Crowd Favorites

The parks people would choose again.

Crowd Favorites is a running leaderboard of the U.S. National Parks, built from one strict input: ranked lists made by people choosing between parks they've actually visited.

How a park earns its spot

Every submitted ranking is a set of head-to-head results. If your list puts Glacier above Zion, that's one win for Glacier over Zion. Pile up everyone's lists and each park carries a real win-loss record against the parks it's been compared with.

That record becomes a pick score from 0 to 100. A score of 50 means a park wins exactly half its matchups — a coin flip against the field. Higher means people who've been there keep choosing it over other parks they've also been to.

Why small samples don't lie here

A park with two rankings and a perfect record shouldn't outrank a park with two hundred rankings and a great one. So scores are pulled toward 50 until a park has enough comparisons to earn its distance from the middle — and every entry shows how many rankings it's based on. No hidden math, no pay-for-placement, no critic's thumb on the scale.

Filter by trip style

Rankings arrive tagged — hiking, stargazing, family trips, RV, caves, and a dozen more. The trip-style filters rebuild the whole leaderboard from only the rankings tagged that way, which is how you get honest answers to questions like "best parks for stargazing."

The tally gets sharper with every list. Add yours — it takes about two minutes and counts immediately.