Unique Otherworldly National Parks

Above, the Painted Desert at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Our national parks come in many different sizes and features. Some parks make one feel as if they're on another planet. 

Travel + Leisure has an article on 10 national parks that will give one that exact feeling. Most of them are freer of crowds than the most well-known parks such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone. Each one is unique.

Travel + Leisure begins it with:

A trip to a national park can make for a great fall vacation. In fact, it makes for a great vacation any time of the year. 

Of course, if you plan on going to some of the most popular national parks in the U.S., like Yosemite National Park or Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you might end up fighting some crowds. And, while all of the 418 park sites (including 61 official national parks) in the National Park Service system are unique in their own way, there are a few underrated parks that deserve some attention for their particularly strange or peculiar features that you can’t find anywhere else. 

For instance, did you know it was possible to take a trip to another planet without leaving the continental U.S.? Otherworldly parks and monuments like White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, and Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho all feature unique landscapes that you wouldn’t expect to find in the U.S. Even the slightly more well-known Death Valley National Park, famous for its peculiar sailing stones, was the original backdrop for Luke Skywalker’s family farm in Star Wars. 

But beyond transporting visitors to the farthest reaches of the galaxy no passport required, some of these national park sites are record holders, including Mammoth Cave National Park, with its 400 miles of explored cave tunnels (the longest system in the world). 

There are thousands of incredible hiking trails, campgrounds, forests, lakes, waterfalls, and mountain peaks throughout the country, but only at these 10 national parks and park sites can you find something fascinating, something unique, or even something downright weird. 

For the purpose of this list, even though there are only 61 official national parks, we chose to include national monuments in order to provide the most diverse landscapes and features. Though there are plenty of unique spots in more popular parks like Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, and Grand Canyon National Park, we chose not to include them since they have such high visitor counts.

To read more, go here.