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.
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For Santa Fe tour operator Monique Schoustra, the past year was “the offseason that just kept going and going and going.”
The final credit card transaction she ran in 2020 for Great Southwest Adventures, the business she co-founded in 1998, was on March 10 the day before New Mexico announced its first three cases of COVID-19 disease and declared a public health emergency.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic stymied her business at the beginning of its crucial season bringing tour buses to sites around northern New Mexico: the Bandelier National Monument, Chama River Valley, Pecos and Chaco national parks and Taos, among other locations.
“We were hopeful, like everyone was, that this was just going to be a few months … a temporary blip,” she recalled.
American honey is radioactive from nuclear bomb test in the 1950s, researchers say
Published
What is the Doomsday Clock?
The decision to move the hands of the clock is made by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board in correspondence with the Bulletin’s board of sponsors, which consist of 13 Nobel Laureates.
LOS ANGELES - Scientists are finding traces of radioactive fallout from atomic bomb testing during the 1950s and 1960s in honey produced in the United States today.
According to a study published on March 29 in the scientific journal Nature Communications, researchers found evidence of a radioactive isotope, cesium-137, in honey produced in the United States.
(Part 1 of this two-part article told the story of how a simple traffic stop led Socorro city leaders to talk of seceding from New Mexico and the rest of the United States in 1953. Leaders of the so-called Free State of Socorro claimed that with no state or federal taxes, Socorroâs economy would boom while its population would more than triple. Even Life magazine ran a story about the rebel state and its prospects in June 1953.)
Home Rule
As with every secessionist movement, it soon became time to create a government to rule the Free State of Socorro. Leaders called for a constitutional convention to be held in October 1953.
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In this historic photo, military personnel are seen moving “Jumbo” to Trinity Site. One of the concerns of the scientists who built the “Gadget” nuclear device that was detonated at Trinity Site in 1945, was that the bomb might not actually go off. In order to preserve the 13 pounds of plutonium in case of failed detonation, an 80 ton steel vessel named “Jumbo” was built with the intention of imploding the device inside. The $12 million vessel was never used for that purpose because by the time the test was nearly ready, scientists were confident that it would work. Instead, “Jumbo” was suspended on a steel tower 800 meters from ground zero. The tower was completely destroyed in the explosion, but “Jumbo” remained very much intact. Later, the military tried to destroy it using eight 500 pound bombs, but only succeeded in blowing the ends off of it. What remains can still be