Wonders of America

From the natural marvels that shape the nation’s dynamic character to the cherished traditions and quirky landmarks that bring communities together, we present a tribute to some of the United States’ most distinctive and superlative places and experiences. Call it the United “-ests” of America. Covering all 50 states and five major territories, it’s a lineup as extraordinary and diverse as the country that inspires it.

Morning light falls softly on the Atlantic coastline, grazing the rocks and the spruce boughs, waking wild headlands and harbor towns. Maine is the first place in the continental United States to see the day break, although just where the light first lands depends on the time of year and thus the sun’s place on the horizon. Near the spring and autumn equinoxes, when the sun rises due east, the earliest rays hit the cliffs of the peninsula called Quoddy Head, the easternmost point on the U.S. mainland. —Brian Kevin

The Ochopee Post Office is a 60-square-foot shack along a bend in the road in the heart of the Florida Everglades, a box of corrugated aluminum with a shingled roof and a hurricane shutter for an awning. Inside, Postmaster Don Walters can extend his arms, rotate in place, and very nearly touch all four walls. On one of them, a collection of photos stretches back to 1953, when a fire destroyed the original post office, located inside a general store. After the fire, a tomato farmer’s storage shed was repurposed as a substitute. On the opposite wall is a medley of postcards sent by fans from around the world.

Hundreds stop by each day, many of them locals, including Seminole and Miccosukee tribal members—the Ochopee postal route covers both tribes’ lands. But most are tourists sliding through the cathedrals of cypress along the Tamiami Trail, hopping gleefully out of their cars to glimpse America’s smallest post office. Some buy postcards, scratching out notes to their families, while others just ask for a selfie with Walters, who’s often clad in aloha shirts because, as he says, “they’re expecting Jimmy Buffett.”

In the decade that he’s held the job, Walters has watched bears, alligators, and even a rare Florida panther passing through the tableau framed by his service window. Fewer birds and raccoons these days, he says. More pythons and, inevitably, more traffic. Of course, he’s also noticed fewer letters and more parcels as the internet has solidified its central role in American life. Still, he loves—truly loves—seeing people glow as they approach his window asking to buy a postcard. It is a genuine act in an increasingly perfunctory world; a big gesture from a small place seemingly untouched by time. One morning this spring, a family of four from Indiana sauntered up, bought postcards, then used the side of the shed to write home before continuing on toward Miami. Walters stamped them and added them to a growing pile. “I could do this for the rest of my life,” he said. —Michael Adno

On July 4, 1888, a small crowd gathered in a dusty field to watch ranch hands turn their day jobs into a rambunctious spectator sport. One wrangler was nearly crushed lassoing a steer. Another mounted a bronc that, one observer wrote, contorted itself “sideways, endwise, perpendicular, horizontal, and in every conceivable shape.” Today, 138 years in, the Prescott Frontier Days rodeo bills itself as the world’s oldest, and tens of thousands attend to cheer riders, ropers, and racers keeping cowboy culture alive. —Rose Minutaglio

Jaws turned the great white shark into an American icon, but only recently has the movie’s coastal New England setting become a great white hot spot. During a recent four-year study, scientists estimated some 800 of the sharks visited the waters off Cape Cod, their numbers peaking during the summer, giving the stretch of Massachusetts coastline one of the world’s densest concentrations. That’s because gray seals, their once dwindling prey, have rebounded after decades of protection. Don’t let Spielberg scare you, though: Only two fatal Cape Cod shark attacks have been documented since 1936. —Alexa McMahon

This summer, wildlife managers from the Blackfeet Nation intend to release several dozen bison in the shadow of a mountain called Ninaiistako, or Chief Mountain, on the border between the tribe’s 1.5 million-acre reservation and Glacier National Park, in northwest Montana. The release is part of an ongoing campaign to establish something close to a free-roaming herd, the first such attempt by a tribal nation and a pivotal moment in the country’s oldest wildlife reintroduction effort—one that’s seen America’s national mammal rebound from a few hundred to half a million animals.

Plains bison once numbered in the tens of millions across North America but were driven nearly to extinction by the end of the 19th century, their slaughter part of a deliberate strategy to erode Indigenous ways of life. Their resurgence stems from more than a century of conservation work, starting with the American Bison Society lobbying for protected herds on public lands, then continued by federal agencies and conservation groups.

