Get free entry to all US National Park sites on Friday
Historic American flying over the entrance to Fort McHenry National Monument
By Forrest Brown, CNN
The US National Park Service offers free entry a handful of times each year to all of its more than 400 sites. We’re at the last one for 2022.
No fees will be charged to enter any site — including the marquee names — on Friday, November 11.
The NPS chose Veterans Day for the last free-entry day to honor the people who have served in the military.
If you wish to commemorate veterans or learn more about US history in general while saving some money, you have have plenty of sites from which to choose, including:
• Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland
• Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park in Georgia and Tennessee
• Fort Davis National Historic Site in Texas
• Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Maryland
• Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Oregon and Washington
• Golden Spike National Historic Park in Utah
• Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial in Ohio
• Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi
Click here for a full listing of every NPS site, which it calls “units.”
Most NPS sites are free all year anyway. Only 108 charge a fee. And as you’d suspect, it’s mostly the big names that ask you to pay to enter: Places such as Arches in Utah, Rocky Mountain in Colorado and Shenandoah in Virginia.
But they’re all free this Friday.
One catch: “The entrance fee waiver for fee-free days does not cover amenity or user fees for activities such as camping, boat launches, transportation or special tours,” the NPS says.
Planning pays off
If you’re not much of a planner, it might be a good idea to develop the habit — particularly if you want to see a popular NPS site on a free day.
Of those 420+ sites in the National Park System, the top 25 got more than half of the system’s total number of visits last year. Some parks set all-time records for visitors in 2021.
If you have a particular site you wish to visit, make sure to check its website first. For instance, popular Yosemite National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains can be open in November, but unpredictable autumn snows can cause short-term closures.
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Top image: The entrance to Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, Maryland. (Melissa Woolf/Adobe Stock)
