National Parks: ‘A . .. pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people’

With a stroke of his pen on the morning of March1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant created the first National Park in the entire world: Yellowstone National Park, the very heart of the west, a wilderness wonderland containing healthy populations of all the top animals and predators native to the continent, as well as more than half of the geothermal formations and geysers in the world.

“A public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” he declared.

Since then, we have added more than 50 other large scale ecosystem parks, and nearly 350 other national monuments and historic sites that comprise the National Park System, often referred to as “the Soul of America.”

Are you missing out on the benefits? The pleasure? The enjoyment? We’ve traveled to 156 of the national park units, from the farthest point offshore Florida (The Dry Tortugas National Park) to the tip of Alaska, (Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park).

Let us be your guide into the vast natural treasury of America – our national parks, forests and wildlife reserves, comprising more than 650 million acres!