More recently, tribes in the U.S., along with First Nations in Canada, have taken a leading role in restoring what Indigenous communities often call buffalo, expanding the conservation mission to stress cultural renewal and sovereignty. Most bison today are livestock in commercial herds, but among those primarily managed for conservation, some 30,000 are stewarded by roughly 45 tribes, says Michael Bo Vocu, executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council. That’s more than twice the number on all federal lands.

To the Blackfeet people, or Niitsitapi, bison are known as iinnii, a word that suggests more than just wildlife—also relatives, teachers, providers. The tribe’s first iinnii were transferred from a Canadian national park a decade ago, descendants of a wild herd once captured in Blackfeet territory. The vision was not only to maintain a herd as a sacred resource, for meat and hides, but also to release a small number, helping restore a wild population.

It’s a plan few other tribes have the land to support, says Ervin Carlson, director of the Blackfeet Buffalo Program. The tribe also negotiated agreements permitting bison to range beyond reservation boundaries and into Glacier and Canada’s neighboring Waterton Lakes National Park. But upon their initial release in 2023, several animals quickly wandered onto private ranchlands, sparking ranchers’ concerns about competition with grazing cattle, so the free-roaming iinnii were rounded up and re-penned.

The next release will follow the completion of a years-long project to fence off private lands—all in the name of restoring a relationship that shaped the land before fences ever divided it. The setback doesn’t diminish the commitment of tribal leaders like Blackfeet Nation Fish and Wildlife director Brandon Kittson. “It would be so amazing to see large numbers of these animals running or moving across the landscape in a natural way,” he says. “They belong here.” —Lailani Upham

A mass ascension at the annual Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is one of the great American spectacles: a kaleidoscopic flotilla of some 550 hot-air balloons. The world’s largest balloon fest draws pilots from around the world, thanks in part to a unique wind pattern called the Albuquerque Box. In the mornings, cooler northerly winds blow beneath a temperature inversion, with warmer southerly winds above. It’s “the perfect storm of goodness,” says longtime event meteorologist Randy Lefevre, allowing balloonists to simply rise, fall, and drift on the currents. —Jennifer Leman

The country's longest expanse of petroglyphs and pictographs is in this red-rock canyon where the marvels extend far beyond the nine miles the site is named for. Forty-six miles of cliff walls host some 100,000 images carved and painted by the Fremont and Ute peoples. Highlights include the Great Hunt Panel, where a cryptic horned figure observes a bighorn sheep hunt. —RM

The sign at the base of Canton Avenue, in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Beechview, declares the partially cobblestoned lane “the steepest street in the continental United States.” The title has its challengers—it depends a bit on where and how you measure—but with a maximum grade of 37 percent, Canton earns the marker’s admonition that you don’t simply stroll up the single-block street: “You have to conquer it.”

The improbable incline brings out good old-fashioned American neighborliness. Some residents prefer to park at the bottom, even in good weather, and they occasionally help one another up with groceries. Michael Hartman, a certified first responder who’s lived on Canton for five years, has been known to administer first aid to the cyclists who regularly test their mettle on the street, sometimes toppling over, including during an annual race up and down the city’s steepest hills. The neighbors look out for delivery drivers too, warning them against stopping on the hill, as transmissions have been known to get stuck in park. Alas, says longtime resident Sheila Edwards, no one on Canton even bothers buying Halloween candy—the hair-raising slope seems to scare off trick-or-treaters. —Amy Schaarsmith

The big dreamers who came up with the first reusable spacecraft needed big, safe places to land them—places like a dried-up desert lake bed. At Edwards Air Force Base, Runway 15/33 (named for its magnetic heading) is the world’s longest operational runway at 29,487 feet. Along with two other landing strips on the same dry lake (one, now inactive, was even longer), it was perfect for high-speed, high-stakes space shuttle touchdowns. Today, the stretch of sun-baked clay is a crucial testing ground for everything from supersonic aircraft to military transports. —JL

The majestic live oak at the heart of the Baptist Village retirement community has been known for about 60 years as the Village Sentinel, but the tree is perhaps 500 years old—and enormous. The National Champion Tree Program has certified its crown spread (the canopy’s widest point averaged with its narrowest) at 161 feet, the largest of all of the program’s 78 champion oaks. Every day, Baptist Village CEO Eric Mathison looks out his window at the residents who sit beneath the Sentinel’s massive branches. Imagining the aged tree emerging from invisible roots, he says, puts him in mind of “the circle of life.” —BK

During the day, Sandy Avila and 20,000 other attendees of last year’s Las Vegas Lowrider Supershow roamed a convention center, admiring more than a thousand impeccably customized, improbably low-slung vehicles. The annual event is the country’s biggest single-day gathering of lowrider fans, a chrome-filled carnival of mid-century sedans, convertibles, and more, their chassis inches off the ground, paint jobs luminous, wire-spoke wheels polished to a sheen. And installed in plenty of them is an ingenious bit of engineering designed to elevate—literally—all that detail work in a way that demands attention.

