Skip to content

Top Navigation

Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure
  • Trip Inspiration
  • Travel Guides
  • World's Best
  • Destination of the Year
  • A-List Travel Advisors
  • Cruises
  • Travel Tips
  • News
  • Food + Drink
  • Travel Accessories
  • Check-In

Profile Menu

Your Profile

Your Profile

  • Join Now
  • Newsletters
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription
  • Help
  • Logout
Login
Subscribe
Pin FB

Explore Travel + Leisure

Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure
  • Explore

    Explore

    • World's Best

      The greatest islands, cities, hotels, cruise lines, airports, and more — as voted by you. Read More Next
    • The 50 Best Places to Travel in 2021

      Whether you're traveling solo or planning a family vacation, here are the 50 best places to visit in 2021. Read More Next
    • Let's Go Together Podcast

      Start listening to T+L's brand new podcast, Let's Go Together! Hosted by Kellee Edwards. Read More Next
  • Trip Inspiration

    Trip Inspiration

    • Trip Ideas
    • Weekend Getaways
    • Spring Travel
    • Summer Travel
    • Fall Travel
    • Winter Travel
    • Solo Travel
    • Romantic Getaways
    • Luxury Travel
    • Beach Vacations
    • Adventure Travel
    • Road Trips
    • Family Travel
    • National Parks
    • Holiday Travel
    • Travel Photography
    • Photo of the Day
    • Culture and Design
    • Travel Deals
    • Attractions
    • Amusement Parks
    • Festivals and Events
    • Bus and Trains
    • Flight Deals
    • Budget Travel
    • Hotels and Resorts
    • Disney Vacations
    • Airlines and Airports
    • Ground Transportation
    • BookTandL.com
  • Travel Guides
  • World's Best

    World's Best

    • Top Hotels
    • Top Cities
    • Top Islands
    • Domestic Airlines
    • International Airlines
    • Tours
    • Safaris
    • All World's Best
  • Destination of the Year
  • A-List Travel Advisors
  • Cruises

    Cruises

    • Find A Cruise
    • Caribbean Cruises
    • River Cruises
    • European Cruises
    • All-Inclusive Cruises
    • Family Cruises
    • Alaskan Cruises
    • Disney Cruises
    • See All Cruise Vacations
  • Travel Tips

    Travel Tips

    • Travel Trends
    • Packing Tips
    • Points + Miles
    • Budgeting + Currency
    • Customs + Immigration
    • Responsible Travel
    • Travel Etiquette
    • Travel Warnings
    • Weather
    • Mobile Apps
    • See All Travel Tips
  • News

    News

    • Wellness
    • Celebrity Travel
    • Animals
    • Jobs
    • Offbeat
    • See All News
  • Food + Drink

    Food + Drink

    • Restaurants
    • Wine
    • Beer
    • Cocktails + Spirits
    • Bars + Clubs
    • Celebrity Chefs
    • Cooking + Entertaining
    • Food Fairs + Festivals
    • World's Best Restaurants
    • See All Food + Drink
  • Travel Accessories

    Travel Accessories

    • Travel Bags
    • Shoes
    • Travel Tech
    • Shopping
    • Style
    • Gift Guides
    • See All Travel Accessories
  • Check-In

Profile Menu

Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
Your Profile

Your Profile

  • Join Now
  • Newsletters
  • Manage Your Subscription this link opens in a new tab
  • Give a Gift Subscription
  • Help
  • Logout
Login
Sweepstakes

Follow Us

  1. Home
  2. Trip Ideas
  3. National Parks
  4. America's Most Underrated National Parks

America's Most Underrated National Parks

By Reid Bramblett
March 16, 2010
Skip gallery slides
Save Pin
Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service
“I’ve been in wilderness all around the world, but Wrangell-St. Elias was something new,” says Stewart Lee, a 35-year veteran Boy Scout leader from Pennsylvania who has visited all but a handful of the national parks. Even his deep experience with and passion for the outdoors couldn’t prepare him for his first visit to the 13.2 million–acre Alaskan park in 2008. “It was like going back to the period of discovery, well before industrialization or even civilization. I suddenly felt like a babe in the woods.”

