The top 3 best places to go hiking alone

Spending time outdoors alone can be relaxing, but you should take some extra precautions to make sure you’ll be safe. While there are many beautiful places throughout the country to spend time in nature, we recommend sticking to national parks because they give you enough space to get out and enjoy the peace and quiet of nature, but they have lots of resources that can help you stay safe. National parks have full-time rangers, detailed maps and descriptions of hikes, places to refill your water bottles, and websites with alerts about weather and road conditions.

While there is some risk associated with any outdoor activity, the country’s national parks are very safe—especially if you make smart choices during your visit. The average fatality rate between 2007 and 2013 was 0.57 deaths per one million visits. This means you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to die in a national park—in any one year, your chances of being struck by lightning in the US are one in 700,000.

Although it is possible to stay safe in any of the national parks, we’re recommending parks that get at least one million visitors per year so that if you hit the trails alone, you’re still likely to pass other adventurers once in awhile. We also considered wildlife threats—even though these threats are very rare, we don’t recommend going to places like Yellowstone alone because wildlife encounters are still a minor concern.

You’d probably be pretty safe visiting any national park in the country, but the three we’ve suggested below have lots of visitors, excellent resources, and minimal wildlife threats.