This Is America’s Largest National Park

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 20, 8:05AM EDT

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This Is America’s Largest National Park — © troutnut / Getty Images

National Park Service (NPS) was founded in 1916. A widely circulated myth is that it was started by America’s great outdoorsman president, Theodore Roosevelt. However, the reality is that it was started by the National Park Service Organic Act. The NPS is a part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. There are 63 national parks, and the service has just slightly more than 12,000 employees.

The entire NPS covers over 211,000 square miles. The most well-known national parks are by no means the largest. Death Valley National Park covers 6,700 square miles. Yellowstone National Park covers 3,400. Everglades National Park covers 2,300. Grand Canyon National Park covers cover 1,900.

The largest national park covers 23,000 square miles. That makes it larger than Vermont and Maryland combined. Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve contains parts of four mountain ranges and the 18,008-foot Mount Saint Elias, one of the tallest mountains in the United States. It has nine of the sixteen highest peaks in the country.

The park is east of Anchorage and west of the Yukon province of Canada. The park headquarters, Copper Center, has a population of slightly more than 200 people. The park also includes several glaciers. The Nabesna Glacier, at 53 miles long, is the longest valley glacier in North America.

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Compared to most other national parks, the Wrangell-St. Elias gets very few visitors, at about 75,000 a year. That compares to almost 6 million to the Grand Canyon National Park.

Click here to read about the most popular national park in each state.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.