By state
National parks in Montana
Every national park and public-land unit in Montana, scored and ranked by our Experience Score.
Montana's national park units stretch across nearly the full width of a state that genuinely recalibrates your sense of how far things are, and together they make a strong case for anyone willing to put in the miles. The northwest corner belongs to Glacier National Park, one of the most celebrated wilderness destinations in North America, while the southern border shares Yellowstone National Park with Wyoming. Past those two well-known anchors, the picture gets more interesting. Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area offers world-class stargazing and water recreation in the far southeast corner of the state, Big Hole National Battlefield preserves a quiet and genuinely affecting piece of Nez Perce history in the southwest, and Grant-Kohrs Ranch brings the ranching frontier to life near Deer Lodge. The visitors who get the most out of Montana's NPS units tend to be self-sufficient, at ease with long drives, and curious about both the natural world and the complicated human stories woven into this landscape, from Indigenous history to the fur trade.
100DOES IT ALL
Sharron Genaux
National Recreation Area · MT
Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area
Bighorn Canyon runs along the Montana-Wyoming border at no charge, centered on the deep gorge the Bighorn River cut over time and the reservoir that backed up behind Yellowtail Dam.
90DOES IT ALL
NPS Photo
National Park · MT
Glacier National Park
Glacier National Park's 90/100 experience score is well deserved.
90DOES IT ALL
NPS / Jacob W. Frank
National Park · ID
Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone is the park every other national park gets measured against, and that reputation holds up.
88DOES IT ALL
NPS Photo
National Battlefield · MT
Big Hole National Battlefield
Big Hole National Battlefield marks the site of one of the worst engagements of the Nez Perce War of 1877.
83WIDE RANGE
NPS Photo
National Historical Park · ID
Nez Perce National Historical Park
Nez Perce National Historical Park is unlike almost any other national historical park in the country.
74WIDE RANGE
NPS Photo / Alex Wiles
National Historic Trail · IA
Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail
The Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail is not a single park.
66GOOD RANGE
NPS Photo / Kris Baxter
National Historic Site · MT
Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site
Fort Union Trading Post sits on the Montana-North Dakota border along the Upper Missouri River, a reconstructed 19th-century fur trade fort that is free to visit and genuinely pulls you in.
60GOOD RANGE
Recreation.gov
Recreation Area · MT
Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River
The Upper Missouri pulls off something genuinely rare: a free, mostly undeveloped river corridor in Montana that still looks much the way Lewis and Clark found it.
56GOOD RANGE
NPS Photo
National Historic Site · MT
Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site
Grant-Kohrs Ranch sits in Deer Lodge, Montana, preserving what remains of a cattle operation that once covered roughly 10 million acres.
53FOCUSED
BLM Montana Dakotas
National Monument · MT
Pompeys Pillar National Monument and Visitor Center
Pompeys Pillar has a reputation that outpaces its physical size, and there is one reason for that: William Clark's 1806 signature carved into the sandstone.
49FOCUSED
NPS photo
National Monument · MT
Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
Little Bighorn Battlefield sits on the rolling Montana plains where, in June 1876, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors defeated the U.S.