

The sun rises over Crater Lake, the country’s deepest lake, in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. (Marc Adamus/Associated Press)

The party continues for the National Park Service, which celebrates its 100th birthday on August 25.

Special events are going on nationwide at each of the more than 400 sites the agency oversees. These include 59 national parks and dozens of monuments, battlefields, lakeshores, seashores, parkways, preserves, recreation areas, rivers, and other historic and scenic sites. You can read all about the celebration at nps.gov/subjects/centennial.

[What it’s like to be a national park ranger]

The Park Service manages more than 84 million acres of land plus 27,000 historic and prehistoric structures. We examined a list of the national parks and found some fun facts to share. If you want to know more, check out “National Parks Guide U.S.A., Centennial Edition,” published by National Geographic Kids.



A squirrel perches on a rock at the Grand Canyon’s South Rim at Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Did you know. . . ?

●Arizona’s Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, 18 miles across (at its widest point) and 6,000 feet deep. Even so, it is not the longest, widest or deepest canyon in the world. Those are claimed by Nepal, Tibet and Australia.

●Old Faithful, a geyser in Yellowstone National Park, erupts 17 times a day. If an eruption lasts less than 2½ minutes, it will be an hour until the next one. If it lasts longer, it will be 90 minutes until the next one. Yellowstone, located mostly in Wyoming, became the world’s first national park in 1872.

[Read KidsPost’s story about the history of the National Park Service.]

●The light in the Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse in Maine’s Acadia National Park has shone for more than 150 years. It can be seen from 15 miles offshore.

●Hoodoos are tall, totem-pole-like rock spires. Some hoodoos in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah are taller than 10-story buildings. Sadly, they won’t last forever. The same erosion process that created these rock towers will eventually destroy them.



A plume of smoke rises because of volcanic activity in the Kilauea crater in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. (Hugh Gentry/Reuters)

●Two of the world’s most active volcanoes form Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. One of them, Kilauea (pronounced kill-uh-WAY-uh), has spewed enough lava since 1983 to pave a path to the moon and back five times!

●The big attraction at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas is the water, of course. It fell to earth as rain about the time the pyramids were built, more than 4,000 years ago. Park visitors are welcome to take a taste . . . and a bath.

●The country’s deepest lake is in Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park. It’s 1,943 feet deep, enough to cover 1½ Empire State Buildings, and holds 4.6 trillion gallons of water, enough to fill nearly 7 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

●Park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning on seven occasions while working at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia between 1942 and 1977. He was nicknamed the Human Lightning Rod and the Spark Ranger.

●An inland sea carved out New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns more than 250 million years ago. The biggest cavern is the length of 12 1/2 football fields. On summer evenings, visitors enjoy watching some 400,000 bats exit the cave’s mouth on their nightly search for insects to eat.



Everglades National Park has both alligators, like this big green fellow, and crocodiles. (J. Pat Carter/Associated Press)

●Everglades National Park in Florida is home to more than 200,000 alligators and crocodiles. South Florida is the only known place where the two live together. Crocodilians are the largest living reptiles. Some grow to be 20 feet long!

●California’s Sequoia National Park abounds with large evergreen trees called sequoias (suh-KWOI-yuhs). One of them, named General Sherman after a Civil War officer, is the biggest tree in the world. It is about 275 feet tall and 102 feet around its base. The tallest tree on earth is also a sequoia. Named Hyperion, a figure in Greek mythology, it was discovered in 2006 in California’s Redwood National and State Parks. Hyperion is nearly 380 feet tall, about two-thirds as high as the Washington Monument!

●The largest national park is Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska. At 13.2 million acres, it’s larger than each of eight U.S. states, including Maryland. The park also features preserve areas; sport hunting is allowed there, but not in the rest of the park.

●The lowest point in North America is Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park in California. It is 282 feet below sea level. Interestingly, Mount Whitney, the highest point in the United States outside Alaska, is less than 90 miles away.