The US has no shortage of big scenery, but a new round-up from The Independent narrows it down to ten landscapes that should sit at the top of any bucket list — a mix of geysers, glaciers, dunes and one very famous waterfall.
The list leans on familiar heavyweights. The Grand Canyon earns its spot for sheer scale: a mile deep, up to 18 miles wide and 277 miles long, so vast that storms sometimes form inside it. The South Rim stays open all year and has classic viewpoints like Mather Point. Yellowstone, meanwhile, contains roughly half the world's geysers — around 500 to 700 of them — fuelled by the supervolcano below, with Old Faithful shooting water 180 feet skyward about 20 times a day.
Niagara Falls makes the cut for its raw volume: about a million bathtubs of water a minute at peak flow across three falls. The Maid of the Mist boat tour gets you right into the spray, while Goat Island has the best land-based views on the US side. In California, Yosemite Valley packs El Capitan, Half Dome and North America's tallest waterfall (2,425-foot Yosemite Falls) into a seven-mile glacial valley — Tunnel View remains the photo stop.
Alaska scores twice. Denali, at 20,310 feet, is North America's highest peak and famously camera-shy behind clouds; since private cars are banned past the 15-mile mark, the park's naturalist-led bus tours are the way in. Mendenhall Glacier, just a 12-mile drive from Juneau, is that rare glacier you can reach without a helicopter — trails lead to viewpoints, kayak trips paddle among icebergs, and Nugget Falls drops 377 feet into the iceberg-studded lake.
The quirkier entries are arguably the most memorable. Oregon's Crater Lake fills a collapsed volcano caldera to 1,943 feet, making it America's deepest lake and one of the clearest bodies of water on Earth, with Wizard Island's cinder cone rising from the water. Hawaii's Na Pali Coast on Kauai — the jagged cliffs Spielberg used for Jurassic Park's Isla Nublar — is too steep for roads, so you'll see it by helicopter, boat or the Kalalau Trail. Wyoming's Devils Tower, an 867-foot hexagonal-column monolith and America's first national monument (1906), starred in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; a 1.3-mile trail loops its base. And White Sands in New Mexico is 275 square miles of white gypsum dunes that look like snow but stay cool enough to walk on barefoot, even in 100F summer heat — Dunes Drive is best at sunset.
Handily, most entries come with a signature stay, from the 1905 El Tovar perched on the Grand Canyon rim (from $270) to the gloriously wifi-free Old Faithful Inn (from $205, May to October).
Why it matters: these ten spread across nine states, so they suit travellers plotting one big road trip or picking a single anchor for a two-week holiday. Nature lovers, photographers and national park collectors will find the most to work with — and several, like White Sands and Mendenhall, are far easier to reach than they look.
Story via The Independent Travel.
