The 50 Most Popular National Parks in America
By Hannah Lang, Stacker News
On 5/15/21 at 8:00 AM EDT
Lucky-photographer / Shutterstock
Approximately 237 million people visited American national parks in 2020, representing a 28 percent year-over-year decrease attributed to the coronavirus pandemic. To determine the most popular national parks in the United States, Stacker compiled data from the National Park Service on the number of recreational visits each site had in 2020.
President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 signed the act creating the National Park Service to leave natural and historic phenomenons unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. Since then, our national parks have welcomed visitors from around the world to experience some of the best the country has to offer and showcase the country s natural beauty and cultural heritage.
At the end of March, the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone tribal council voted to cancel a preliminary agreement with the resource company Lithium Nevada to explore installing an open-pit mine near the reservation. Thacker Pass, near the Oregon border, is home to the largest deposit of lithium in the United States. Supporters of the mine say it could produce up to 66,000 tons per year of lithium carbonate, a component in rechargeable batteries, which car and truck manufacturers can use to build millions of solar-powered and electric cars over the next five decades, buttressing an essential component of President Biden’s plan to reverse the progress of climate change. And yet it poses plenty of its own risks: according to the EPA, waste tailings from the mine could leave traces of uranium, mercury, and arsenic in the local watershed, where they’d linger for the next three centuries. Regardless of whether a private, for-profit entity like Nevada Lithium is acting with the best of int
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Friends of Cedar Mesa Director Josh Ewing points to petroglyphs at Sand Island Campground. The area was taken out of Bears Ears National Monument when the boundaries were redrawn in 2017.
Just five miles west of Bluff in southern San Juan County, there’s a campground called Sand Island. It’s nestled between a steep cliff and the bank of the San Juan River, and it’s home to some of the oldest rock art in America.
Renee Bright
President Barack Obama designated roughly 1.35 million acres in San Juan County as Bears Ears National Monument in December 2016.
Josh Ewing is the director of a Bluff-based conservation group called Friends of Cedar Mesa, and he’s an expert on the petroglyphs.
Five months after an unusual death, another man is missing at unique Death Valley hot springs
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The body of Donald Vanneman III was discovered in this source pool on Dec. 20, 2020. In a separate incident, another man, Robert Alan Wildoner, is currently missing from the area. National Park Service
Five months after an unusual death at a unique Death Valley hot springs destination, a man has gone missing in the same spot.
Robert Bob Wildoner was camping around the Saline Valley Hot Springs area while attempting to repair and retrieve a vehicle that broke down at the site over the Easter holiday, according to the Inyo Valley Sheriff s Office and a missing persons poster posted on the Saline Preservation Association website.
Did one of Southern California’s most isolated places become even more isolated during the pandemic? You bet. The funky allure of Slab City, which my colleague Priscella Vega calls “the Shangri-La of desert weirdness,” was no match for COVID-19. “The people that come visit me Iceland, Russia, Japan stopped coming,” said Rodney “Spyder” Wild, owner of an RV compound he rents on Airbnb.
The squatter’s paradise, which vaguely feels like a free, year-round Burning Man, is in Imperial County on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea about 50 miles north of the border with Mexico. Locals call it “the last free place in America” where there are no rules, no government, no taxes.