The Most Beautiful National Parks in the United States
9 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful national parks in the United States are Yellowstone National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park. The list covers 9 national parks. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The United States invented the national park. Yellowstone, set aside in 1872, became the first national park in the world, and the idea grew from the country's scale: whole volcanic plateaus, canyon systems and mountain ranges were placed under protection before towns and roads could divide them. The American West in particular holds rock laid down over hundreds of millions of years and laid bare by uplift and erosion.
Yellowstone sits on a vast volcanic caldera, with more geysers and hot springs than anywhere else on earth, from Old Faithful to the rainbow rings of Grand Prismatic Spring. The Grand Canyon cuts through nearly two billion years of rock, and in Utah, Bryce Canyon is filled with thousands of hoodoos, while Zion's red and cream sandstone cliffs tower over the Virgin River.
In California, Yosemite is the granite valley of El Capitan and Half Dome, and Sequoia protects groves of giant sequoias, including the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on earth by volume. Badlands in South Dakota shows striped buttes and pinnacles rich in fossils, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado is so narrow and deep that its walls stay in shadow for much of the day.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 2 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | |
| 3 | Zion National Park | National park | |
| 4 | Sequoia National Park | National park | |
| 5 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 6 | Yosemite National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 7 | Badlands National Park | National park | |
| 8 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | |
| 9 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | ✓ |
01 Yellowstone National Park
United States44.600° N 110.500° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
James St. John from Newark, Ohio · CC BY 2.0 The park's more recent history is a case study in how fragile even a protected wilderness can be. Wolves were hunted to extinction inside Yellowstone by the 1920s, and their absence let elk populations balloon and strip valleys of young trees — a chain of consequences ecologists were still tracing decades later. When wolves were reintroduced in 1995, willow and aspen began recovering within a few years, an outcome now taught as one of the clearest real-world demonstrations of what a single missing predator can do to an entire landscape.
Did you know? The Yellowstone Caldera measures about 72 by 45 km and was created by an eruption 640,000 years ago that released more than 1,000 cubic km of material.
02 Bryce Canyon National Park
United States37.640° N 112.170° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay People have lived here for at least 10,000 years. The Paiute told that the hoodoos were the Legend People, turned to stone by the trickster Coyote for their misdeeds. The name comes from Ebenezer Bryce, a Scottish-born Mormon settler who homesteaded below the amphitheatre in 1874 and is reputed to have called it a hell of a place to lose a cow. Protected as a national monument in 1923 and a national park in 1928, Bryce is also a Dark Sky Park: its night sky is among the darkest in North America, with about 7,500 stars visible to the eye, and rangers lead stargazing programmes. The park is home to the largest protected population of the threatened Utah prairie dog.
Did you know? The hoodoos are carved from the soft Claron Formation of the Pink Cliffs, while harder rock nearby survives as solid monoliths in the White Cliffs.
03 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Zion's darkness is as much a resource as its rock. Away from the sandstone glow of sunset, the park carries International Dark Sky Park status, meaning its night skies are protected from light pollution seriously enough to show the Milky Way clearly on a clear night — a designation that's becoming rarer nationally even as more people learn to value it, and one that rewards anyone willing to stay past the point when the tour buses leave.
Did you know? The Zion–Mount Carmel tunnel, opened in 1930, runs for about 1.1 miles through the sandstone, with windows cut into the cliff.
04 Sequoia National Park
United States36.565° N 118.773° W
Image by Kjjj3 from Pixabay The complication is what a century of fire suppression did to that arrangement. With small fires kept out of the groves for decades, fuel built up on the forest floor, and starting around 2015, wildfires burning through that accumulated fuel have reached temperatures the trees never evolved to survive — hot enough, in the worst cases, to cook the seeds inside cones that would once have opened safely. Parks staff now use prescribed, deliberately low-intensity burns to try to restore the fire regime the sequoias actually need, rather than the one climate change and a century of well-meant suppression left behind.
Did you know? The Giant Forest grove holds five of the ten largest trees on Earth by volume.
05 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Most people see the canyon from the South Rim, where the rim road and the paved Rim Trail string together viewpoints such as Mather, Hopi and Mohave Points. The South Rim also holds a remarkable group of early park architecture. Mary Colter designed Hermit's Rest and Lookout Studio (both 1914), Bright Angel Lodge (1935), whose stone fireplace repeats the canyon's rock layers in order, and the Desert View Watchtower of 1932 at the eastern end, modelled on Ancestral Puebloan towers and offering one of the few views down to the river.
Did you know? The canyon is about 446 km long, up to 29 km wide and more than 1.8 km deep.
06 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay The Ahwahneechee lived in the valley for thousands of years before the Mariposa War brought outsiders in 1851. Only thirteen years later, in 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, placing the valley and Mariposa Grove under protection; John Muir's campaign then led to the national park in 1890. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 1984.
Did you know? The 1864 Yosemite Grant was the first time the US government set land aside specifically for preservation and public use, eight years before Yellowstone.
07 Badlands National Park
United States43.750° N 102.500° W
Image by victortran0107 from Pixabay The light is the thing to wait for. At sunrise and sunset the low sun rakes across the ridges and the stripes in the rock appear almost painted; at midday the same landscape goes flat and bleached. Short trails near the eastern entrance, such as the Window Trail, lead straight in among the formations.
Did you know? In 1993 two visitors spotted a backbone by a picnic area, launching the Big Pig Dig that went on to yield thousands of fossil bones.
08 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay For the bold, the inner canyon can be reached by steep, unmaintained routes that are serious undertakings, while the paved East Portal Road, with a 16 percent grade, descends to the river at the canyon's upstream end. Sunrise and late evening, when light slides briefly down the walls, are the moments to stand at the edge.
Did you know? Twenty-six workers died building the Gunnison Tunnel, and President William Howard Taft travelled to Colorado to dedicate it in September 1909.
09 Mesa Verde National Park
United States37.260° N 108.494° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- Dark Sky Place
Image by kaylee from Pixabay The outside world learned of the ruins in the 1880s. Local rancher Richard Wetherill and his companion Charlie Mason came upon Cliff Palace in December 1888, and in 1891 the young Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiöld carried out the first methodical excavations, shipping many objects to Europe. Alarm at looting helped push Congress to protect the area, and the decades of stabilisation, excavation and wildfire-revealed discoveries since then have made Mesa Verde one of the best-studied ancient landscapes in North America.
Did you know? Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in the park, contains around 150 rooms and 23 kivas.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful national parks in the United States?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park ranks first, followed by Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park.
- What was the first national park in the United States?
- Yellowstone, established in 1872, was the first national park in the United States and is widely considered the first in the world.
- What is the largest tree in the world?
- By volume, the largest known tree is the General Sherman Tree, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park, California.
- What are hoodoos?
- Hoodoos are tall, thin spires of rock left behind by erosion. In Bryce Canyon, frost wedging and rain wear down layers of soft limestone, while harder caps protect the tops of the pillars.
- How many national parks are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 9 national parks.