Answer: Adirondack Park

When you think of enormous parks, your mind might turn to the ones that get the serious press, publicity, and mentions in your old history books like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon.

The largest park in the contiguous United States, however, is the Adirondack Park located in northeastern New York. The park encompasses a staggering 6.1 million acres and is about the same size as the state of Vermont and larger than the national parks of the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite combined together.

Talk of preserving the land began shortly after the American Civil War and by the 1880s, had gained enough momentum that legislation was put into motion securing huge swathes of upstate New York to protect the dense forests from logging. Later legislation would boost the size of the protected area from the original 2.8 million acres to its present size.