oldest national park:

1872: Yellowstone National Park, the oldest, is also one of the largest and probably the best-known national park in the United States. Situated in three states — Wyoming, Montana and Idaho — Yellowstone contains approximately one-half of the world’s hydrothermal features. There are over 10,000 hydrothermal features, including over 300 geysers, in the park.

Newest national park:

2013: Pinnacles National Park in California is  the newest park. It is most popular in cooler months because it gets uncomfortably hot to hike there during the summer. This park has the greatest number of bee species per unit area of any place ever studied. The roughly 400 bee species are mostly solitary; they don’t live in hives.

Largest national park:

13.2 million acres: Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska measures 13,005 square miles. Parklands rise from the ocean all the way up to 18,008 feet of Mount St. Elias. This park is the same size as Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park and Switzerland combined. It was established in 1980.

Smallest national park:

.02 acres: Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Pennsylvania is the site of the childhood home of Thaddeus Kosciuszko, an engineer and Polish freedom fighter who fought to help free the colonies during the American Revolution. General George Washington presented Kosciuszko with two pistols and a sword in recognition of his outstanding service to America. The site became a national memorial in 1972.

*Source: National Park Service

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