There are 58 national parks in the United States, many of them unsung natural oases full of majestic beauty. And while the marquee parks—Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite—are well worth visiting, there are drawbacks, namely high admission prices and enormous crowds. An average of 26,542 people visit Yellowstone on a typical July day—nearly twice as many as Michigan’s gloriously isolated Isle Royale National Park gets in an entire year.

Fewer park-goers simply mean a better out-in-the-wild experience. Barely 200 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains—which, with more than 9 million annual visitors, ranks as the nation’s most popular park—lies Congaree National Park, where the total visitorship for all of 2008 didn’t quite break 105,000, or less than a third of what the Smokies saw in its slowest month (January) that year.

What those lucky 105,000 visitors experienced, though, was a pristine tract of old-growth forest creating an unbroken hardwood canopy that has survived virtually unchanged since the days before Columbus.

The other parks on our list may also be little known, but they too are singularly spectacular, each incorporating special features. North Cascades National Park, for example, has the highest concentration of glaciers in the lower 48 states, and Utah’s Capitol Reef, deep in the heart of Utah’s former bandit country, is renowned for its colorful layer cake of mountains.

“Somebody looked at our aerial footage of Capitol Reef and said it was computer generated,” said Ken Burns, creator of the popular documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, in an interview last September in the Salt Lake Tribune. “They can’t believe there is still a [pristine] place in the United States that looks like that.”

Burns is far from the first to sing the praises of these inspirational but little-known national parks.

“I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” said Theodore Roosevelt of his frontier ranches now incorporated into the park that bears his name. Buffalo, bighorn sheep, and wild horses still roam these Dakota badlands just as they did in Teddy’s day.

So strap on your boots, follow in the footsteps of Lee, Burns, and Roosevelt, and get ready to hit the nature trails of some of our least-known national treasures.
Start Slideshow

1 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Biscayne National Park, FL

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Ninety-five percent of this colorful park on Miami’s doorstep is underwater. Save for 30 islets and a mangrove forest fringe on the mainland, Biscayne is 173,000 acres of Caribbean-clear waters that wash over the sea-grass shallows of Biscayne Bay—and the world’s third largest coral reef.

Cool Fact: There are 72 shipwrecks in the park. Six are part of a Maritime Heritage Trail opening in late 2010. The 112-foot schooner Mandalay (a posh windjammer cruiser sunk in 1966) is shallow enough for snorkelers.

Don’t Miss: Some of the best snorkeling and scuba diving in the United States. Swim with manatees and more than 200 species of fish—colorful coral-nibblers, toothy silver barracuda, and 500-pound groupers.

1 of 10

Advertisement
Advertisement

2 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Congaree National Park,SC

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Congaree is a slice of the bayou just outside Columbia, SC. Its some 27,000 acres of floodplain (the polite word for “swamp”) were set aside to preserve the largest remaining tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the United States.

Cool Fact: This is serious forest, including some of the tallest trees (the loblolly pines can reach nearly 170 feet) in the eastern United States, forming one of the highest natural canopies in the world.

Don’t Miss: Free, ranger-guided weekend canoe tours on Cedar Creek, which flows gently around the knuckles of ancient bald cypress and tupelo garlanded with Spanish moss.

2 of 10

3 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Isle Royale National Park,MI

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

This gorgeous park near Thunder Bay, Canada, is the largest island in the world’s largest freshwater body (by surface area), Lake Superior. Though it ranks as the fifth least-visited park (14,000 annual visitors) in the nation, it has the highest backcountry use. It’s accessible only by boat or seaplane and is one of the few national parks to close in winter.

Cool Fact: The isolation makes this a unique bio-preserve. Isle Royale has freshwater clams, snails, and insects in sizes and densities not seen elsewhere since the 1800s (bring DEET). It’s also the only place where moose and wolves coexist without bears to balance atop the predator pole.

Don’t Miss: A boat tour around some of the park’s 400 satellite islands, and a backcountry camping trip.

3 of 10

Advertisement

4 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park,CO

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

The Gunnison thunders down the steepest mountain descent of any river in the United State s through one of the most spectacular and deepest canyons in the country. The less-trafficked North Rim has a great campground, at the lip of a nearly 2,000-foot plunge into the gorge.

