Have You Ever Visited A National Park?

If not, this Saturday may be the perfect day.  It is National Public Lands Day and you can get in free to any national park. I came across an interesting article about national parks.  I remembered that historian Ken Burns did an amazing documentary on national parks in the United States back in 2009.  It took six years to put it together and it was turned into a 12 hour television series and I did get to see some of it. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is the only National Park I have been to.  

How did national parks begin in this country? President Woodrow Wilson is given a lot of credit for creating The National Park System in 1916. President Theodore Roosevelt created five national parks and has four parks named after him as does Abraham Lincoln.  The most well known national parks in this country are the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Park. Below is a picture of Yosemite Falls.

Although we have 423 national park sites, there are only 63 actual national parks.  There are six other countries who have more national parks than we do and here they are:

#6 Mexico has 67 national parks with many of them focused on the water surrounding the country.

#5 Brazil has 72 national parks and is best known for some of the most amazing beaches in the world, which you may already know.

#4 Israel? I was surprised with this one. They have 81 national parks and their National Park System covers 20% of the country.  The best known one is Masada National Park which looks over the Dead Sea.  Two of my children have visited this site.

#3 India has 106 national parks and one of them is the best place to in the world to see tigers.

#2 Thailand has an incredible 147 national parks including one that is 1,125 square miles.

#1 Australia: I actually knew the answer to this after reading a book on the country.  Ready for this, it's pretty amazing. They have 726 national parks which sounds ridiculous.  The most famous one is Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park which has on display a 4.4 billion year old rock formation pictured below.  How about that purple sky?