The diversity of landscapes, climates, flora and fauna offered by the American national parks is more than just extraordinary. From the moistness of the mangrove-bordered lagoons inhabited by alligators of Everglades, in Florida, going through the frozen peaks of valleys where bears live in Glacier Park in Montana, passing by the vertiginous pits of Grand Canyon, until the bubbling hot geysers of Yellowstone.
The idea to create National Parks was launched in 1870 by a group of explorers reunited in Wyoming. About 46 years later, the National Park Service was created. Its mission is to preserve the territories placed under its protection, to take care and valorize these open air museums, witnesses of what America had been in the past. The National Park Service is a federal agency. Responsible of a total of 388 sites, historical places, battlfields, beaches, riverbanks and lakes. The parks generally stay open all along the year, but in the cold regions the winter activities are limited. In general, they possess built camping sites, convenient hotels and restaurants - sometimes even luxurious establishments, managed by private or public companies bounded by legal contracts with the federal government, their quality of service as well as their prices are strictly controlled. In high season, from June to the end of August, we suggest you to reserve your place in advance for hotels, motels, cottages and bungalows in every park. In the other hand, it is generally useless to reserve your place at the camping sites, where the rule says "First to come, first to be served". A maximum stay on a camping site is generally limited to 14 days; even in some of the most popular parks it could be a maximum of 7 days only. Every park proposes you exhibitions, observation walks guided by rangers, the discovery of special points surveyed by naturalists, and sometimes even campfire debates. Due to the large distances separating the majority of these parks, it is difficult do visit more than two or three parks during a voyage. You need, for example, to go a distance of 750 km to go from Redwood to Sequoia, even though both are located in California. It is also difficult to select the parks you want to visit - everything depends on your priorities. Yet the ones we suggest the most to visit are Shenandoha (East), Everglades and Great Smoky Mountains (South), Carlsbad Caverns and Grand Canyon (Southwest), Bryce Canyon, Glacier, Mesa Verde and Yellowstone (Midwest), Denali, Sequoia and Yosemite (West Pacific).
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