What is your favorite national park?

[Lissa]

I have no idea if this topic 'lives' in the lurker lounge community, but I decided to ask anyway.
(I like to see you try and hijack this into an anti-government thread.:)

For some reason national parks are always nicer, more beautiful and spectacular in other countries.....and even more so in countries far away. On the other hand, coming from the Netherlands it is well understandable that my top picks will not be from my own country.

In the US my trips were most of the time build around NP visits. Giving you the nice on-the-road holiday feeling and seeing the most beautiful things.
The first thing that comes to mind is of course Grand Canyon national park; this is in my opinion by far the most spectacular park there is.....especially when seeing it for the first time. Yellowstone is also great, as well as most other parks I've seen but the one I maybe love the most is Saguaro NP in Arizona.....probably because this is so different from what I am used to (and I love cactii).

In Europe my best overal NP exeperience is probably the plitvic lakes . I went there with my family when I was a kid and love to go back there.....it is the area where the civil war in Yugoslavia started.

Another great experience was tierra del fuego NP . The great thing was that this is as far from the south pole as Copenhagen is from the North Pole, but a totally different surroundings (most importantly, less humans).

What do you find the greatest park? Any holiday advice?

For sheer beauty and serenity, Olympic National Park on the Olympic Pennisula in Washington state is well worth the trip. It's the only temperant rain forest within the US getting somewhere on the order of 100 to 110 inches of rain a year, but you'd never know it as the Olympics are shrouded in mist year round (the cause of all the percipitation). It is very quiet and the wild life are unlikely to recognize you're there till you are within a few feet of them if upwind (I was able to get within 10 feet of a deer there once because it couldn't really hear me and deer have very poor eyesight while being upwind). Just make sure you're in decent shape and have a good pair of hiking boots to enjoy the excursion.