Find nearest national park

Nearest park from five state capitals

How to use it

1. Tap Use GPS, search your town, or click the map to set your starting point.
2. The table re-sorts at once, nearest park first, with the straight-line distance in kilometers.
3. Every park is pinned on the map, so you can see which direction each lies in.
4. Click a park's name to open its National Park Service page for hours, fees, and road conditions.

How parks are ranked

Each park in the list has one reference point, a latitude and longitude rounded to two decimals. The tool measures the great-circle distance from your point to each and sorts them. Two decimal places is about a kilometer, which is small next to the size of any park.

Large parks stretch far from their reference point. For a park like Wrangell-St. Elias or Death Valley, the nearest boundary can be tens of miles closer than the listed distance. Use the result to compare parks, not to plan the last leg of a trip.

Straight line versus the drive

Roads into parks wind through mountains and around canyons, so the drive is often much longer than the straight line. Two parks on opposite rims of a canyon can be close on the map and hours apart by road. Parks outside the 48 states, such as those in Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands, may have no road route at all.

For a road distance and time to one park, copy its name into the two-place tool and use its driving comparison.

About the park list

The list holds the 63 national parks on the National Park Service's system list, checked by name on 2026-09-30, each linked to its Park Service page. Each park is ranked by one approximate interior point, so a large park's nearest entrance can be closer than the figure shown. Other Park Service units, such as national monuments and seashores, are not included.

Planning a visit

Distance is only a first filter. Check each park's Park Service page for seasonal road closures, timed-entry reservations, and fees before setting out. High mountain roads in several western parks close in winter, which can make a nearby park unreachable by car for months.