Just how big is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve? To give you an idea, check out the accompanying map. It shows how Wrangell-St. Elias would swallow a number of parks you might have considered to be large themselves.
If you could lift and move parks around, you could easily fit Yellowstone National Park (2.2 million acres), Shenandoah National Park (199,100 acres), Death Valley National Park (3.3 million acres), Everglades National Park (1.4 million acres), Isle Royale National Park (571,790 acres), and Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park (19,622 acres), inside Wrangell-St. Elias, which sprawls across more than 13 million acres of Alaska when you consider both the national park and the national preserve.
So big is Wrangell-St. Elias that it would even swallow Switzerland!
Comments
Very cool graphic! Thanks for the perspective.
I'm surprised to see that Death Valley is larger than Yellowstone.
Death Valley doubled in size as a result of Diane Feinstein's desert protection act of 1994 that created Mojave Preserve among other things. Believe me, Death Valley is one place where you never want to pass by a gas station without topping the tank.
It would really be interesting to see this graphic on top of a map of the lower 48 states, too.
Death Valley is huge. What makes it feel even bigger is that it's so empty. You really feel the hugeness because you can see forever there. Yellowstone feels positively intimate in comparison.
The coolest thing about Death Valley is that although it seems huge and empty, it's full of amazing things. I could hike around there for a month and not be satisfied.