National parks aren’t born. They’re made, via an act of Congress and a signature of the president. Getting a piece of land to receive that landmark status involves a lot of money and politics. Congresspeople and senators often advocate for land they represent to become a park in order to boost local economies through tourism. Other times, local activists push for national park status to conserve their wild landscapes from development.
For every effort that’s successful, there are many that fail. Sometimes it’s due to rivalries between government agencies, opposition from private businesses, or plain old bad timing. There’s a long history of places that almost entered the pantheon of national parks, and some of the locations might surprise you. This isn’t a complete list (there are more than 100 failed proposals in California alone), but it shows just how tricky it is to elevate a landscape to the “holy grail” status of national park.
California
Santa Monica/Los Angeles
In February 2026, the National Park Service (NPS) began soliciting comments about whether portions of the coastline near Los Angeles should become a national park, and it’s not the first time this part of Southern California has been in the national park conversation.
In 1916, conservationist Stephen Mather got a bill into Congress to designate a few hundred acres of forest in the Sierra Madre Mountains above L.A. a national park. The bill never even made it to a vote, crowded out by contemporaneous efforts to create Olympic and Acadia national parks.
An environmental activist advocated for parts of Santa Monica to be designated a national park to protect against mining and development in the 1920s, but the Great Depression ended that effort.
Then, in the 1970s, local congressman Alphonzo Bell Jr. tried several times to get the Santa Monica Mountains declared a national park, but all his efforts failed. The mountains were declared a national recreation area, however, in 1978.
Lake Tahoe
People advocated for this iconic body of water to become a national park even before the NPS was created in 1916. In response to concerns over logging in the area, local residents attempted to pressure Congress to pass the law several times — in 1899, 1913, 1930, and 1935, according to nonprofit the Tahoe Fund. All of these efforts failed because the overwhelming amount of private development that had already occurred in the area.
Federal and state agencies ultimately took a much more patchwork approach to conservation here. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) gradually bought up parcels of land when they went up for sale, and California and Nevada established several state parks. By 1980, together these agencies owned 70% of the land in the Lake Tahoe basin, and today that number stands close to 90%.
Mount Shasta
Efforts to make California’s fifth-tallest mountain a park date back to the conservation legend himself, John Muir. In 1888, he started pushing for a national park here, and tried to convince President Theodore Roosevelt of it in 1903 on their famous Yosemite trip together, according to the Sierra Club.
“Mount Shasta, situated near the northern extremity of the Sierra Nevada, rises in solitary grandeur from a lightly sculptured lava plain, and maintains a far more impressive and commanding individuality than any other mountain within the limits of California,” he wrote.
In 1912, several local business associations proposed a national park bill for the peak, and a legislator introduced it. Congress adjourned before the vote, but it went before the House again in 1914. In an odd twist of fate, nearby Mt. Lassen began a series of eruptions, stealing all the attention and receiving the designation instead. Had that volcano not blown its top, Mt. Shasta very well could’ve become a national park.
Efforts continued until 1929. California already had four national parks at this point, and representatives from other states with fewer parks were unwilling to continue to heap the economic engines on an already well-off state. This peak is part of the Cascade mountain range, and some saw it being a national park as a duplicate of another Cascade peak-turned-park, Mt. Rainier. Eventually, Congress established the Mt. Shasta Wilderness Area in 1984.
California’s Other Almost-Parks
A 2008 academic study by Lary M. Dilsaver listed 134 failed park proposals in the state. They illustrate the variety of reasons a proposal doesn’t make it over the finish line. They include:
- Big Sur (1978): Failed due to locals opposing the idea of the NPS owning the land.
- Catalina Island (1953): NPS found that the area was “not of national significance,” a requirement for all national parks.
- Burney Falls (1919): NPS said it was not of national significance, and then the area ultimately became a state park in 1926.
- Mono Lake (1934, 1953, 1982): The USFS already managed a large amount of land here, and opposed it changing hands to the NPS.
Mountain West
Dinosaur National Monument
Woodrow Wilson designated this important site of Native American and paleontological history in Utah and Colorado a national monument in 1915. Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the president can designate a national monument without Congressional approval.
