The weirdest national park sites in the United States

By Cheri Sicard
After years of researching the National Park System, National Park Diaries keeps running into places that break the usual rules, and they share them in the video at the end of this post. These are the parks that feel out of place, ignore neat categories, or make the map look a little absurd. That oddness is what makes them fun.

From a site no one can step on to a park the federal government rents, these units show how strange national park administration can get. In the video at the end of this post, they reveal them all.

St. Croix Island is the only international historic site

Maine is home to one of the strangest titles in the system, St. Croix Island International Historic Site. There are dozens of national historic sites, but this is the only international historic site in the entire system.

The park tells the story of early French settlement in North America. St. Croix Island sits in the St. Croix River on the U.S. side of the border, while Parks Canada manages a matching site across the water. Both countries work together to interpret the same history.

The odd part does not stop there. Visitors can go to viewing areas on both sides of the border, but the island itself is off-limits to protect its historic resources.

Washington, D.C., might be the capital of park weirdness

In Washington, D.C., many famous memorials are separate National Park System units on paper. The Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Jefferson Memorial each count on their own. Yet in day-to-day practice, they are managed together as the National Mall and Memorial Parks.

Then there are the tiny scraps of land created by D.C.’s diagonal street grid. Those odd triangles and slivers of grass at strange intersections often fall under National Park Service control, too. In other words, a small city park in an obscure corner of D.C. might also be a national park site.

Nearby, Catoctin Mountain Park adds another twist. It does not carry a “national” label at all, and Camp David sits inside it. So, when the president is there, parts of the park can close and security tightens. National Park Diaries also points to a deeper history in its video on why Camp David is located in a national park.

Some park units barely fit the map

Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument is the only unit in the system with no land at all inside its borders. Even water-heavy parks like Biscayne and Dry Tortugas include some land. This one is pure marine space, acting as a protective buffer around St. John.

Manhattan Project National Historical Park is one park split among Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington. Oak Ridge enriched uranium, Hanford produced plutonium, and Los Alamos built the bombs. That is one park, spread across three states and three major pieces of atomic history.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park offers a different kind of weird. Its North Unit and South Unit are only about 50 miles apart in a straight line, but they sit in different time zones. So a fast enough drive could, at least on the clock, make someone arrive before leaving.

American Samoa has the strangest setup of all

The National Park of American Samoa may be the wildest case. The federal government does not own the land. Instead, it leases the park from Samoan villages, which makes it the only park in the system with that arrangement. The lease runs for 50 years from the park’s 1988 creation, so 2038 becomes an important date if renewals ever come up.

That is the bigger takeaway here. National parks are not only landscapes. They are also legal and administrative creations, and sometimes those rules get wonderfully strange.

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