National Geographic’s 7 Natural Wonders of America

As the United States reaches its semiquincentennial milestone on July 4, 2026, Americans can expect to hear a host of familiar patriotic songs—and many of these iconic tunes acclaim not just the proud founding principles of the nation, but also the majesty of its diverse landscapes. Woody Guthrie sang about America’s redwood forests and Gulf Stream waters, ribbons of highway and the sparkling sands of diamond deserts, while Katharine Lee Bates, after a trip to Colorado, was inspired to capture spacious skies, amber waves of grain, and purple mountain majesties.  

Many of National Geographic’s Explorers have been similarly inspired by these American features and landscapes, and they’ve returned to study or photograph them again and again—in some cases, dedicating their careers to preserving and plumbing the depths of these extraordinary places. 

The Explorers can sound like poets, too, at least when trying to illustrate what makes these wonders of the United States so remarkable. Read on for a preview of the wonders themselves. How many have you visited? And how can you contribute to their welfare, ensuring that their features, flora, and fauna may survive for the next 250 years and beyond?  

Grand Canyon

This great American road-trip destination is still somehow underestimated in its ability to awe, particularly due to its scale; at its maximum points, the canyon is 18 miles wide and well over a mile deep. It can easily be glimpsed from space. What strikes Pete McBride, a photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer who hiked its entire length of 750 miles, in a journey captured in the 2019 documentary Into the Canyon, is the lesson this place imprints on visitors about the passage of time and the power of water. “The youngest layers of rock are on the top, and it descends through multiple layers to the basement, where the river is. In places there is rock, called the Vishnu schist, which dates back 1.8 billion years,” he says. “It is a time machine.” 

The Grand Canyon contains eons of geologic history, with rock layers dating far past the dinosaurs and promising a future beyond humans. Of course, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been touched by humanity. Its carving force, the Colorado River, is in a third decade of drought, and with even the nearby Lake Powell reservoir dangerously dwindling, parts of the canyon could actually soon run dry. Apart from affecting tourism, such as recreational rafting and boating in the area, this drought could alter the ecology systems and wildlife that call the canyon home.  

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McBride is still finding special spots within the canyon’s mighty maw. “There are secret alcoves and hidden slot canyons and quiet beaches under mesquite trees,” he says. But his favorite experience involves that threatened fauna. “One of the greatest attributes is the deep layer of silence that hangs throughout the landscape,” he says. “When I was walking the length, so often my alarm clock wasn’t digital, wasn’t mechanical, wasn’t even pre-dawn light. It was the soft whisper of bat wings that would circle over me as the temperature changed.”  

Coastal Redwoods

While redwood trees exist in other countries, the majestic Sequoia sempervirens thrives along a misty 40-mile stretch of the northwestern coast of the United States that’s like nowhere else on the planet due to the area’s very specific climate. “That mist and fog contains water, obviously, but it also has nutrients like nitrogen, calcium, and magnesium dissolved in it,” says Nalini M. Nadkarni, a forest ecologist and National Geographic Explorer. “The coastal redwoods have evolved to take the nutrients through their foliage, and that’s the ticket that allows them to survive and flourish in these coastal forests.” 

Of course, this relationship with the sea means that anything that affects the water threatens the trees, with California’s drier and drier seasons portending yet more terrifying wildfires. Nadkarni finds wonder in the trees’ sheer beauty but also in their endurance. “Just as our country has been able to sustain its values and its resources for over 250 years, in the face of disturbances like wars and environmental disasters and political upheavals, so have these redwood trees survived for 2,500 years through fires and floods and harvesting,” she says. “Both the country and the redwoods have resilience that really inspires me.” 

Niagara Falls

When M Jackson, a National Geographic Explorer and a geographer, glaciologist, and science communicator, envisions Niagara Falls, she imagines not a midcentury postcard nor a pair of newlyweds in red ponchos on the Maid of the Mist cruise. She sees the last ice age. As the continental ice sheets retreated over 10,000 years ago, they carved the Niagara River channel that created the waterfalls—but the system remains in transformation. “The falls are steadily eroding and migrating upstream, as they have for thousands of years, meaning the Niagara Falls we see today is different from the Niagara Falls of the past, and it will continue to change into the future,” Jackson says. “To me, Niagara Falls is a reminder that landscapes we often consider permanent are actually in immense transformation—just as all of us are.” 

