LIFE Explores America's National Parks

By Meredith Corporation

America's national parks are more popular than ever, drawing record numbers of visitors every year. This special issue is a celebration of these parks, representing the best of the geographic and biological diversity of the far-flung U.S. park system. Packed with extraordinary photographs (as well as intriguing data and detailed descriptions), these pages serve not only as a guide to the parks' individual charms, but also as an appreciation of their unmatched—and fragile—natural splendor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Meredith Corporation
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781547856763

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

This Land Is Your Land

America’s national parks are something all citizens can agree on: They are an inarguable treasure, the happy result of the prescience of our predecessors

BY DANIEL S. LEVY

The newest national park is New River Gorge in West Virginia.

JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS 2020, as part of a $2.3 trillion pandemic stimulus package, Congress redesignated the New River Gorge National River as a national park and preserve. The 73,000-acre spread in West Virginia lures mountain climbers with the deepest gorge in the Appalachian Mountains, and the river attracts those looking to barrel down 53 miles of whitewater. Visitors can spy kingfishers, beavers and wild turkeys, fish for smallmouth bass and muskellunge, and explore the African American Heritage trail.

The U.S. National Park System is made up of 423 sites—battlefields, military parks, historical sites, memorials, parkways, preserves, rivers and the system’s rarefied category of National Park. These national parks are found in 30 states and two territories, an area stretching 7,500 miles from the rocky eastern shore of Maine to the South Pacific coral reefs of American Samoa. And now, with the recent addition of New River Gorge, there are 63 of them.

Each year, millions of visitors find magic in these places: watching the sun break over the horizon from Maine’s Cadillac Mountain, spelunking Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, gazing over the vastness of Arizona’s Grand Canyon, photographing bison herds in Yellowstone, or braving a bone-chilling climb to the summit of Alaska’s Mount Denali. America’s national parks have long served as refuges of calm, meccas of adventure and vessels of discovery.

While all these places have been billions of years in the making, it can be said that Thomas Jefferson set off the desire to preserve them, long before the United States had any idea what existed out there in the wilderness. When Jefferson became president in 1801, there were 16 states, and the 25-year-old nation barely reached a third of the way across the continent. To those living in the 16 states, the area west of the Mississippi River was terra incognita.

Then, in 1803, Jefferson launched America’s age of exploration by dispatching Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lieut. William Clark to learn what lay in the 828,000-square-mile Louisiana Purchase (land the U.S. had just bought from the French) and to explore even beyond that, in the region of the northwest all the way to the Pacific Ocean. For more than two years, this Corps of Discovery expedition of nearly 80 servicemen and civilians trekked westward and then back east. On their 8,000-mile journey, Lewis, Clark and their crew chronicled all they saw, marveled at creatures they had never imagined, collected plants and minerals new to science. They gathered animal skins, buffalo robes and beaded native leggings and met with local tribes.

Their tales of adventure, hinting at the great natural treasures beyond the Appalachian Mountains, thrilled Jefferson and others, who resolved that the U.S. make its claim to the continent by assuming the nation’s God-given right to the land—Manifest Destiny, as it would come to be known. Soon settlers headed out to stake the territory, riding through prairies of swaying grasses, passing beneath snow-capped mountains and fording wide, powerful rivers.

Among those intrepid souls was the painter George Catlin. During his travels in the 1830s in present-day North Dakota, Oklahoma and Minnesota, he met with the Blackfoot, Cherokee, Chippewa and other tribes. He created hundreds of sketches and paintings—a delight to viewers when he exhibited them back east. Catlin was among the first to suggest the importance of protecting and preserving these western lands, writing of the need for a magnificent park . . . a nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild[ness] and freshness of their nature’s beauty.

Others agreed, and in 1872 President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Act, forming the first national park. More parks would follow, largely