The first national park
When early explorers came back from the Yellowstone area of the American West with stories of boiling mud, steaming ground and fountains of hot water shooting into the air, many people did not believe them. In 1872 Congress set Yellowstone aside as the world's first national park, to be protected for everyone rather than sold off. Its most famous GEYSER, Old Faithful, erupts roughly every hour and a half, and it sits on top of one of the largest volcanic systems on Earth. The rainbow colours of its hot springs come from heat-loving microbes, and its bison herd is the oldest in the United States that has lived wild the whole time. Canada created its first park, BANFF, around hot springs in the Rocky Mountains in 1885.
A president and a naturalist sleep in the snow
In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt went camping in YOSEMITE with the Scottish-born naturalist John Muir, who had spent years campaigning to protect it. They slept outdoors, and one morning woke under a fresh covering of snow. Roosevelt went on to protect around 230 million acres of land during his presidency. Yosemite's granite cliffs, such as El Capitan, rise almost a kilometre straight up from the valley floor.
SEQUOIA National Park holds the General Sherman tree, the largest single tree on Earth by volume, over 80 metres tall and weighing more than a thousand tonnes. The tallest known tree, a coast REDWOOD over 115 metres high, grows in Redwood National Park, but its exact location is kept secret to protect it from visitors trampling its roots.
The Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon in Arizona is about 450 kilometres long and up to 1.8 kilometres deep, carved by the Colorado River over roughly the last five or six million years. The rocks at the bottom are nearly two billion years old, so walking down the trail is like walking back through the Earth's history, layer by layer. Roosevelt protected it in 1908, and it became a national park in 1919. ARCHES National Park in Utah has more than two thousand natural stone arches, and in SAGUARO the tall cactus that gives the park its name may not grow its first arm until it is fifty or more years old.
Parks for wildlife
Many parks were created to protect animals. KRUGER in South Africa, about the size of Wales, is home to lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos and buffalo, and the SERENGETI in Tanzania hosts the great herds whose yearly journey is on our safari animals page. The EVERGLADES in Florida, a vast, slow-moving river of grass, is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles live side by side.
Parks also show how the world is changing. GLACIER National Park in Montana had around 150 glaciers in 1910 and now has only about two dozen. Every RANGER, TRAIL and RESERVE exists to protect WILDLIFE, HABITAT and WILDERNESS, from DENALI in Alaska, so wild that most visitors see it only from a bus on its single road, to OLYMPIC, ZION and ACADIA, and the CANYON country of the south-west.