how many national state parks are there in the us
List of national parks of the United States Twenty-seven states have national parks, as do the territories of American Samoa and the United States Virgin Islands. California has the most (nine), followed by Alaska (eight), Utah (five), and Colorado (four). The largest national park is Wrangell–St. Elias in Alaska: at over 8 million acres (32,375 km2), it is larger than each of the nine smallest states. The next three largest parks are also in Alaska. The smallest park is Hot Springs, Arkansas, at less than 6 thousand acres (24 km2). The total area protected by national parks is approximately 52.2 million acres (211,000 km2), for an average of 885 thousand acres (3,580 km2) but a median of only 236 thousand acres (960 km2) at Mount Rainier, the 30th largest park.[4] The most-visited national park is Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, with over 11.3 million visitors in 2016, followed by Arizona's Grand Canyon, with nearly 6 million. In contrast, only 10,047 people visited the remote Gates of the Arctic in Alaska in the same year.[5]