Seven parks from Maine to Kentucky, and the region we argued about most.
This is the loosest grouping of the seven, and pretending otherwise would be insulting. Acadia is on the coast of Maine. Mammoth Cave is in south-central Kentucky, 1,200 miles away. They share a region and essentially nothing else.
What holds it together is negative space. These are the eastern and Great Lakes parks that are not Southeast and not Great Plains. Cuyahoga Valley and Indiana Dunes are urban-adjacent parks on the industrial Midwest shoreline. Isle Royale is a wilderness island in Lake Superior that closes entirely for winter and is the least visited park in the lower 48. New River Gorge only became a national park in 2020.
It is also the most surprising region to work through, because these are the parks people skip. Isle Royale has the longest-running predator-prey study in the world. Indiana Dunes is where the science of ecological succession was invented.
"Northeast" is doing a lot of work for a region containing Kentucky and Indiana. A stricter cut would split off a Great Lakes region, but that leaves Acadia and Shenandoah alone. We took the imperfect seven over two awkward halves.