National parks by state (Alaska has 8)

There are 63 fully designated National Parks in the United States, spread across 30 states and two US territories. Alaska has 8, California has 9, and Utah has 5 in a stretch known as the Mighty Five. Twenty-seven states, mostly in the Midwest and the Northeast, have zero. This guide lists every park, the state that contains it, the year it was designated, and the visitation numbers that make Great Smoky Mountains the busiest and Gates of the Arctic the loneliest.

The states with the most national parks

A handful of Western states hold most of the parks. California leads at 9, Alaska is next at 8, Utah has 5, and Colorado has 4. Together those four states hold 26 of the 63 parks, roughly 41 percent of the entire system. The reason is simple: the federal government owned huge tracts of land in the West when the National Park idea took hold in the late 1800s, so setting land aside required no purchase, only an act of Congress or a presidential proclamation.

State	Parks	Named parks
California	9	Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Redwood, Lassen Volcanic, Channel Islands, Pinnacles
Alaska	8	Denali, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark, Wrangell-St. Elias
Utah	5	Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Zion
Colorado	4	Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, Great Sand Dunes, Black Canyon of the Gunnison
Washington	3	Mount Rainier, Olympic, North Cascades
Arizona	3	Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Saguaro
Florida	3	Everglades, Biscayne, Dry Tortugas
Wyoming	2	Yellowstone (shared), Grand Teton
Montana	2	Glacier, Yellowstone (shared)
South Dakota	2	Badlands, Wind Cave

Utah's five parks are packed into the southern half of the state and can be driven in a week, which is why the Mighty Five road trip has become a fixture of Western tourism. Colorado's four are more spread out but each showcases a different landscape, from alpine tundra at Rocky Mountain to the Pueblo cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. Wyoming and Montana share Yellowstone, so their counts overlap in the totals.

The 27 states with zero national parks

Not every state has one. Twenty-seven states have no national park within their borders, though most have national monuments, historic sites, or seashores managed by the same agency. The list of states with no national park at all:

• Northeast: Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont
• South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi
• Midwest: Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin
• West and other: Idaho (Yellowstone touches Idaho but the visitor infrastructure sits in Wyoming), Nevada (has Great Basin), Oklahoma, Vermont, plus the smaller states above

Two states surprise people. New York, despite being the third most populous, has no national park, only monuments like the Statue of Liberty and historic sites like Sagamore Hill. Pennsylvania, home to Valley Forge and Gettysburg (both national historical parks, a different category), has no national park either. The last northeastern state to gain one was Maine, when Acadia was upgraded from a national monument in 1919.

The biggest, the smallest, and the most visited

The scale of the parks varies wildly. Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska covers 13.2 million acres, larger than Switzerland. Gates of the Arctic, also in Alaska, is 8.4 million acres and gets fewer than 12,000 visitors a year because it has no roads, no trails, and no visitor center you can drive to. At the other end, Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri covers just 91 acres and is essentially a monument on a lawn.

Superlative	Park	State	Number
Largest	Wrangell-St. Elias	Alaska	13.2 million acres
Smallest	Gateway Arch	Missouri	91 acres
Most visited	Great Smoky Mountains	Tennessee / North Carolina	12+ million visitors / year
Least visited	Gates of the Arctic	Alaska	~11,000 visitors / year
Oldest	Yellowstone	Wyoming, Montana, Idaho	Established 1872
Newest	New River Gorge	West Virginia	Designated 2020
Highest point	Denali	Alaska	20,310 feet
Lowest point	Death Valley (Badwater Basin)	California	282 feet below sea level

Great Smoky Mountains gets more than double the annual visitors of the next busiest park, Grand Canyon. The reason is partly geographic (it sits within a day's drive of a third of the US population) and partly financial: the park charges no entry fee, a condition of the original 1930s land donation from the state of Tennessee. Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon all charge 35 dollars per vehicle.

National parks that cross state lines

A few parks sit in more than one state, which changes the count depending on how you measure it. The parks that cross borders:

• Yellowstone covers Wyoming (96 percent), Montana (3 percent), and Idaho (1 percent). Most visitor infrastructure, including Old Faithful and Mammoth Hot Springs, sits in the Wyoming portion.
• Great Smoky Mountains straddles the Tennessee and North Carolina border along the ridgeline. Both states claim it in their tourism materials.
• Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon are all fully in California, but Sequoia and Kings Canyon share a boundary and are administered as one unit by the Park Service.
• Death Valley extends slightly into Nevada, but is counted as a California park.
• Cumberland Gap is a national historical park (not a full national park) spanning Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, worth noting because it is often confused with the top-tier designation.

The Park Service counts each unit once regardless of how many state lines it crosses, so Yellowstone contributes one park to the total of 63, not three. That is why California's 9 is the honest maximum for a single-state count.

How the system was built, decade by decade

The National Park idea was invented in the US and exported worldwide. Yellowstone came first in 1872, protected by Congress before the states around it were even fully organized. Sequoia and Yosemite followed in 1890, both in California. The National Park Service itself was not created until 1916, under President Woodrow Wilson, to manage the growing collection of parks and monuments in one federal agency. Before that, individual parks were guarded by the US Army.

The biggest wave of new parks came in 1980, when the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act created seven new Alaska parks in a single stroke: Gates of the Arctic, Katmai (upgraded from a monument), Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark, Glacier Bay (upgraded), and Wrangell-St. Elias. That one law more than doubled the acreage of the National Park System overnight. Recent additions have been slower and more scattered: Great Sand Dunes in Colorado (2004), Pinnacles in California (2013), Gateway Arch in Missouri (2018), Indiana Dunes (2019), White Sands in New Mexico (2019), and New River Gorge in West Virginia (2020), the most recent full designation.

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