Natural wonders of North America

12 to explore

• Watch Natural wonder Banff National Park Banff National Park lies in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, in western Canada. It began in 1885 around a group of hot springs, which makes it Canada's first national park. Today it covers 6,641 square kilometers of jagged peaks, glaciers, forests and turquoise lakes such as Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, and it is home to grizzly bears, wolves, elk and many more animals.
• Watch Natural wonder Bryce Canyon National Park Bryce Canyon National Park, in southern Utah, is not really a canyon. It is a row of giant bowls, called amphitheaters, carved into the edge of a high plateau and filled with colorful rock spires called hoodoos. The park says it has the largest collection of hoodoos in the world. Ice and rain shaped them from rocks first laid down in an ancient lake.
• Watch Natural wonder Denali Denali is North America's highest mountain, 6,190 meters (20,310 feet) tall, in the Alaska Range. It rises about 5.6 kilometers from its base, more than Mount Everest does from its own high base. Huge glaciers spread from it in every direction, and the national park around it is home to grizzly bears, moose, caribou, Dall sheep and wolves.
• Watch Natural wonder Everglades National Park Everglades National Park covers 1.5 million acres at the southern tip of Florida. It protects marshes of sawgrass, forests of mangroves and pines, and shallow bays, all fed by fresh water flowing slowly south. It is home to alligators and crocodiles, the rare Florida panther and hundreds of kinds of birds, but invasive Burmese pythons have caused serious harm to its wildlife.
• Watch Natural wonder Grand Canyon The Grand Canyon is a huge, steep-sided canyon in Arizona carved by the Colorado River. It is about 447 kilometers long and, on average, 1.6 kilometers deep, and its walls show layers of rock almost two billion years old.
• Watch Natural wonder Lake Superior Lake Superior is the largest of North America's five Great Lakes, shared by the United States and Canada. It covers about 82,100 square kilometers, reaches 406 meters deep, and holds more water than the other four Great Lakes put together. It sits in an ancient crack in the continent that glaciers scooped out.
• Watch Natural wonder Mariana Trench The Mariana Trench is a long, curving valley in the floor of the western Pacific Ocean, near the island of Guam. Its deepest spot, the Challenger Deep, is the deepest place known in the whole ocean, close to 11,000 meters down. If Mount Everest stood on the bottom, its peak would still be about 2 kilometers under water.
• Watch Natural wonder Mississippi River The Mississippi River flows about 3,770 kilometers from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, through the middle of the United States. Its basin drains about 40 percent of the continental United States. Long ago Native Americans paddled canoes on it; later came steamboats, and today huge barges carry grain and fuel. Millions of birds follow it when they migrate.
• Watch Natural wonder Niagara Falls Niagara Falls is a set of three waterfalls on the Niagara River, which flows from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario across the border between Canada and the United States. About 500 waterfalls in the world are taller, but Niagara is famous for its height together with the enormous amount of water that pours over it.
• Watch Natural wonder Rocky Mountains The Rocky Mountains, or Rockies, stretch about 4,800 kilometers from northern Canada to New Mexico in the United States. They include more than 100 separate ranges, and their highest peak, Mount Elbert in Colorado, is 4,399 meters tall. Glaciers carved their peaks and valleys, and famous parks such as Banff, Jasper and Yellowstone protect their lakes, hot springs and wildlife.
• Watch Natural wonder Yellowstone National Park Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a giant volcano in the western United States. Heat from melted rock deep underground powers more than 10,000 hot springs, geysers, mudpots and steam vents, and the park is home to bison, wolves and two kinds of bears.
• Watch Natural wonder Yosemite National Park Yosemite National Park lies in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Its granite cliffs, rounded domes and tall waterfalls were shaped by rivers and then by glaciers, which turned narrow canyons into wide U-shaped valleys. It is also home to giant sequoia trees and hundreds of black bears.