Glimpses of the National Parks 

 and Monuments 



"Oh, Ranger ! I have just time enough to see one national park. Which 

 one has the best scenery ?" Now that is a hard question. It is also one often 

 asked by those who have yet to see their first national park and who have a 

 vague idea that a national park is "something like a city park, only larger." 

 Actually, the national parks bear little resemblance to most city parks. Where 

 the city parks are cultivated areas, the national parks are regions where 

 Nature is permitted to take her own wild course with trees, flowers, animals, 

 hills, and dales. The National Park Service seeks to keep the parks in as wild 

 a state as possible. Only such roads, trails, and buildings are allowed as are 

 absolutely essential to the comfort of travelers. Each of the fifteen major 

 national parks is supreme in its own way, and each is different. Each was 

 formed to preserve to posterity some striking and outstanding wonder. 



Mount Rainier, for example, is a beautiful, stately, snow-covered moun 

 tain, an extinct volcano, down the sides of which flow twenty-eight glaciers 

 or rivers of ice. Yellowstone National Park contains more hot-water geysers 

 than can be found in all the rest of the world put together. Nowhere else in 

 the world will the traveler find granite walls so stupendous as in Yosemite, 

 nowhere else will he find waterfalls so high and astounding, or cliffs so 

 precipitous. Sequoia National Park is the home of the finest groves of giant 

 sequoias, including the largest and oldest living thing on earth, the General 

 Sherman Tree. Crater Lake fills, with a deep blue, the cavity left when the 

 top of Mount Mazama, one of America's greatest volcanoes, caved in and 

 disappeared into its own depths, ages ago. Mount McKinley National Park 

 contains the highest peak on the American continent, rearing its crest twenty 

 thousand feet above the sea. Grand Canyon National Park, in Arizona, ex 

 hibits the mightiest and most colorful chasm in the world. Mesa Verde Na 

 tional Park preserves the ruins of a remarkable ancient American civilization. 

 Hawaii National Park offers stupendous exhibits of volcanic activity, and 

 much of the time a lake of boiling lava. And so on, through the whole list of 

 the national parks. 



Besides the national parks there are thirty-three national monuments 

 under the direction of the National Park Service. National parks are reserved 

 and dedicated by act of Congress, and, as a rule, they have been carved out of 

 the public domain and set apart as national parks because they contain 

 scenery or other natural phenomena so unusual and distinctive as to make 

 their preservation in essentially their primal condition of national importance. 

 Originally it was believed that only areas of considerable size should be 

 included in national parks, but long since the element of size has been dropped 

 as an essential factor in creating parks. 



National monuments are set aside by order of the President under the Act 

 of Congress of June 8, 1906, which is known as the "Antiquities Act." It 

 authorizes the Chief Executive to "declare by public proclamation historic 



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