That innovation takes center stage at night, in a parking lot on the Strip, which is where Avila pointed her rose-gold 1966 Chevy Impala. The president of Pasadena, California’s Lady Lowrider Car Club, she wanted a front-row spot to watch the biggest of the weekend’s “after hops,” unsanctioned street parties where lowriders with mighty hydraulics try to out-bounce one another for cash and street cred. The big ticket is Frank’s Super Hop (named for its impresario, hydraulics wiz Frank Castillo). From dusk till dawn, some 130 tricked-out “hoppers” took turns pitting suspensions against gravity—a feat of pistons, springs, and pressurized hydraulic fluid—some lifting their tires nine or 10 feet off the ground. Frank’s has all the energy of a Vegas title fight, with crowds whooping as bumpers hit pavement and parts fly. “It’s definitely, like, the Super Bowl of hopping,” Avila says.

But competition is just one aspect of a tradition rooted in the post-World War II car boom, when the automobile was fast becoming the defining emblem of American culture. The first lowriders rolled out of garages in Chicano neighborhoods in Southern California and the Southwest, where young, working-class men (mostly) transformed secondhand cars into declarations of style and defiance. By modifying factory cars—complete with candy-colored paint jobs, airbrushed murals, and plush upholstery—customizers announced their resistance to a mid-century American culture of conformity. And unlike prewar hot-rodders, who built their cars for speed, lowrider enthusiasts made theirs for cruising bajito y suavecito: low and slow.

Lowriding is still, for many, a celebration of Chicano identity, but the scene in Vegas these days is diverse and global—and has more and more women, says Avila, who comes in part to connect with other all-female clubs. Mostly, though, she comes to bounce with her friends down the Strip, “to get dope pictures” while she’s hitting the switches under her dash that hop her Impala’s front end or lift a tire so she’s three-wheeling. It’s an amazing feeling, Avila says, being seen. —Denise M. Sandoval

Blasting 2.5 miles through Maynard Mountain in 1943 was a feat. Maintaining the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, with its single lane for cars and trains, is its own challenge. Jet-turbine-like fans keep it ventilated. A hot-water-circulating system prevents icing. And the control centers on both ends? Bombproof, built to withstand frequent avalanches. —Eric Wills

Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis, Jr., and James Brown are a few American icons who made their names at Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater. For 92 years, the lively crowd at the country’s longest-running talent competition has helped judge aspiring singers, dancers, and other performers by either cheering loudly or booing them off stage. A boo isn’t always a career killer: In 1989, heckles ended the set of a 16-year-old comedian named Dave Chappelle. —RM

The steel-latticed KRDK-TV mast, rising above a patchwork of cornfields in the midst of the Great Plains, is a testament to the power of lightweight construction. At 2,060 feet, the spire is the most towering edifice on U.S. soil, taller than any American skyscraper, broadcasting high-on-the-dial cable channels across some 15,000 square miles. —BK

In any given year, 350 to 450 inches of rain are likely to drench the dormant volcano at Kaua‘i’s center. Other Hawaiian spots can contend for the title of rainiest—annual totals fluctuate, and data collection can be spotty—but Wai‘ale‘ale has set eye-popping records, topping a hundred inches in a month as recently as 2021. The nearly mile-high peak snags moist trade winds, which cool and condense around its summit, enrobing the mountain in waterfalls. —BK

At the heart of the watershed that conservationists call America’s Amazon, a wild stream snakes for nearly 200 miles through some of Alabama’s most scenic countryside. What makes it miraculous is below the surface. The Cahaba holds more native fish species per mile than any other North American river over a hundred miles long: 130 of them, roughly the same as the entirety of California.

Its rocky shoals create oxygen-rich riffles for saddleback darters, skygazer shiners, and bullhead minnows. Its swift-moving portions host Alabama hog suckers, Coosa chubs, and frecklebelly madtoms. And its deep pools are home to longnose gars, highfin carpsuckers, and prehistoric-looking paddlefish. That breadth of species, in turn, supports an exceptional variety of turtles and snakes, along with freshwater mussels, which rely on fish to disperse their larvae.