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Jackson believes the history and power of the waterfalls quite literally bombard visitors, hitting them in the face, as the falls’ mist is made of former glacial ice, and their fine sediments the debris of continents. But such a mighty force cannot escape the impact of humans. Increased rain events and greater water volume in the Great Lakes Basin might erode not just the falls but also the tourism and towns around them. Ways to help Niagara Falls include supporting watershed and Great Lakes conservation organizations, and advocating for policies that protect freshwater resources. “If we love Niagara Falls, if we love our local landscapes, we also have to steward them, advocate for them, and at times fight for them,” says Jackson.   

Appalachian Mountains

Stretching 2,000 miles from Alabama up into Canada, the Appalachians are more than a mountain range; they’re a social, economic, geographic, and even musical corridor of American culture. In providing a way of life for the more than 26 million people who call this place home, though, the mountains have been developed and divided in a way that has fragmented the habitats and movement of migratory birds, black bears, bobcats, and more—while climate change threatens the rivers and drinking water of 36 million Americans along the eastern seaboard. 

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Gabby Salazar, a conservation photographer, environmental social scientist, and National Geographic Explorer, values the work of conservation organizations, like the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the Appalachian Mountain Club, that preserve migratory routes for Appalachian wildlife. Salazar fell in love with the outdoors and nature photography as a child on family vacations to the mountains. “For me, the Appalachian Mountains are so awe-inspiring because there is wonder at every scale. I feel awe when I look out at a mountain vista, and when I’m on the ground, staring at a salamander at eye level,” she says. “One of my core memories is seeing the synchronized fireflies in the Smoky Mountains and feeling like I’d discovered magic right in my backyard.” 

Everglades

The massive subtropical wetland is so wound through the concept of what Florida is that residents and tourists alike might not appreciate its true size: Aside from the protected area of Everglades National Park, the Everglades watershed covers one-third of the state. The slow, shallow sheet of water is an incredible meeting point of freshwater and coastal seas, and temperate and tropical climates—allowing for nine separate habitats (including the largest thicket of mangroves in the Western Hemisphere) within its total 1.5 million acres.  

Those habitats host a stunning diversity of fauna, including several endangered species—like three kinds of sea turtle, the Miami-blue butterfly, and the Florida panther. There’s been a tremendous recovery of the panther population over the past several decades, from about 20 left in 1995 to today’s population of over 200, but to get them off the endangered list would require yet more protected land. It’s this protection of wildlife that National Geographic Explorer, filmmaker, and conservation photographer Carlton Ward, Jr. is most interested in supporting, with his organization Florida Wildlife Corridor and visual-storytelling initiative Wildpath. As an artist as well as an advocate, Ward hails the glories of the Everglades with his photography. “We have a never-ending educational opportunity to show these images, which people at first might think is Africa or the Amazon without realizing it’s 30 miles from their apartments in Naples or Miami,” says Ward, an eighth-generation Floridian. “The way the light comes in low over the Gulf and meets this peninsula jutting down from the continent? It’s just beautiful.” 

Yellowstone National Park

The world’s first national park is a land of otherworldly features and unbelievable numbers: Situated atop an active super volcano, Yellowstone holds more than 10,000 geothermal features, like hot springs and fumaroles, and nearly two-thirds of the entire planet’s geysers. It contains waterfalls twice the height of those in Niagara, and its own millennia-old Grand Canyon. “It’s geologically wonderful as a site,” says journalist and National Geographic Explorer James Edward Mills, “but what makes it phenomenal is the sheer grandeur of the space.” 

