National Parks

I am on a National Park kick right now. It began last week with a helpful reminder that it was free national park day and I also posted the days for the year. Well that was a great post and I enjoyed it. Then a few days later my dad emailed me with questions that I felt like were good questions and thus they are being turned into a blog. So here we go!

Hey which states have the most national parks?

Tied in first place is Alaska and California with 8 followed by Utah with 5 and Colorado with 4 (wiki answers)

How many does Utah have?

5 national parks: Arches, Canyon Lands, Bryce, Capitol Reef, and Zion.

Also what’s the difference between national parks and national monuments?

National Parks are designated by congress. National monuments are set aside by the president.

And which states by square miles have the most space devoted to national parks and which have the most by percentage of the state devoted to NPs?

This question is not so simple to look up, but lets say this Alaska smokes the competition when it comes to square kilometers coming in around 131,000.

As for the second part of this question, I think California might come in first, but I would have to go tabulate the numbers of roughly 50 national parks for almost all 50 states. I neither have the time to go do this, nor does the national park service because I did not find it there either.

 
Des every state have at least one national park?

No

Which parks are the top 5 visited? How many people visit the parks?

Rank    Park Name    Visitation
1    Great Smoky Mountains NP- 9,289,215
2    Grand Canyon NP- 4,279,439
3    Yosemite NP- 3,242,644
4    Yellowstone NP- 2,870,295
5    Olympic NP- 2,749,197
6    Rocky Mountain NP- 2,743,676
7    Zion NP-  2,567,350
8    Cuyahoga Valley NP- 2,468,816
9    Grand Teton NP- 2,406,476
10    Acadia NP- 2,083,588

So here are your national park facts for the day. I hope you enjoy. Next week will be really cool though. Zion+Free National Park Day+ Friends=Awesome