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Thursday 18 August 2016

National Park

There are 58 national parks of the United States operated by the National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior. National parks must be established by an act of the United States Congress. These parks combined protect more than 51,900,000 acres (210,000 km2) in twenty-seven states and two territories.

Yellowstone National Park was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.  It spans an area of 3,468.4 square miles (8,983 km2), comprising lakes, canyons, rivers, and mountain ranges

Detailed pictorial map from 1904

Although Yellowstone was not officially termed a "national park" in its establishing law, it was always termed such in practice and is widely held to be the first and oldest national park in the world.

The first area to use "national park" in its creation legislation was the US's Mackinac Island, in 1875.

At the urging of preservationist John Muir and editor of Century Magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, the United States Congress established Yosemite National Park in California on October 1, 1890. The park reaches across the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

View of Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park,. By Diliff 

During his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the creation of five National Parks.

Parks Canada, the world's first national park service, was established on May 19, 1911 under the Canadian Department of the Interior. Since its creation, its name has changed, known variously as the Dominion Parks Branch, National Parks Branch, Parks Canada, Environment Canada - Parks Branch, and the Canadian Parks Service, before a return to Parks Canada in 1998.


President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service on August 25, 1916. It was established to manage all the national parks, many national monuments, and other conservation and historical properties around the United States.

President Wilson signed an act of the U.S. Congress in 1919 establishing most of the Grand Canyon as a United States National Park.

Grand Canyon

President Calvin Coolidge signed an Executive Order in 1929 establishing the 96,000 acre Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

The Peak District was designated the UK’s first National Park on April 17, 1951.

Peak District

The newest U.S. national park is Great Sand Dunes, established in 2004, which like many other national parks was previously a national monument.

Donald Trump donated his first-quarter presidential salary of $78,000 to the US National Parks Service in 2017 only days after announcing $2 billion in cuts to the department that funds it.

There are 113,000 National Parks in the world covering six per cent of the Earth’s land surface.

England’s 10 National Parks cover more than nine per cent of the country.

Northeast Greenland National Park is the world's national park. Established in 1974 and expanded to its present size in 1988, it protects 972,001 km2 (375,000 sq mi of the interior and northeastern coast of Greenland. The park is bigger than all but 29 countries in the world and features 5000 - 15,000 Musk Oxen with no permanent human population. It is overseen by the Greenland Department of Environment and Nature.

Zackenberg Station, Northeast Greenland National Park

The Great Smoky Mountains, straddling Tennessee and North Carolina, was the most visited national park in the U.S. in 2015 with 10,712,674 visitors.

The US's biggest park is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska. It was established in 1980 and it contains 13.2 million acres.

The least-visited national park in the U.S. is the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in Alaska, which lies entirely north of the Arctic Circle and has "no established roads, trails, visitor facilities, or campgrounds."

The Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota is the only American national park named directly after a single person.

The Brasília National Park is a national park located 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) from the centre of the Brazilian capital city of Brasília. The park covers an area of 423.83 square kilometres (163.64 sq mi), with territory spanning the suburbs of Brasilia, Brazlândia and Sobradinho and the municipality of Padre Bernardo. It is the largest park in the world which is situated in an urbanized area.

"Moyenne Island" is a small uninhabited island in Seychelles which a certain Brendon Grimshaw bought for £8,000 in 1962. With help from a partner, Rene Antoine Lafortune, Grimshaw transported and bred roughly 120 tortoises onto the island which is now the world's smallest national park

The Miami area is the only metropolitan area surrounded by two national parks — Everglades to the west, Biscayne to the east.

In October 1999 Jan Davis, who protested the banning of BASE jumping at national parks due to safety concerns, by BASE jumping off El Capitan in Yosemite National Park . Her parachute failed to open and she died.

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