Even though the area was thus protected and managed by the NPS, some folks wanted to elevate it further to national park status. Representatives made noise about the subject in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the measure failed each time due to opposition from industrial and agricultural interests, according to Desert News.
Colorado National Monument
This part of western Colorado has been a national monument since 1911, but its more than century-old status hasn’t stopped people from trying to change it. In 2010 and 2014, local politicians and tourism boards supported the area becoming Rim Rock Canyons National Park.
The terrain and topography is very similar to Arches National Park, which people on both sides of the argument used in their favor. Other objectors claimed that the monument was too small (32 square miles) to earn that demarcation. According to reporting from The Denver Post, surveys showed that only about 40% of locals supported the idea, and Congresspeople and senators thus declined to endorse it.
Sawtooth Mountains
The saga surrounding whether Idaho’s most famous mountain range should be a national park lasted for decades. Mining and cattle operations led Theodore Roosevelt to establish a 3.5-million acre forest preserve here in 1905. Jean Conly Smith, a local birder, naturalist, and Suffragette, tried to petition a senator to make it a national park in 1912.
The Idaho State Legislature passed a bill endorsing the idea in 1915. The USFS, however, strongly opposed the idea, since it meant they’d give up control. In the 1920s and ’30s, USFS staff lobbied against the idea by promising locals to improve their roads if they took the Forest Service’s side. In 1937, the Dept. of Agriculture created the 200,000-acre Sawtooth Primitive Area to limit development.
Continued expansion of mining in the area pushed conservationists to renew the call for a national park in the 1950s and ’60s. Some local hunters and ranchers opposed mining, but didn’t want the area to be a national park since it would restrict those activities. Ultimately, politicians, local businesses, and conservationists were able to settle on a compromise: The Sawtooth National Recreation Area, created in 1972. This designation prevented new mining claims, but still let people harvest timber, fish, and hunt.
Craters of the Moon National Monument
This unusually named landscape in Idaho was another contender for national park status. The 750,000-acre area is home to the largest lava field in the Lower 48, with lava flows, volcanic cones, tunnels, and kipukas, small islands of vegetation protected by lava flows.
In 2015, locals began pushing for its elevation, hoping that tourist dollars would help save their dwindling small town economies. The Farm Bureau, a national agriculture industry group, killed the effort in 2017 over concerns it would impact ranchers’ ability to graze livestock.
Escalante Canyons National Park
There is perhaps no national monument more embattled than Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah. Its history is one of back and forth: Trump shrank it by half in his first administration, Biden then restored it, and just this year Trump shrank it again.
In response to the first reduction, in 2017, Utah Rep. Chris Stewart introduced a bill to create Escalante Canyons National Park from the remnants of Grand Staircase. While recent presidents have exercised authority to unilaterally shrink the size of national monuments, they cannot touch national parks, which are under Congressional authority.
The bill attracted controversy. Some argued that Utah’s existing five national parks didn’t have adequate funding to keep up on maintenance, and adding another wouldn’t help matters. Conservation groups said that restoring Grand Staircase to its former size should be the focus instead. Stewart re-introduced the bill in 2020, but it didn’t make any forward progress.
Midwest
Ouachita Mountains National Forest
Of all the places that almost became a national park, the Ouachita Mountains very well might have come the closest. The area had been a national forest since 1907. A local Congressman introduced a bill to make this region of Oklahoma and Arkansas a park in 1927. The NPS opposed the idea, since it didn’t believe the area was special or unique enough.
Despite this challenge, the bill passed the House and Senate, and just needed a signature to become law. In his last day in office, President Calvin Coolidge refused to sign the bill, essentially vetoing it. When President Herbert Hoover took office and the Great Depression took center stage, the idea of Ouachita Mountains National Park fell by the wayside.
Buffalo National River
From the 1930s to 1960s, the U.S. government went on a dam-building spree, damning up many rivers across the country in order to manage water and agriculture and generate power. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to do the same with the Buffalo River in Arkansas, but locals fought back and killed the project. It then became a national river in 1972.
