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Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado was the first national park established to protect human created structures and history, including 5,000 archaeological sites and 600 cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people.

California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks is home to the largest living single-stem tree in the world, the giant 275 foot tall General Sherman.

The smallest national park unit, Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, only takes up roughly 0.02 acres in downtown Philadelphia.

The diversity of plant and animal life, beauty of the mountains, and incredible campsites and communities in Tennessee and North Carolina make Great Smoky Mountains National Park the most visited (12 million people in 2020) national park.

Of course the country’s largest state, Alaska, is home to its largest park, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve at 13.2 million acres.

The longest cave system in the world with more than 3,454 mapped miles of caves is located beneath Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.

Speaking of caves, Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico is home to the deepest cave in the country at 1,593 feet.

Ironically, the first state, Delaware, is the only one without a single national park or national monument. Being the second smallest state, there’s plenty of options within driving distance though.