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Zion National Park
Zion National Park, established in 1919 as Utah's first national park, is defined by the dramatic sandstone canyon carved by the Virgin River, whose sheer red and cream-colored cliffs rise up to 2,000 feet directly above the canyon floor in some of the park's most iconic sections. The park's Angels Landing hike, a famously narrow trail with chain handholds bolted into the rock along a knife-edge ridge with sheer drop-offs on both sides, became so popular and congested that the National Park Service implemented a permit lottery system in 2022 specifically to manage visitor safety and trail overcrowding. The Narrows, a hike that involves wading and sometimes swimming directly through the Virgin River between towering, closely spaced canyon walls, offers a genuinely different kind of hiking experience from Zion's more conventional trails, with sections of the canyon narrowing to just 20 to 30 feet wide between walls that rise a thousand feet or more overhead. Zion's combination of its dramatic sandstone canyon walls, the famously exposed Angels Landing hike now requiring a permit lottery, and the genuinely unique river-wading experience of the Narrows has made it one of the most physically adventurous and consistently popular national parks in the entire American Southwest.
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Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, established in 1934, is consistently the most visited national park in the entire United States by a wide margin, drawing well over 12 million visitors annually — more than double the visitation of the next most popular park — a status driven substantially by its free admission and its position within a day's drive of a huge share of the eastern US population. The park straddles the border between Tennessee and North Carolina, and its name comes from the natural blue-tinted haze that often settles over the mountains, produced by volatile organic compounds released from the region's dense forest vegetation rather than pollution, a genuinely natural atmospheric phenomenon. The Great Smoky Mountains hold one of the most biodiverse temperate forest ecosystems in the world, home to more tree species than all of Northern Europe combined, along with a synchronous firefly species whose brief, coordinated flashing display each early summer has become its own significant seasonal tourist draw requiring a separate lottery-based viewing permit. Great Smoky Mountains National Park's combination of being the most visited national park in the country, its naturally occurring blue haze, and its exceptional forest biodiversity has made it the essential accessible-wilderness entry point for a huge share of the American population that might never otherwise visit a national park at all.
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