Nearest-park regions · all 63 congressionally designated parks

U.S. National Park Gravity Map (Voronoi)

Every point on U.S. land, coloured by the closest of the 63 congressionally designated National Parks — an unweighted nearest-site Voronoi on great-circle distance to each park's representative point. Contiguous 48 states as the main map; Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands as insets. Hover or tap any region for the park behind it. Prepared from live web data on 2026-08-28.

Each colour is one park's gravity region: every location inside it lies closer — along the great circle — to that park's representative point than to any other park's. Colours identify parks only; they carry no ranking. Dots mark representative points, not park boundaries or entrances.

East of the Rockies and across Alaska, single parks command enormous gravity regions — the roster places only a handful of parks between the Mississippi and the Atlantic — while clusters in California, the Colorado Plateau and the Pacific Northwest carve the West into tight cells. wpstudents.towson.edu

All 63 official parks are covered, explicitly including the eight Alaska parks (Denali, Wrangell-St. Elias, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark), the two Hawaii parks, the National Park of American Samoa and Virgin Islands National Park. simplemaplab.com

44 of the 63 parks were extracted from the Wikipedia featured list with 2025 recreation-visitor counts; the remaining 19 names and locations were supplemented from the complete 63-park roster. wikipedia.org · wpstudents.towson.edu

Park points here are representative coordinates, consistent with the single latitude/longitude the NPS API publishes per unit; full boundary geometry exists (USA National Parks GeoJSON, NPS GIS boundaries) but this map deliberately uses one point per park. apis.io · gist.github.com · carto.nationalmap.gov

Methodology. Assignment is purely geographic: each location joins the park whose representative latitude/longitude is nearest by great-circle (straight-line over the globe) distance. It ignores park acreage, visitation, driving distance and distance to park boundaries, so the region you sit in can differ from the park with the closest entrance by road. Near cell edges, tiny differences in the chosen coordinate or distance method can flip the assignment. These cells are a geometric construction, not official NPS service areas. Remote parks get their own inset panels so they do not distort the continental view; Puerto Rico and other territories hold no congressionally designated National Park and are not paneled.

Park roster — all 63 National Parks

Park	State / territory	Visitors 2025	Source

Prepared from live web data on 2026-08-28. 63 congressionally designated U.S. National Parks; 48 extracted rows (44 unique parks with 2025 recreation-visitor counts) from the Wikipedia list, remaining 19 parks supplemented from the complete 63-park roster; monuments, preserves, historic sites and other NPS units excluded. Regions are unweighted nearest-site Voronoi cells on great-circle distance to standard representative park coordinates (labelled as representative points, not sourced from the extracted rows), clipped to U.S. land. Established dates and acreage were cut for space. A dash means visitation was not in the extracted rows.