Nine parks in a single year — 1980 redrew America's park gravity map more than any other moment

All 63 congressionally designated U.S. national parks, from Yellowstone (Mar 1, 1872) to New River Gorge (Dec 27, 2020). Every point of U.S. land is colored by the national park whose representative coordinate is geodesically nearest — a point-based geographic Voronoi, or gravity map. Scrub the timeline to watch old territories split as each park arrives.

63national parks today

43establishment-event years

+9parks in 1980, the largest jump (39 → 48)

148 yrsYellowstone 1872 to New River Gorge 2020

18721 park

American Samoa — inset, true distances

U.S. Virgin Islands — inset, true distances

What color means: each tint is the gravity region of one park — every point inside it is closer, by great-circle distance to the park's representative coordinate, than to any other park. Color does not show park ownership or official National Park Service boundaries. Alaska, Hawaii and the two island insets are repositioned and rescaled on screen, but nearest-park assignment always uses true geographic coordinates, never screen position. Hover any region for the park's name, jurisdiction, coordinates and designation date; hover dims everything else. Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Marianas hold no park row in this dataset and are not drawn.

The 1980 Alaska lands moment stands alone: nine parks entered in one year, seven of them together on Dec 2, 1980 — Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark and Wrangell–St. Elias — lifting the count from 39 to 48. wikipedia-org.zproxy.org

New River Gorge, West Virginia (Dec 27, 2020) is the 63rd and newest park — the first eastern addition since Indiana Dunes and White Sands brought the count to 62 in 2019. wikipedia-org.zproxy.org

Only two parks sit outside the 50 states: Virgin Islands (1956) and American Samoa (1988) — the latter, at 14.25° S, is the only national park south of the equator. wikipedia-org.zproxy.org

Growth came in 43 distinct event years spread over 148 years: Yellowstone stood alone for 18 years until Sequoia and Yosemite arrived within a week of each other in 1890. wikipedia-org.zproxy.org

All 63 parks

Click a header to sort.

#	Park	Jurisdiction	Established as national park	Lat	Lon	Source

Method: dataset assembled 2026-08-28 from the linked comprehensive current list of U.S. national parks (wikipedia-org.zproxy.org) — 63 park rows plus a 43-row establishment-year aggregate, used as given. "Closest" means great-circle (geodesic) distance to each park's single representative coordinate — not driving time, entrance location, or distance to an official boundary; representative points simplify large or island parks. Dates are dates of designation specifically as a national park; earlier monument or protected-area history is not used. Regions are sampled on a pixel grid clipped to U.S. land from Natural Earth geometry; boundaries are therefore approximate at coastlines. Timeline steps occur at exact establishment dates (53 date steps across 43 years); the slider is labeled by year.