The bounty results from a nearly alchemical convergence of complex Appalachian geology, a dense network of feeder streams, and hefty rainfall from Gulf storms (the most species-dense short river, the Conasauga, is in the same basin). Tributaries carve through diverse, tightly packed rock strata, giving each creek distinct microhabitats where different species thrive. Unlike most big rivers in the South, the Cahaba has no significant dams. The result, says Brian Keener, director of the University of West Alabama’s Cahaba Biodiversity Center, is “an absolute global biodiversity hot spot.” —Asher Elbein

Officially, the biggest wave ever surfed in the U.S. was a 77-foot leviathan ridden in January 2008 by then 42-year-old big-wave ace Mike Parsons. The spot was one few surfers in the world have ever laid eyes on: Cortes Bank, an open-ocean break about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, where some extraordinary underwater topography creates a volatile, legendary wave factory.

Cortes Bank is almost an island, a barely submerged seamount that rises abruptly from depths of thousands of feet. Since it’s surrounded by deep water, the long-traveled and unobstructed swells that reach it can be remarkably powerful—and in just the right conditions, they climb the underwater ridge and surge upward to become colossal, cathedral-like waves.

And while rising seas have some surfers worried about the erosion of coastal surf breaks, deepwater ones like Cortes are little affected by a few feet of sea-level rise. In fact, climate change could make waves at Cortes even burlier, since warming waters fuel more energetic storms.

Even now, though, riding Cortes is a pros-only affair. Veteran surfer Greg Long, who survived a near drowning there in 2012, calls it “as extreme and dangerous as anything that I would ever want to do in the ocean.” But despite blacking out beneath three waves and being resuscitated by his safety team, he’s kept on surfing Cortes since. Such is the magic, he says, of “the bathymetric miracle that exists there.” —Chris Dixon

Last year, the Narragansett Indian Tribe observed what it called its 350th annual August Meeting with traditional drumming, dancing, and song. The gathering, rooted in honoring the harvest of green corn, is believed by the tribe to be North America’s oldest recorded powwow—a word that likely comes from the Narragansett pau wau, although this originally referred not to a meetup but a spiritual leader. The event welcomes the public, and it’s been impressing outsiders since the 17th century: One colonial account describes the Narragansett holding “a great dance ... a sort of invocation.” Of course, there is no U.S. history without Indigenous history. “We were here for thousands of years before,” says Loén Spears, a Narragansett tribal citizen and executive director of the Indigenous-led Tomaquag Museum. “When you think like that, the time on record is only a short period of time in the ongoing celebration.” —RM

Apollo program scientists liked to say that the path to the moon leads through Mississippi. The rocket engine testing stands at the Stennis Space Center, christened in 1961 on 138,800 acres of Gulf Coast flatwoods, are towering testaments to the American impulse to treat the impossible as simply an engineering problem. And the old aphorism still holds true: The engines that launched this year’s Artemis moon mission were put through their paces at Stennis. —BK

Last Thanksgiving, Temika Moore stood halfway up the bleachers at the New London High football field, right on the 50-yard line, doing what you’re not supposed to do when the New London Whalers play the Norwich Free Academy Wildcats. “Go!” she yelled. “Go … GO, GO!” During the 150th year of America’s longest-running high school football rivalry, Moore was cheering for both teams. But she was no ordinary spectator. One of her sons, Mhi’Blessin “Bless” Maddox-Moore, was a senior running back and linebacker for Norwich. Another son, Zhi’Mir “Freak” Maddox-Moore, was a sophomore wide receiver, defensive back, and kick returner for New London.

In the history of high school football, no series has been played longer. Since the first New London-Norwich meeting on May 12, 1875, both teams have seen their share of joy and heartbreak. Also acrimony: The game was suspended for two years in 1951 due to a brawl. Controversy: In 1909, the final score was disputed, and a member of the national rules committee stepped in to declare a tie. Peculiar lore: In 1889, a punted ball was lost in a New England snow squall—went up and seems never to have come down.

High school football was once a coming-of-age tradition in every corner of America, but participation in the sport has dwindled. Still, there remain towns where the game feels less like an extracurricular activity and more like a treasured inheritance. “This is a milestone football game, and we’re privileged and blessed to be here,” Wildcats head coach Dylan Schroth told his team before kickoff. “You’re going to make your mark to set up the next 150 years.”

Last year’s meetup added a new twist to the old clash: It was the first game on record with brothers on opposing teams. As the contest rolled on, Norwich pulled away, scoring 21 unanswered points, including a rushing touchdown by Bless from four yards out. Final score: Norwich 28, New London 12. Series score: 82-70-11, Norwich.