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For Mills, the park’s majesty extends beyond the physical wonders of the rainbow-ringed Grand Prismatic Spring, proud subalpine forests, and iconic Old Faithful geyser to the land’s history. “It [represents] the beginnings of our conversations about what it means to set aside land for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” says Mills, who first visited the park with his family in 1976 for the country’s bicentennial. It was amid the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant Act of 1864, preserving a natural landscape for the public for the first time; the designation of Yellowstone as a national park followed less than a decade later, during Reconstruction, and was voted on by the first seven Black men elected to Congress. The park represented a radical new idea: that such a beautiful place belonged to all of its people. “As a person of color, and as someone who really respects and admires the importance of preserving history that we don't often learn in school, Yellowstone is a great jumping-off point to begin our conversations around what federally designated land for the enjoyment of all people looks like,” Mills says.  

Hawai‘i volcanoes

To a geothermal scientist and National Geographic Explorer like Andrés Ruzo, the archipelago of Hawaii represents a laboratory and lesson in how volcanoes function: The islands were formed by a series of eruptions, one after the other, in a chain, as the Pacific Plate drifted over a volcanic hotspot from left to right. That makes the westernmost island of Kauaʻi the oldest, at 5.1 million years, and the Big Island the youngest, and still growing bigger, at just 300,000 to 400,000 years old. “As we look for evidence into the processes and mechanisms at work in the natural world, the Hawaiian Islands show you on a human timescale, in a way that’s unbelievably dynamic,” Ruzo says. “This unique landscape gives us such a special window into what makes the Earth tick.”  

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If you measure from ocean floor to sky, at 33,500 feet, the volcano Mauna Kea on the Big Island is the tallest mountain on the planet. Its peak, like other volcanic peaks across the archipelago, is a sacred place to the Hawaiian people: the dwelling of the gods. Ruzo, who spent summers on his family’s coffee farm built along the active Casita volcanoes in Nicaragua, studied geology on the Big Island, watching lava pour into the ocean and expand the landform by acres in real time. A glasslike film forms on the fresh lava flows as they cool rapidly. “It sounds like you’re stepping on snow, because it cracks, but at the same time you’re seeing every color of the rainbow—gold and purple and green—as it refracts light in the most spectacular way,” he says. “Unless you’re on the volcano, living it, you’re not going to appreciate these magical subtleties. It's moments like that that help us fall in love with the world.” 

America's past and future  

As part of the ABC News special, two more National Geographic Explorers are highlighting less expected, but no less spectacular spots that reveal the vast expanse of the nation’s past and how much there is still to learn about the United States in the centuries to come. Paleontologist and National Geographic Explorer Tyler Lyson welcomes viewers to Marmarth, North Dakota, which he declares the best place in the world to find dinosaur fossils, given its distant past of wide basins of sediment (and its modern present of dry, flat, exposed rock). “It's one of the few places in the world where you have dinosaur fossils that go up to the literal line in the sand that was caused by an asteroid’s impact,” he says. And Lyson should know: In 1999, while still in high school, he discovered “Dakota,” a remarkably preserved Edmontosaurus that still had soft tissue intact, like its scaly skin.  

Meanwhile, legendary ocean explorer and National Geographic Explorer at Large Bob Ballard provides a dispatch from the EV Nautilus as it prepares to set off on a mission around Guam and the Mariana Trench to chart regions of the United States never before explored. “It turns out that 52 percent of our country—[the land] we actually own—lies underwater. We have better maps of Mars than over half our country!” Ballard says. He compares the journey to Lewis and Clark’s expedition, though given that 60 percent of his team’s leaders are women, he’s calling it Lois and Clark. “We have every face, every pronoun, every American you can have” on this boat, he exclaims. Viewers can tune in at NautilusLive.org through mid-October to plumb the ocean floor in real-time alongside the Nautilus crew. What does Ballard, who famously located the Titanic wreck in 1985, hope to find this time? “My greatest discoveries are when I’ve bumped into things, like when I bumped into hydrothermal vents and discovered the origin of life on this planet,” says Ballard. “We just go around in the darkness with a flashlight and bump into things. So who knows?”