Over 50 years later, locals are bringing that same activist energy back to the Buffalo. Beginning in 2023, conservationists began calling for the river to become a national park. They cited the example of New River Gorge, which was a national river before it became a national park in 2020, and hoped the new designation would bring in more federal dollars for upkeep and management. The idea sparked opposition due to concerns about over-tourism and environmental impact. It remains in limbo, as its leaders haven’t been able to convince Arkansas politicians to support the idea.
South & Southwest
Bandelier National Monument
This is one of many examples of elected officials attempting to turn a national monument into a national park. Theoretically, since the land is already publicly owned and managed by the NPS, this kind of elevation is more straightforward.
In 2019, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich introduced a bill to turn this iconic part of his home state of New Mexico into a park. Many Indigenous cultures lived in this part of the desert for thousands of years, and left behind petroglyphs and dwellings carved into rock walls.
Heinrich’s proposal had the support of local county leaders, conservation groups, and some Native American tribes. However, the Pueblo of Cochiti strongly opposed the measure due to concern over potential impact to tribal resources and access. Heinrich reintroduced the bill in 2021 and it stalled out.
Davis Mountains
The Davis Mountains, the largest mountain range in Texas, sit squarely between the state’s two existing national parks, Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains, so it’s no surprise people have tried to make it a park as well.
In the 1980s, a few ranchers expressed interest in selling their land to the Dept. of the Interior (DOI) for a national park, in part to save themselves from paying expensive property taxes. The agency commissioned a study examining the feasibility of a national park in the area, and public meetings attracted large crowds of critics, who worried about over-tourism, vandalism and crime, and improper federal management. The proposal ultimately went nowhere, and 99.5% of the land in the Davis Mountains remains privately held.
Atchafalaya Basin
Swamps might not be the sexiest kind of landscape to sell as a national park, but they’re important sources of biodiversity and help act as natural flood barriers. Louisiana’s 1.5-million-acre Atchafalaya Basin is the largest river-basin swamp and wetland in the U.S., and became a National Heritage Area in 2006.
In 2014, environmentalists (including the Sierra Club) pushed for national park status in order to protect it from development. Industrial operations to grow sugar cane and rice located nearby the basin harmed the ecosystem. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built a complex system of canals and levees here; while this infrastructure has helped control flooding, it also cut off water from areas in the swamp that need it to survive.
Supporters believed a national park designation would lead to better protections and more funding, and if the DOI could buy those farms, it could preserve the land. High levels of private land ownership and opposition from business interests, however, put a stop to the idea before it could ever really hit the ground running.
East Coast
High Allegheny
The campaign to make the Allegheny National Forest a national park got momentum beginning in 2010, and it’s still well-organized, with a dedicated website and organization. The proposal consists of 6 non-contiguous parcels of national forest land totaling 77,500 acres. The organizers argue that the new designation would increase visitor numbers and support the local economy with more tourism dollars and jobs. They also believe the NPS would create new trails, overlooks, and visitor centers.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin endorsed the NPS doing a survey on the idea in 2011, but then quickly pulled his support in 2012 due to concerns over potential impacts to fishing and hunting access, killing the project.
Adirondacks
The conservation history of this area of northeastern New York stretches all the way back to the 1800s. The state owns 2.7 million acres, and in 1894, it classified them as “Forever Wild” spaces, meaning they’re preserved under the state constitution. They can’t be developed, logged, transferred, or sold.
In 1967, Laurance Rockefeller and his brother Governor Nelson Rockefeller submitted a proposal to make over 1 million acres of the area a gigantic national park. According to reporting from the Adirondack Almanack, most New Yorkers hated the idea. There was concern that the status would lead to more highways and development, in order to make the area more accessible to tourists.
It would’ve meant the state would relinquish its control of the land to allow the federal government to manage it instead. Hunters also condemned the idea, since most national parks typically have a blanket hunting ban. The Conservation Department refused to endorse the idea, and the proposal died quickly thereafter.
