Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon From The South Rim | Photo Credit: Digon3 | Cover Photo: Nic McPhee
With Memorial Day and the summer season just hours away, our National Park Service is about to become inundated with people for the next four months.

Related: Bison Attacks Tourist Taking A Selfie With It

So in anticipation of summer tourists taking selfies with Bison, people throwing rocks off the rim of the Grand Canyon, and boy band morons desecrating pristine hot springs, we wanted to provide the reading public with some info that will inspire respect for the NPS and the servants who uphold its ideals.

Donate to The NPS here: National Park Foundation

Here are the 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The NPS

1) The National Park Service oversees roughly 84 million acres of pristine habitats, national monuments, and wilderness areas. The state of Kansas is only 52 million acres!

Photo Credit:
Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park | Photo Credit: Jim Peaco, NPS
2) The most visited National Park is Great Smoky Mountains National Park with over 10.5 million visitors annually. 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park | Photo Credit:
Great Smoky Mountains National Park | Photo Credit: USchick
3) Over 307 million people visit our national parks and monuments each year!

Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park | Photo Credit:
Crowds @Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park | Photo Credit: Allison Donnelly
4) The National Park Service oversees 75,000 archeological sites.

Petroglyph near Canyonlands National Park | Photo Credit:
Petroglyphs near Canyonlands National Park | Photo Credit: DaveJenkins.com via Wikimedia Commons
5) The highest peak in the United States is the 20,320′ Denali that lies within Denali National Park.

Denali | Photo Credit:
Denali | Photo Credit: Jennifer
6) 247 threatened and endangered species live within the National Park Service boundaries.

The endangered Black Footed Ferret @Wind Cave National Park | Photo Credit: NPS
The endangered Black Footed Ferret @Wind Cave National Park | Photo Credit: NPS
7) The National Park Service looks after approximately 18,000 miles of trail (that’s 3/4 of the Earth’s circumference!)

North Cascades National Park | Photo Credit:
North Cascades National Park | Photo Credit: Daniel Hershman
8) The world’s largest single organism– General Sherman (Giant Sequoia tree) is housed inside Sequoia National Park.

General Sherman | Photo Credit:
General Sherman | Photo Credit: Neal Parish
9) Crater Lake in Crater Lake National Park is the deepest lake in the US at 1,943. (That’s enough to sink the entire One World Trade Center!)

Crater Lake in winter | Photo Credit:
Crater Lake in winter | Photo Credit: WolfmanSF
10) Wrangell St. Elias National Park in Alaska is the biggest chunk of land under the NPS’ watch at 8.3 million acres. That’s bigger than each of the 9 smallest states in the country!

Mt. Saint Elias | Photo Credit: NOAA
Mt. Saint Elias | Photo Credit: NOAA

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