These New National Park Rankings Will Shock You

Let’s start with the real shockers: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion don’t even break the top 10 in a new ranking of U.S. national parks. Can we even trust a list that puts these incredible places in the middle of the pack? We’ll let you decide.

In celebration of National Park Week 2024, an online travel guide company called Travel Lemming released its updated list of best U.S. national parks for 2024. The team calculated each park’s overall ranking based on its average ranking across seven categories: crowds, reviews, weather, affordability, jobs, accessibility, and biodiversity. 

We’ll discuss more about methodology later. For now, let’s get to the rankings.

Travel Lemming’s Ranking of the U.S.’s 63 National Parks

1. Shenandoah National Park
2. Joshua Tree National Park
3. Olympic National Park
4. Great Smoky Mountains National Park
5. North Cascades National Park
6. Grand Canyon National Park
7. Channel Islands National Park
8. New River Gorge National Park
9. Everglades National Park
10. Redwood National Park
11. Cuyahoga Valley National Park
12. Saguaro National Park
13. Big Bend National Park
14. Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park
15. Death Valley National Park
16. Yellowstone National Park
17. Mount Rainier National Park
18. Zion National Park
19. Kenai Fjords National Park
20. Haleakalā National Park
21. Capitol Reef National Park
22. Sequoia National Park
23. Yosemite National Park
24. Grand Teton National Park
25. Carlsbad Caverns National Park
26. Canyonlands National Park
27. Dry Tortugas National Park
28. Biscayne National Park
29. Indiana Dunes National Park
30. White Sands National Park
31. Pinnacles National Park
32. Mammoth Cave National Park
33. Arches National Park
34. Rocky Mountain National Park
35. Badlands National Park
36. Congaree National Park
37. Kings Canyon National Park
38. Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
39. Lassen Volcanic National Park
40. Bryce Canyon National Park
41. Acadia National Park
42. Crater Lake National Park
43. Katmai National Park and Preserve
44. Denali National Park and Preserve
45. Petrified Forest National Park
46. Glacier National Park
47. Gateway Arch National Park
48. Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
49. Hot Springs National Park
50. Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
51. Voyageurs National Park
52. Guadalupe Mountains National Park
53. Mesa Verde National Park
54. Great Basin National Park
55. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve
56. Lake Clark National Park and Preserve
57. Isle Royale National Park
58. Theodore Roosevelt National Park
59. Virgin Islands National Park
60. Wind Cave National Park
61. American Samoa National Park
62. Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve
63. Kobuk Valley National Park

Where does your favorite park fall on the list?

Methodology

Travel Lemming explains its methodology quite extensively, detailing all seven categories and how they calculated a score for each one.

For instance, they took into consideration how crowded parks are by dividing the total recreation visits in 2023 by the number of square acres. They determined a “reviews” ranking by taking the average user-review score from multiple sources, including Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

They also considered average monthly temperature and precipitation, plus the likelihood for extreme weather to determine each park’s “weather” ranking, and they calculated affordability in part by digging up the National Park Service’s reports on total visitor spending per park.

A new category added in 2024 is “jobs.” Travel Lemming says it calculated each park’s jobs score by looking at the number of jobs each park creates. This is an attempt to gauge how significantly the park economically benefits the community around it.

For accessibility, the researchers looked at how easy or difficult it is to access the park. This category likely pulled the overall ranking down for stunning parks that require a helicopter or ferry to access, like Alaska’s remote Kobuk Valley National Park, which came in last place.

The final category that contributed to this year’s national park ranking is biodiversity. Travel Lemming gave a score in this category based on the total number of species present in each park.

What do you think? Will you choose your next national park adventure based on this ranking?