National Park Week: 15 surprising facts about America's parks you may not know
It’s National Park Week — a unique time to appreciate the beauty and splendor of the great American outdoors.
While the U.S. park scene offers plenty of notable historic sites and landscapes, there are also many features and facts about our national parks that are far lesser known.
"National parks are powerful places that have many meanings and connections to those who visit them — our shared history, our sense of discovery, and our dreams of the future," the National Park Foundation notes.
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Here are 15 facts about the national parks, according to the National Park Service (NPS), that may come as a surprise.
This includes 13.2 million acres at the largest national park: Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
Wrangell-St. Elias is the same size as Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park and Switzerland combined, according to NPS.
Mackinac was decommissioned as a national park when U.S. troops were removed from Fort Mackinac, leaving no one to tend to the park, according to The Travel.
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Today, it is one of Michigan’s state parks known as Mackinac Island State Park.
On July 10, 1913, the California park's Furnace Creek hit a record-high 134 degrees, NPS reports.
Five species of sea turtles are found in South Florida's waters, which nest annually in the Dry Tortugas area, according to NPS.
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The park is made up of seven small islands that can only be reached by boat or plane, making it one of the most remote national parks in the U.S.
The cave system has 426 mapped miles with what's been discovered to date, according to NPS.
First State was formalized as a national park by an act of Congress in 2015, the City of Wilmington's website reports.
The bordering states of Maryland and New Jersey have 27 national parks combined.
Yellowstone's "supervolcano" eruptions happened 2.1 million, 1.3 million and 631,000 years ago, according to geologists who studied the large calderas left in the eruptions' wake.
Yellowstone is one of the world's largest active volcanic systems, Wyoming State Geological Survey reports.
Lechuguilla is mapped at 1,604 feet deep with more than 145 miles of passages.
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The cave is also known as one of the 10 longest caves in the world, NPS reports.
In the 1860s, thousands of Hawaiians suffering from leprosy were banished and isolated to Molokai Island, said NPS on its website.
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Hawaii's isolation policy was abolished in 1969, almost 30 years after a cure was found — but patients still live at Kalaupapa by choice.
President Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation on Jan. 9, 1903, making Wind Cave America's eighth national park, NPS reports.
Crater Lake, measured at 1,932 feet deep, was created when an eruption collapsed a tall peak 7,700 years ago, according to NPS.
Mountain goats are not native species to the Olympic Peninsula as of 2018, NPS stated.
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The animals have lost their fear of people due to human exposure, which can potentially lead to aggressive behavior, said NPS.
The massive volcano stands 13,681 feet above sea level and rises more than 30,000 feet from the bottom of the sea — a taller reach than Mount Everest.
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Mauna Loa, meaning "long mountain in Hawaiian," makes up about 51% of the island, NPS reports.
The Grand Canyon encompasses a whopping 1,218,375 acres of land, according to NPS.
The rolling white sand dunes span 275 square miles of New Mexico desert, NPS reports.
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