America is teeming with awe-inspiring natural beauty, but nowhere is this more evident than in the Mountain West states, where you’ll find the largest concentration of national parks in all of the United States.
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Established in 1872, Yellowstone is the oldest and perhaps most famous of America’s national parks, Yellowstone. Spanning the states of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, the park is known for its wildlife and many geothermal features, among them Old Faithful, which has erupted every 44 minutes to two hours since the year 2000. Visitors can stay at the Old Faithful Inn to catch the popular geyser shoot between 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of boiling water up to 185 feet high for up to 5 minutes.
Grizzly bears, moose, and American bison are just some of the fauna to be spotted at the park, the central location of the Kevin Costner TV drama series “Yellowstone.”
Straddling Nevada and California, Death Valley is the fifth-largest National Park in the United States. The hottest and driest place in North America, Death Valley’s terrain is dominated by salt flats, sand dunes, and badlands. Its harsh desert climate is home to diverse plant life, like the Creosote Bush and the Joshua Tree.
Then, there’s Utah’s Zion National Park, which was once populated by the Ancestral Puebloans also known as Anasazi, and later on settled by the Mormons. The park counts mountains, canyons, buttes, mesas, monoliths, rivers, slot canyons, and natural arches as some of its natural land features and rock formations. It is also home to 289 species of birds, 75 mammals (including 19 species of bat), and 32 species of reptiles.