Cool Fact: Stack the Empire State Building atop the Willis Tower (a.k.a. Sears Tower) and you’d still be two stories short of the canyon rim at Warner Point, 2,722 feet above the river.

Don’t Miss: Rafting the Gunny itself—a raging river of Class III to IV rapids sluicing though a canyon that’s often only 40 feet wide between mighty rock walls rising hundreds of feet—in the adjacent Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area.

4 of 10

5 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Theodore Roosevelt NationalPark, ND

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

This landscape of mythic western history, where Sitting Bull fought and General Custer hounded the Sioux, has the same eerily eroded badlands, shaggy buffalo, and bighorn sheep that draw crowds to Badlands National Park in South Dakota—but with half the visitors. Also: wild horses.

Cool Fact: In 1883, a 25-year-old politician from back East arrived in these parts to hunt buffalo. He started the first of several ranches (now part of the park) and began his extreme image makeover from scrawny New Yorker to strapping western adventurer (and future president) Teddy Roosevelt.

Don’t Miss: A horseback ride through the hills and badlands, splashing across the Little Missouri River.

5 of 10

6 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Capitol Reef National Park,UT

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Capitol Reef was established around a massive, 100-mile-long wrinkle in the earth’s crust called the Waterpocket Fold (the “reef” in the park name). This awesome and colorful mountainous layer cake showcases 10,000 feet—and 270 million years—of sedimentary history.

Cool Fact: The most popular day hike—Capitol Gorge, down a twisting dry-wash canyon, past a majestic domelike outcropping, to a series of natural water cisterns—takes you through the hills that were once the hideout of Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch.

Don’t Miss: The spectacular drive to the park from the west along Route 12, and the 1,400-year-old Indian petroglyphs on the roadside cliffs above the many orchards of Fruita, a historic hamlet where mule deer graze under the shade of cottonwoods along the Fremont River.

6 of 10

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

7 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Great Basin National Park,NV

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

This remote desert park in east-central Nevada has plenty of groves of gnarled bristlecone clocking in at more than 4,000 years old, as well as aspen, jackrabbits, and alpine wildflowers spread over 77,000 acres that range from the basin floor at 5,000 feet above sea level to peaks topping 13,000 feet.

Cool Fact: The skies over isolated Great Basin rank among the darkest in the lower 48 states, providing some of the best stargazing in the nation.

Don’t Miss: The glittering marble caverns of Lehman Caves, and the 3.4-mile round-trip hike to the Lexington Arch, a rare aboveground limestone arch that, at six stories, is one of the largest in the United States.

7 of 10

8 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

North Cascades National Park,WA

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Fifty miles from Bellingham on the Canadian border is a picture-postcard Pacific Northwest landscape of sawtooth mountains slung with hammocks of snow. More than 300 glaciers feed some of the country’s highest waterfalls, and wildlife, including the occasional grizzly, prowl the park’s old-growth forests.

Cool Facts: North Cascades is one of the snowiest places on earth and contains more than half of the glaciers in the lower 48 states. It also has the highest number of recorded plant species of any national park in the country.

Don’t Miss: A hike on the nearly 400 miles of trails—perhaps the stiff, 12-mile-round-trip Cascade Pass–Sahale Arm Trail winding through wildflower fields past waterfalls and glaciers with panoramas of some of the park’s 127 alpine lakes.

8 of 10

9 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Channel Islands National Park, CA

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Just offshore from developed SoCal lie the Channel Islands, five of which are protected as a national park. Fewer than 30,000 people actually leave the mainland to explore the islands themselves, where 175 miles of untrammeled shores make pristine breeding grounds for harbor seals and sea lions.

Cool Facts: Among the islands’ more than 2,000 plant and animal species are 145 found nowhere else in the world; they also have one of the best-preserved archaeological records on the Pacific coast, documenting 10,000 years of continuous human habitation.

Don’t Miss: A boat tour during whale migrations (blue and humpback in summer, gray from late December to mid-March) and a hike on the easy, 1.5-mile Anacapa Loop trail, which runs along the island’s dramatic ridgeline.

