This is a barren time in the sports calendar. We are in a desolate trough between the international intrigue of the Olympics and the drama and nonsense of football season. I’m goddamn bored. Coincidentally, the National Parks Service turns 100 years old today. Unlike late August, the National Parks are good, and as the only member of the Deadspin staff with a geology degree, I am slightly more qualified to write about the natural wonders of our nation than anyone else.
The summer is drawing to a close, and maybe you want to visit a National Park. Which one should you go to? Do you wanna see cool rocks? What about bears? Please consult these airtight rankings. (I’m not going to rank American Samoa National Park or Virgin Islands National Park for various reasons we don’t need to get into.)
1. Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone National Park’s geothermal features are the products of a caldera, which is a recharging supervolcano with over 6,000 times the eruptive potential of Mt. St. Helens. Basically, magma from the Earth’s lower mantle travelled up through the upper mantle and the crust, and it feeds the Yellowstone caldera. It’s like Hawaii, but on land. As the Earth’s crust shifts over the hotspot, the location of the Yellowstone magma has changed. It erupted 2.1 million years ago, 1.2 million years ago, and 630,000 years ago. Astute readers will note that that recurrence interval indicates that another explosion could be approaching in the immediate future. When it explodes again, it will cover the Western United States in ash.
Anyway, Yellowstone is also very large, stocked with buffalo, and features a series of naturally heated rivers you can swim in.
2. Yosemite National Park
By the time the last glaciers carved their way through the Yosemite Valley 12,000 years ago, they’d managed to smooth over almost every peak in the region. Unlike the Lake Tahoe area, the Eastern Sierras are full of granite, and other felsic rocks. Harder mineral compositions means that famous hanging walls like Half Dome and El Capitan are able to stand up more or less perfectly straight.
All that said, the cooler part of the actual park is the less-visited eastern half. If you hike Cloud’s Rest, you can stare down at the little line of ant people scurrying up Half Dome, 2,000 feet below you. You are their queen. Look at those doofuses.
3. Zion National Park
Look at this shit.
4. Glacier National Park
As established in the Yosemite segment, glacial geomorphology is the shit. Glacier has the actual benefit of actual, uh, glaciers. Near-dead as they are, alpine glaciers are much weirder than glaciers that calve into the ocean. Experts estimate that the remaining glaciers in the park will all be gone by 2030, so go see them before these last remnants of the Ice Age die forever. Glacier NP has the additional benefit of a big grizzly bear population as well as mountain goats.
5. Bryce Canyon National Park
Bryce Canyon looks like an alien civilization tried to carve a long, complicated message to humanity via orange spires of rock. In fact, these hoodoos only exist because of a very specific confluence of circumstances. Most of the body of each column consists of soft layers of limestone and siltstone, capped off by a thinner, harder layer. The Bryce Canyon area was a paleo-lake, but it’s a very arid and cold climate now. Because there’s precious little rainfall in the area, conventional erosion is not the dominant regime. Instead, frost wedging contributed to much of the separation within rock columns that leads to hoodoos. Higher layers are more chemically resistant to weathering, allowing them to resist.
6. Olympic National Park
I usually think of rainforests as a rather equatorial biome, but there are several temperate rainforests on Washington’s Olympic peninsula. This is where people think Bigfoot lives. If I was him, I would hang here too.
7. Grand Canyon National Park
The only problem with the Grand Canyon is that there’s too much of it to comprehend at once. When you look down into it, there are simply too many incredibly detailed ridges and sub-valleys to take in to truly grasp its size in one go.
8. Grand Teton National Park
Here’s a fact: This National Park is named after boobs.
9. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
Because Hawaii is so volcanically active, many words for lava come from the native Hawaiian, like A’a and Pāhoehoe. If you look at the islands on a map, you can chart the course of the hotspot that created them over time. The islands furthest to the northwest are older and more degraded, while the big island is still actively growing on its southern margin. There is a chain of fallen, crumbled Hawaiis to the north of the existing island chain. Twenty two miles off the coast of the big island, the Lōʻihi Seamount has been slowly forming, and it will become the newest Hawaiian island. Sadly, it won’t breach the surface for at least 10,000 years, so we’re stuck the islands we’ve got.
10. Denali National Park
I respect and fear the power of mighty Denali.
11. Rocky Mountain National Park
12. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park
13. Redwood National Park
14. Badlands National Park
15. Everglades National Park
16. Kings Canyon National Park
17. Death Valley National Park
More fun than it sounds! Every 10 or so years, Death Valley experiences a “super bloom” as long-dormant seeds sprout en masse, covering the once-desolate landscape in a carpet of life. It’s weird as hell.
18. Great Smoky Mountains National Park
19. Joshua Tree National Park
20. Lassen Volcanic National Park
Nobody goes here, because it’s off in a strange pocket of northeastern California, but nowhere else has so many different types of magmatic systems packed into one area. The Gorda Plate, a fucked up old tectonic plate, has been subducting into the west coast for a long long time, and has produced some strange inland volcanism. Lassen Peak is the southernmost of the active volcanos in the Cascade Range, but the park also has a perfect cinder cone and some sulfuric hot spring action.
21. Sequoia National Park
Sequoias are redwoods, but with modesty.
22. Arches National Park
23. Capitol Reef National Park
24. Gates Of The Arctic National Park
25. Shenandoah National Park
26. Saguaro National Park
27. Kenai Fjords National Park
28. Glacier Bay National Park
Nice glacier.
29. Big Bend National Park
West Texas has a National Park and somehow it’s pretty good.
30. Acadia National Park
31. Mt. Rainier National Park
32. Channel Islands National Park
The Channel Islands were inhabited by a species of pygmy mammoth until about 10,000 years ago, when the ice age ended. A group of mammoths must have swam over to the islands and set up shop, gradually evolving into smaller and smaller animals to adapt to their island biome.
33. Katmai National Park
34. Petrified Forest National Park
35. Haleakala National Park
36. Lake Clark National Park
37. North Cascades National Park
38. Mammoth Cave National Park
Mammoth Cave is easily the longest cave in the world, about 405 miles of tubes and such under Kentucky. It’s so big they keep finding stuff in it, and it’s probably not fully explored.
39. Canyonlands National Park
40. Hot Springs National Park
41. Crater Lake National Park
42. Wind Cave National Park
43. Carlsbad Caverns National Park
44. Biscayne National Park
45. Mojave National Park
46. Dry Tortugas National Park
47. Congaree National Park
48. Cuyahoga Valley National Park
49. Great Basin National Park
50. Kobuk Valley National Park
51. Great Sand Dunes National Park
52. Black Canyon Of The Gunnison National Park
Pretty canyon.
53. Guadalupe Mountains National Park
54. Mesa Verde National Park
55. Voyageurs National Park
56. Isle Royale National Park
57. National Museum Of Getting Hit By A Car
58. Theodore Roosevelt National Park
They gave poor Teddy, who set the National Park system up, a very pretty but unspectacular park in North Dakota. Also, it’s split up into two unconnected segments, which, really, makes it two parks.