North American National Parks, From Greenland to the Caribbean

Northeast Greenland National Park, established in 1974 and enlarged in 1988, covers about 972,000 square kilometers and is the largest national park in the world, with an estimated five to fifteen thousand musk oxen living in an area that is essentially uninhabited year-round.

Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island in Nunavut takes its Inuktitut name from the phrase meaning the land that never melts, and it holds the Penny Ice Cap, Mount Thor with its 1,250 meter face and the Akshayuk Pass backpacking route.

Wood Buffalo National Park, created in 1922 across northeastern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories, is the largest national park in Canada at 44,741 square kilometres and is one of only two known nesting sites of the whooping crane.

Jasper National Park, first protected in 1907 as Jasper Forest Park, covers about 11,000 square kilometres of the Alberta Rockies and protects the glaciers of the Columbia Icefield, part of a World Heritage Site declared in 1984.

Waterton Lakes National Park began in 1895 as the Kootenay Lakes Forest Reserve and covers 505 square kilometers where the Rocky Mountains meet the Prairies, sharing a border with Glacier National Park in Montana.

Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana covers more than one million acres, includes more than 130 named lakes and over 1,000 plant species, and forms the centerpiece of the roughly 16,000 square mile Crown of the Continent Ecosystem.

Redwood National and State Parks combine one national park and three California state parks, and their 139,000 acres preserve 45 percent of all the remaining old growth coast redwood forest.

Zion National Park in southwestern Utah sits where the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin and Mojave Desert meet, and its Zion Canyon is fifteen miles long and up to 2,640 feet deep, carved by the North Fork of the Virgin River through Navajo Sandstone.

Big Bend National Park in West Texas takes its name from a large bend in the Rio Grande and is the largest protected area of Chihuahuan Desert in the United States, with more than 1,200 plant species and more than 450 bird species.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddles the North Carolina and Tennessee border, is crossed by the Appalachian Trail, and with more than 11 million visitors in 2025 is the most visited national park in the United States.

Virgin Islands National Park, established in 1956, protects roughly sixty percent of Saint John along with more than 5,500 acres of adjoining ocean, and joins Caribbean reefs and forests to remains from pre-Columbian times through the Danish colonial period.