THESE ARE THE BEST U.S. NATIONAL PARKS—AND THEY’RE NOT EVEN THAT CROWDED

THE 63 NATIONAL PARKS in the U.S.—what writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner once called “our best idea”—encompass a dizzying variety of worlds. Spoiled beyond belief, we can choose between dense woodland and bone-dry desert, inaccessible mountain peaks and protected swaths of ocean.

In Zion, endangered condors soar above red escarpments, while in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, lackadaisical banana slugs mosey through old-growth rainforest.

Every summer, Americans head out to make the most of these public lands, but where to begin? We grounded our recommendations in cold, hard numbers that reveal, definitively, which park is best. We collected data from every Congress-designated national park across four main criteria: the size of the crowds, the quantity and quality of hiking routes, availability of campsites and access to other recreational activities like horseback riding, mountain biking and fishing. We pulled data on hiking trails and other activities from AllTrails, the largest aggregate website of U.S. trails, and other numbers, including camping figures, directly from the National Park Service.

Nothing destroys the tranquility of nature like limboing through a sea of selfie sticks, so, conscious of crowd-averse travelers, we gave the most weight to visitor data—ascribing 50% of the total score to crowd sizes—then factored in the other categories evenly to tally each park’s final score.

Here, a winner that will make you rethink what you thought you knew about our parks, a breakdown of the numbers and a guide to planning a summer of outdoor adventure.

A Surprising Victor

Most people tend to associate national parks with a few predictable places—Yellowstone, Zion, Yosemite—but when we crunched the numbers, an unexpected winner emerged: Isle Royale National Park, a wooded archipelago near the northwestern edge of Lake Superior in Michigan, is, according to our metrics, the best.

About 508 miles of hiking routes crisscross scraggly boreal forest and follow windswept coastline. Accessible only by ferry, private boat or seaplane, this is true wilderness: a land of moose and wolves and the drama forever playing out between them.

Backpackers can pitch a tent in one of the park’s 36 rustic campgrounds, but visitors will find plenty of day-hiking opportunities, too, and the circa-1956 Rock Harbor Lodge makes up for a lack of bells and whistles with an endless reserve of old-school charm.

Only around 25,000 visitors come to Isle Royale every year, but the park scores high for hiking infrastructure. On the 40-mile Greenstone Ridge Trail, look out for knobby-kneed moose and take in the vastness of Lake Superior.

Travelers will find a touch of the sublime on long solo treks and early-morning dips at what feels like the edge of the world—even if the social-media shots don’t compare to those of some blockbuster parks farther west.

Our runners-up, North Cascades, Wash., and Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Calif., scored high for plenty of diversions and small crowds—though you can access both, unlike our winner, easily by car. In North Cascades, around 400 miles of hiking routes lead up glaciated peaks and to electric-blue lakes, while at Sequoia & Kings Canyon, campers can choose from 1,213 sites, including dreamy spots near the Giant Forest shaded by mighty ponderosa pines.

The Question of Crowds

Whether you blame Instagram or the pent-up wanderlust that came from Covid-19 lockdowns, it’s no secret that these days, the soul-sucking experience of shuffling from viewpoint to viewpoint amid hordes of people often leaves a national park visit nonrestorative. It’s gotten so bad that parks like Rocky Mountain and Arches have had to impose timed-entry reservations.

As we sorted through the data, we found that simply looking at lists of the “most visited” parks doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the country’s most popular sites are enormous and offer hundreds of miles of trails, making them actually feel less crowded than smaller parks. To achieve a more accurate crowding score, we combined each park’s 2023 visitation numbers with its total acreage.

Unsurprisingly, photogenic destinations like Acadia in Maine—accessible from many Northeast cities—and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the border between Tennessee and North Carolina, topped the list as the most crowded. Other names you might have heard of similarly slid down our overall rankings due to their continuing struggles with overcrowding. Spread over just 143,843 acres, Utah’s Zion National Park, for example, attracted a staggering 4.6 million visitors last year.

On the other end of the spectrum, the most remote parks in Alaska attract only five-figure visitor counts. Gates of the Arctic and Lake Clark, where ornery grizzlies roam untouched wilderness, had the fewest visitors per acre, but their lack of trails and campsites put them lower in the overall ranking.

