Everett Potter

Special for USA TODAY

The National Park Service marked its 100th anniversary this month. Entrusted with taking care of America’s national parks, the National Park Service has the monumental task of welcoming more than 275 million visitors every year. Some of those visitors believe in a roster of outdated myths about our national parks, so we asked two experts to set the record straight.

The National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary

The national parks are always crowded, especially in summer.

Even in summer, say passionate national park devotees, you can find elbow room in the parks. Go to a park such as North Cascades National Park in Washington, suggests Mark Woods, the author of Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America’s National Parks.

“Its rugged mountains, sometimes described as ‘America’s Alps,’ attract about as many visitors in an entire year as Yosemite Valley does on a busy summer day,” Woods says. “But even in wildly popular parks, it’s possible to get away from the crowds.”

He cites what some park workers will readily confirm: Many visitors never get very far off the roads that wind through the park, whether it’s in California or Maine.

“Most of Yosemite’s visitors never make it into the more than 700,000 acres of designated wilderness,” Woods says. “I recently visited Acadia in the heart of a crowded summer and still found ways to experience remarkable solitude, from stand-up paddle boarding on Echo Lake one morning to heading to the summit of Cadillac Mountain one night.”

Acadia National Park: 10 tips for making the most of your visit

James Kaiser, author of Acadia: The Complete Guide and other guide books to the national parks, agrees, noting that “even in summer, it's easy to escape the crowds. Venture away from the most famous attractions — Old Faithful in Yellowstone, Tunnel View in Yosemite, Mather Point in Grand Canyon — and the crowds will thin out. Go for a hike and you'll escape the vast majority of park visitors. Go on a challenging or lesser-known hike and you'll wonder where everyone went.”

Kaiser’s tip for avoiding the crowds and still seeing the highlights at a given park?

“Visit at sunrise when most people are still in bed,” he advises. “You'll avoid the crowds and enjoy terrific lighting for great photos.”

The best parks are concentrated in a few states in the West.

Tell that to anyone who's visited Acadia in Maine and enjoyed 360-degree views of islands, lighthouses and sailboats from the top of Cadillac Mountain, suggests Kaiser. “Or basked on the white sand beaches and swam in the turquoise waters of Virgin Islands National Park in the Caribbean. Or stood on the 13,677-foot summit of Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii.”

Volcanoes: 10 national parks with explosive origins

There’s no question that the West is home to some of our most beloved national parks. Yellowstone, which became the world’s first national park in 1872, covers portions of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Yosemite is in California and the Grand Canyon is situated in Arizona. But the rest of the country has a remarkable number of parks to explore. Woods cites “the rugged serenity” of a 45-mile-long island in Lake Superior that’s home to Isle Royale National Park as well as “a small tropical island with a massive 19th-century fort” called Dry Tortugas National Park in Florida. There’s also 160-mile-long Gulf Islands National Seashore in Mississippi and Florida as well as 285 miles of caves in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.

“As much as I long to get back to some western parks, I’ve come to appreciate what is right in my backyard,” says Woods. “I live in Jacksonville, Fla., and one of my favorite parks is just across the Georgia border, Cumberland Island National Seashore.”

You can find a national park near you at nps.gov/findapark.

The Grand Canyon is the most visited national park.

Actually, far from it.

“With 5.5 million visitors in 2015, Grand Canyon National Park barely made it into the top 10 of the most visited places in the national park system,” Woods says. “The Blue Ridge Parkway was No. 1 with more than 15 million visits. And when it came to the 59 national parks, the Grand Canyon was a distant second to Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s 10.7 million visits.”

In fact, it depends on which numbers you’re actually looking at, Kaiser points out.

“If you only count people who descend into Grand Canyon on overnight trips”, says Kaiser, such as “backpackers, mule riders and river runners, it's one of the least-visited national parks in America.”

Yellowstone is the largest national park.

It might seem that way when you’re driving through it all day with your family. But with 2.2 million acres, Woods notes that Yellowstone isn’t even close to being the largest. In fact, it’s small when compared with some of the behemoth parks in our national system. He cites Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, “which is so massive — 13.2 million acres rising from the ocean to 18,008-foot Mt. Elias — that it’s about the same size as Yellowstone, Yosemite and Switzerland combined.”

The states should really be running the parks, not the federal government.

It’s a sentiment that one hears, along with talk that the privatization of parks would be a better system. Kaiser disagrees, noting that “The National Park Service provides a coordinated level of protection above and beyond what individual states can offer. Without the National Park Service, states could redefine ‘protection,’ leaving our most beautiful landscapes vulnerable to threats like resource extraction and overdevelopment.”

His feelings are shared by Woods, who says that “This land is your land. This American idea is at the very core of what Wallace Stegner called ‘the best idea we ever had.’ It’s at the heart of the creation of the National Park Service 100 years ago. And it’s part of the continuing magic of these places. If you're an American, Yellowstone and every other national park belongs to you, whether you live in Wyoming or Wisconsin.”