Charts
Study Ranks National Parks by How Dangerous They Are
Travel planning can be stressful, but the team at Cocoweb made one aspect of the job a lot easier with this detailed visual chart of the relative safety and danger of each National Park. The National Parks are the crown jewels of the United States, full of stunning vistas, diverse wildlife and plant life, and lots of opportunities for outdoor fun and exploration. With wilderness adventures come risks. The Cocoweb team created a scoring system for park danger and ranked each National Park in the chart by their relative safety and danger.
Click below to zoom.
The scoring system used a few different criteria to rank the parks. Aspects include fatalities, number of search and rescue missions, dangerous animals, number of drownings, falls, and heat exhaustion deaths, and cell service coverage. The scores showed these ten parks as the most dangerous:
- North Cascades
- Lake Clark
- Denali
- Wrangell-St. Elias
- Isle Royale
- Gates of the Arctic
- Sequoia and Kings Canyon
- Grand Teton
- Yellowstone
- Glacier Bay
These parks have some common factors (besides several of them being in Alaska.) Many of them have extreme temperatures, remote areas that are hard to access by rescue teams, and high mountain peaks that should only be tackled by expert hikers. Some of the dangerous parks are the most famous and most visited. Don’t avoid a park just because it has some dangerous hikes, locations, or conditions. Rather, you should choose your activities carefully and arrive prepared with emergency plans, survival kits, and first aid materials. The best way to enjoy the parks safely is to know the risks, listen to ranger guidance about which trails to take at what times, and make sure you stick to hikes and activities that match your experience level.