9 of 10

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

10 of 10

Save Pin
Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park,AK

Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

At 13.2 million acres of Alaskan wilderness, this, the largest U.S. park, is six times the size of Yellowstone and larger than nine U.S. states—yet it has only two roads, together barely totaling 105 miles. Combined with its contiguous neighbor parks, the 24 million acres form the world’s largest international protected area, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Cool Facts: The park has North America’s highest concentration of glaciers and encompasses nine of the 16 tallest mountains in the U.S. The park’s namesake, the 14,163-foot Mount Wrangell, is one of the world’s largest active volcanoes; on clear days, you can see it smoking.

Don’t Miss: A tour of the historic Kennecott copper mine buildings, followed by lunch at the New Golden Saloon in the funky former boomtown of McCarthy (pop: 42). Or, try rafting the Copper River or world-class fishing in Yakutat.

10 of 10

Replay gallery

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook

Up Next

By Reid Bramblett

Share the Gallery

Pinterest Facebook
Trending Videos
Advertisement
Skip slide summaries

Everything in This Slideshow

Advertisement

View All

1 of 10 Biscayne National Park, FL
2 of 10 Congaree National Park,SC
3 of 10 Isle Royale National Park,MI
4 of 10 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park,CO
5 of 10 Theodore Roosevelt NationalPark, ND
6 of 10 Capitol Reef National Park,UT
7 of 10 Great Basin National Park,NV
8 of 10 North Cascades National Park,WA
9 of 10 Channel Islands National Park, CA
10 of 10 Wrangell-St. Elias National Park,AK

Share options

Facebook Tweet Mail Email iphone Send Text Message
Travel + Leisure Travel + Leisure

Magazines & More

Learn More

  • Subscribe this link opens in a new tab
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Content Licensing this link opens in a new tab
  • Sitemap
  • Travel Guide Sitemap

Connect

Follow Us
Subscribe to Our Newsletters
Other Travel + Leisure Sites
Other Meredith Sites

Other Meredith Sites

  • 4 Your Health this link opens in a new tab
  • Allrecipes this link opens in a new tab
  • All People Quilt this link opens in a new tab
  • Better Homes & Gardens this link opens in a new tab
  • Bizrate Insights this link opens in a new tab
  • Bizrate Surveys this link opens in a new tab
  • Cooking Light this link opens in a new tab
  • Daily Paws this link opens in a new tab
  • EatingWell this link opens in a new tab
  • Eat This, Not That this link opens in a new tab
  • Entertainment Weekly this link opens in a new tab
  • Food & Wine this link opens in a new tab
  • Health this link opens in a new tab
  • Hello Giggles this link opens in a new tab
  • Instyle this link opens in a new tab
  • Martha Stewart this link opens in a new tab
  • Midwest Living this link opens in a new tab
  • More this link opens in a new tab
  • MyRecipes this link opens in a new tab
  • MyWedding this link opens in a new tab
  • My Food and Family this link opens in a new tab
  • MyLife this link opens in a new tab
  • Parenting this link opens in a new tab
  • Parents this link opens in a new tab
  • People this link opens in a new tab
  • People en EspaƱol this link opens in a new tab
  • Rachael Ray Magazine this link opens in a new tab
  • Real Simple this link opens in a new tab
  • Ser Padres this link opens in a new tab
  • Shape this link opens in a new tab
  • Siempre Mujer this link opens in a new tab
  • Southern Living this link opens in a new tab
  • SwearBy this link opens in a new tab
Travel + Leisure is part of the Travel + Leisure Group. Copyright 2021 Meredith Corporation. Travel + Leisure is a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation Travel + Leisure Group All Rights Reserved, registered in the United States and other countries. Travel + Leisure may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Privacy Policythis link opens in a new tab Terms of Servicethis link opens in a new tab Ad Choicesthis link opens in a new tab California Do Not Sellthis link opens a modal window Web Accessibilitythis link opens in a new tab
© Copyright . All rights reserved. Printed from https://www.travelandleisure.com

View image

America's Most Underrated National Parks
this link is to an external site that may or may not meet accessibility guidelines.