The least visited National Parks.

Bottom 25 by five-year average.

The five-year window matters more at this end of the ranking than the top. A single wildfire season, a ferry-service interruption, or a road reconstruction project can swing a small park's annual total by tens of thousands of visits; large in percentage terms even when the absolute number is unchanged in scale. Smoothing across 2021-2025 surfaces the structural least-visited cohort rather than the unit that happened to have a bad shoulder season.

Why these are least-visited

Access and seasonality explain much of this list. Several Alaska parks have no road access or require a flight or boat for the final leg. Isle Royale closes for much of winter and requires a ferry or seaplane when open. Great Basin, North Cascades, and Black Canyon of the Gunnison are road-accessible but remain far from major airports. These are practical explanations for the ranking, not measurements in the visitation dataset itself.

Least crowded at peak.

"Least visited" and "least crowded" are not the same question. A park can post a modest annual total and still feel packed on the one weekend everyone shows up. The more useful metric for a crowd-averse trip is peak-month intensity: how many visits the park draws in its busiest month. Sorted that way, the parks below stay quiet even when they are at their fullest. Most of the Alaska units qualify (every month is the off-season), along with Isle Royale, North Cascades, Great Basin, and Black Canyon of the Gunnison. This is a better starting point than the annual ranking above if you want empty trails rather than just remote scenery.

Annual rankings put Rocky Mountain National Park at roughly the same total as Grand Canyon. By peak-month intensity they are not in the same league: Rocky Mountain's traffic compresses into a much shorter summer window because Trail Ridge Road is closed half the year, and its July weekends are among the network's busiest. The same is true for Glacier, Acadia, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake. Sorting by peak month rather than annual total separates parks that are genuinely uncrowded from parks that just have great winters and brutal summers. For the shoulder windows that thin the trails at the marquee parks, see the month-by-month best-time picks.

Methodology

Visit counts are official "Recreation Visits" from the NPS Visitor Use Statistics Data Package, 2025. The five-year average column averages 2021-2025 to reduce single-year noise; the latest-year column shows the most recent complete calendar year. Some NPS units publish other statistic types (Tent Campers, Recreation Visit Hours) that are not used here. Independent site, not affiliated with the National Park Service. Least-visited units are excluded if no Recreation Visits are reported for any year in the five-year window, that filter removes a handful of NPS units that are not actually visitor-staffed. Peak month in the least-crowded table is the calendar month with the highest 5-year-average recreation visits for each park; parks without a complete monthly dataset are excluded from that table.

Common questions.

What is the least visited national park?

Gates Of The Arctic National Park & Preserve is the least-visited official National Park, averaging only about 10,939 recreation visits a year. The ranking includes all 63 official National Parks, including units whose source designation is National Park & Preserve.

What are the least visited national parks in the lower 48?

Outside Alaska, the quietest official National Parks are National Park of American Samoa, Isle Royale, and North Cascades. Each draws a small fraction of the network's foot traffic because it sits far from any major airport.

What is the difference between least visited and least crowded?

Least visited ranks by annual total; least crowded ranks by how quiet a park stays in its busiest month. A park can post a low annual total yet still feel packed on its one big weekend. The peak-month table on this page sorts for genuinely empty trails.