After the game both Maddox-Moore boys headed toward their mom. Bless tried to trade jerseys with his brother. Freak looked like he wanted to disappear.

“You’re crying,” Temika said, surprised.

“Yeah,” Freak said.

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to lose.” —Seth Wickersham

Rank America's 63 national parks by size, and Great Smoky Mountains comes in middling. But scientists have identified a stunning range of some 23,000 species there, famously including more salamander varieties than anyplace else on Earth—among them the Blue Ridge two-lined, above. Credit a plethora of habitat types across 6,000-ish feet of elevation, says former park research coordinator Paul Super, who has one of the Smokies’ 969 lichen species named after him. And because glaciers stopped short of the park, it’s home to northerly species that came fleeing ice and never left. —BK

In America, even a tapped-out mine can reinvent itself as something extraordinary. The Sanford Underground Research Facility, some 4,850 feet beneath the craggy Black Hills, attracts the world’s leading astrophysicists, many of whom come to study dark matter, an elusive substance thought to be the glue that binds galaxies together. All that surrounding rock shields the former Homestake Gold Mine from background radiation—so if a hypothesized dark matter particle ever hits one of the facility’s detectors, scientists will know they’ve found one of the holy grails of modern physics. —Brian Resnick

In the country that birthed the concept of wilderness preservation, one of the hardest things to protect is silence. Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton co-founded Quiet Parks International to seek outdoor places sheltered from the thrum of humanity: cars and planes, generators and chainsaws, distant sirens. His leading candidate for the lower 48’s most hushed hollow is the spot he calls “one square inch of silence,” in Olympic’s Hoh Rain Forest, where ambient sound registers at the same decibel levels as the softest whisper. That is, Hempton clarifies, when it’s not raining. —Eve Conant

Mysteries and disputes swirl around America’s de facto national dish. Who invented the hot dog? Why the canine-related name? And is it a sandwich? What’s certain is that no establishment has been consistently selling hot dogs longer than Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island. Since 1914, through wars, recessions, and the ups, downs, and up-agains of downtown, the Main Street diner has stayed more or less the same. So have its mild wieners, grilled on a flattop and adorned with yellow mustard, hand-chopped onions, and a secret sauce whose spice mix is known only to owners Jimmy Todoron and Kathy Choka. It’s a classic Coney dog, but for more than a century, Fort Wayne has claimed it as its own. “I honestly feel like the restaurant belongs to the city,” Todoron says. “I kind of just manage it for them.” —Brett Martin

Above ground, Armillaria mellea manifests as honey-colored mushroom clusters. But beneath the mossy forest floor, they’re all connected by a vast web of mycelium, growing for millennia and feeding on tree roots. The humongous fungus, Earth’s largest living thing by biomass, is believed to be 8,650 years old, weigh as much as 35,000 tons, and spread across 2,385 acres. That’s older than the Giza Pyramids, three times heavier than the Eiffel Tower, and nearly triple the size of Central Park. —RM

For generations, the Charles family mined their land in the San Juan Mountains for gold, but five years ago, they realized they’d found something even rarer: 134 fossilized footprints left by a long-necked sauropod 150 million years ago. The West Gold Hill Dinosaur Trackway, now managed by the U.S. Forest Service, is the country’s longest continuous stretch of dinosaur prints, as well as a unique example of a track that loops back on itself—a moment of rambling passage made permanent in glacier-scoured sandstone. —AM

The interior of the country’s largest geode is roughly the size of a two-car garage, its walls covered in thousands of opaque, whitish-blue celestine crystals, most as big as footballs and some even larger. Researchers call it a fluke: Celestine pockets aren’t uncommon in the region, says mineralogist Jamison Brizendine, but none have crystals “even remotely the same size.” Visitors to Heineman’s Winery, on Lake Erie’s South Bass Island, can walk right inside, some 40 feet underground, down a flight of stone steps. The winery’s founder discovered Crystal Cave while drilling a well in 1897, and Heineman family lore says the first person to glimpse it was his five-year-old son, lowered down in a bucket. In the century-plus since, it’s lost none of its luster. —Jerry Dennis

It's hard to definitively quantify darkness—atmospheric factors vary from night to night—but Texas’s biggest national park is enveloped by the world’s largest certified dark sky spot, the 15,000-square-mile Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve. With virtually no light pollution, it’s one of the best places in the U.S. for Milky Way views, where nighttime visitors can look up and see the star-spangled canopy as they would have 250 years ago. —RM