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    Rated: Top 10 Best National Parks for Hiking

    half-dome-yosemite

    Half Dome is in Yosemite National Park, California (Image by Pung, Shutterstock)

    Salt Lake City-based KURU Footwear — a brand that has developed innovative heel technology for boots, sneakers and many other types of shoes — has created a list of the best national parks in the United States for hiking, based on the number of trails, miles of trails, average trail rating and park crowd levels. Yosemite National Park reigns at the top of the list, but it’s far from the only national park in California to make the Top 10.

    The analysis looked at all 63 U.S. national parks and used data from the National Park Service and the popular hiking app AllTrails to come up with its ranking. It’s important because hiking is one of the most basic ways that visitors engage with national parks. In fact, 48 percent of Americans say visiting a national park is on their bucket list.

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    Graphic courtesy of KURU

    Three of the top 10 best national parks for hiking are found in California. And the East Coast was represented by two parks on the list. The full Top 10 consists of:

    1. Yosemite National Park (California)
    2. Great Smoky Mountains National Park (North Carolina/Tennessee)
    3. Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming)
    4. Olympic National Park (Washington)
    5. Shenandoah National Park (Virginia)
    6. Glacier National Park (Montana)
    7. Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado)
    8. Sequoia National Park (California)
    9. Grand Canyon National Park (Arizona)
    10. Kings Canyon National Park (California)

    Of course, there’s also a bottom to this list, where White Sands, Biscayne, Kobuk, Dry Tortugas and Gateway Arch national parks round out the final five.

    The 522,000-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park gets the most annual visitors (by far!) with more than 13 million in 2023. The next closest park, the Grand Canyon, got 4.7 million that year.

    In total, 325.5 million Americans visited a national park in 2023, which is up more than 13 million people than the previous year. According to KURU, if you tried to hike every single national park trail in the United States, it would take a whopping 11 years if you did one trail per day.

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    Image by Sean Pavone, Shutterstock