The West gets the glory, but there are 14 national parks east of the Mississippi — and travel writer Emily Pennington, who has visited every single one of America's 63-odd national parks (and hiked on every continent), has ranked nine favourites for the East Coast.
Her top pick needs little introduction. Maine's Acadia pairs tide pools and cliff-edge hiking with classic New England touches: photogenic lighthouses, spectacular autumn colour, the lively gateway town of Bar Harbor, and popovers at the Jordan Pond House teahouse. At the other end of the map, Florida contributes three parks. The Everglades sprawls across 1.5 million acres of sawgrass marsh — paddle the marked canoe trails at Flamingo or scan for alligators from an airboat — while Biscayne, which is more than 95% water, is one of the few places in the lower 48 to book guided scuba diving, snorkelling and stand-up paddleboarding inside a national park. Furthest offshore, Dry Tortugas sits about 70 miles from Key West: the Yankee Freedom ferry delivers day-trippers to secluded beaches, snorkelling and a tour of Civil War-era Fort Jefferson.
Inland, the mountains take over. Virginia's Shenandoah, barely 80 minutes from Washington DC, serves up the 105-mile Skyline Drive, the chunky scramble up Old Rag Mountain, and thinner crowds than neighbouring Great Smoky Mountains — which, despite being the most-visited park in the country (around 12 million people a year), remains free to enter, with only a new parking tag to sort. South Carolina's often-overlooked Congaree protects the largest surviving stretch of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the US; its 2.6-mile Boardwalk Loop is flat, accessible and shaded by bald cypress.
Adventure-seekers have two more stops. West Virginia's New River Gorge packs rock climbing, whitewater rafting and the longest steel-span arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere into one compact park, with the new Hill Hall Hotel in Fayetteville as a boutique base. Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley, wedged between Cleveland and Akron, surprises with waterfalls, a 20-mile cycling path and a vintage diesel railroad.
Why it matters: most of these parks sit within a day's drive of major East Coast cities, making them realistic long-weekend trips rather than bucket-list expeditions. Pennington's advice also skips the obvious in favour of practical pairings — a park plus a good gateway hotel, from the dog-friendly Graduate in Columbia to Big Meadows Lodge right on Skyline Drive.
Quick answers to the obvious questions: only six of the 14 eastern parks are within day-trip distance of the Atlantic; the crown jewels are generally held to be Acadia, the Everglades and the Smokies; and trivia for the trailhead — Gerald Ford is the only US president to have worked as a park ranger, a summer job at Yellowstone at age 23.