Hiking and Camping

Perhaps the best part of being in a national park is indulging your feral self: scrambling up a craggy summit on all fours, cooking over an open fire, putting a pause on social norms like showering to sleep in a tent for a week straight.

To determine the best parks for hiking, we combined the number of unique paths listed on AllTrails with the total route mileage and average user rating of those trails to create a unified hiking score. California’s Yosemite, home to a sizable section of the storied John Muir Trail, emerged as the best park for hikers. Acadia, with trails that showcase the sea and the best of New England autumn, earned second place, while Great Smoky Mountains and Colorado’s Rocky Mountain national parks tied for third. Looking to embark on a multiday trek? Yosemite and Great Smoky Mountains each has more than 140 different backpacking-specific routes on AllTrails.

To determine the best parks for camping, we fused the total number of campsites with the number of visitors per park. Though Yellowstone has the most campsites at 2,139, less-traveled Sequoia & Kings Canyon earned the overall best camping score. The 214 car-friendly sites at Sequoia’s Lodgepole Campground, for example, hug a section of the mighty Kaweah River.

Others might prefer a trip to Death Valley in California—the third best park for camping—where only 1.1 million annual visitors share 804 campsites spread across 3.4 million acres. Though you’d be wise to avoid summer, when temperatures often hit a mind-melting 120 degrees, a night under the stars in Death Valley appeals in the cooler months.

Something for Everyone

Not everyone’s idea of a good time involves daylong hikes and open-air sleeping. So, for a more well-rounded breakdown of our parks, we also looked to AllTrails data and assigned a score based on the range of other, non-hiking recreational activities offered in each park, including cycling, snowshoeing and 13 other activities.

Acadia delivers enjoyable bike rides on the shaded crushed-stone carriage roads near Jordan Pond—make sure to include a stop at the Victorian-era tea house nearby—and the park’s quality birding and sea kayaking opportunities helped it edge out the competition as the top park for non-hiking adventures. Experienced anglers won’t be surprised to hear that Yellowstone came in close behind thanks to the superlative fly fishing to be had on the Madison, Lamar and Yellowstone Rivers. And when summer is a distant memory, try Wyoming’s Grand Teton, Montana’s Glacier or Colorado’s Rocky Mountain national parks, all tied in the number three spot, in part for the opportunities to hit extensive snowshoeing trails.

The Unscientific Analysis of a Parks Obsessive

Our national-park expert steps away from the numbers to share her personal favorites

As a die-hard outdoors nerd who spent a year living in a minivan while visiting all 63 U.S. national parks, I was filled with effervescent glee when I pulled up the ranking team’s final data to see that Isle Royale National Park, a place that few non-Michiganders have even heard of, topped our list for best overall national park. I hiked its famed Greenstone Ridge Trail in 2020, and though I suffered more mosquito bites than I can count, I walked away in awe.

I’ll never get over just how big a moose is in person or how small you can feel in a seemingly endless boreal forest. The absence of crowds allowed for so many of my most memorable moments exploring national parks—times I was forced to fall back on my own self-reliance, get a little uncomfortable and be present.

Other less-traveled favorites of mine also cracked our top 5, including Big Bend in Texas, which wowed me with dizzying night skies and limestone canyons that pop with unlikely colors. Due to their lack of trails and campgrounds, some Alaska parks ranked lower than I would have liked, but one rose to the top for its balance of accessibility and unbridled nature. Despite being largely explorable by car, Denali and its caribou, blueberry-munching grizzlies and miles of tundra introduced me to a truer notion of wilderness than I ever thought possible. Its sheer, undeveloped hugeness staggered me.

Numbers, of course, never tell the whole story. Utah’s Capitol Reef didn’t even make the top 30, but I often recommend it to others, admittedly in part because of experiences I could never have planned—like watching ravens gather on cliffs at the end of a hike up Grand Wash. The beauty of America’s best idea is that there’s something for everyone, and no two trips will ever be the same, no matter where you go. —Emily Pennington

2024-07-04T01:06:52Z dg43tfdfdgfd