The votes for our 2023 Best Of Travel Awards have been tallied and every pick is a winner. To those who selected these hidden gem national parks — nice work. I’m a retired NPS ranger and you’ve picked some of my personal favorites; parks loved by many of my friends and co-workers as well. Here are your top picks:

1. Indiana Dunes National Park (Winner)

Indiana

The term “hidden in plain sight” was invented to describe this hidden gem. You don’t have to travel to the tundra, or to the Caribbean, to find it. Head to Chicago, turn left at Gary, Indiana, go past the steel mill at Burns Harbor, and you’ll end up at a geological wonder that surprisingly is a wonderland of biological diversity.

Yes, smack dab in the industrial heartland, you’ll find an amazing variety of plants and animals. In fact, the NPS ranks it as fourth in all of the parks in the diversity of its living things. Bird watchers rank it as one of the best birding areas in the country.

Its biological makeup comes from a diversity of habitats. There’s the lake, the dunes, the wetlands, the prairie grasses, the pines, maples, oaks, and more.

There’s also a great variety of hiking. Hiking the dunes is a thigh-burning way to get your steps in (yes, there are boardwalks, but the boardwalks have stairs). But with 50 miles of trails, many of them gently flat and some paved, the park is a treasure waiting to be discovered.

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