America’s most popular national park is …
Straddling the North Carolina-tennessee border, the most popular national park in the United States covers 800 square miles in the Southern Appalachian Mountains and is home to lovely flora and fauna and a large section of the Appalachian Trail. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which attracted 12.5million visitors last year, topped the National Park Service’s 2019list of most popular national parks, the park service reported in April. More than 327million people visited park service sites last year, a 2.9% increase from 2018, and the third-highest number since record keeping began in 1904. (The park service wasn’t even created until 1916.)
Among those 419 sites, only 62 are national parks. The park service also released rankings on all the sites it oversees, which includes parkways, seashores, lakeshores, battlefields and memorials. With more than 15 million visitors in 2019, Golden Gate National Recreation Area took the park service’s overall top spot for the second year in a row, beating out second place Blue Ridge Parkway, the 2017winner, which had 14.9million visitors last year.
The two park sites have been swapping first and second place rankings since 1979, the park service said.
1 Great Smoky Mountains National Park,
12.5 million visits 2 Grand Canyon National Park, 5.97 million visits
3 Rocky Mountain National Park, 4.7 million visits
4 Zion National Park, 4.5 million visits
5 Yosemite National Park, 4.4 million visits
6 Yellowstone National Park, 4 million visits
7 Acadia National Park, 3.4 million visits
8 Grand Teton National Park, 3.4 million visits
9 Olympic National Park, 3.2 million visits
10 Glacier National Park, 3 million visits