I’ve created a 64-park bracket of American National Parks and will spend the month of May conducting Twitter polls in a single-elimination playoff to determine the park that Twitter users most want to visit once COVID-19 social distancing guidelines are lifted.

Please note that this is just for fun and is no way affiliated with or sponsored by the National Park Service.

Prediction brackets will be accepted until 11:59 pm on Sunday, 3 May 2020. You can download an Excel file or PDF file of the complete bracket.

Submit prediction brackets (one per person) to Storey Clayton via e-mail or Twitter DM. If Storey receives at least 25 brackets, there will be a prize for the winner. If he receives at least 100 brackets, there will be prizes for the top three.

Follow this blog and the hashtags #NationalParkPlayoff and #MayMadness to keep up with all the action as it unfolds! Once the competition begins on May 4, daily recaps will be posted here in the style of sports news!

This is the follow-up to the American City Bracket, which was a similar concept, held in April 2020, between major American cities. Tucson, Arizona won the Final Four in that contest, besting New Orleans, Chicago, and New York.

A note on methodology: there are currently 62 official National Parks in the United States. Storey decided to drop three obscure Alaskan parks (Katmai, Kobuk Valley, and Lake Clark), as well as two relatively new and obscure parks in the west (California’s Pinnacles and Colorado’s Black Canyon of the Gunnison). He then added four popular National Monuments (New York’s Statue of Liberty, California’s Muir Woods, Wyoming’s Devils Tower, and Idaho’s Craters of the Moon) as well as three popular National Memorials (DC’s Lincoln Memorial, Maryland’s Fort McHenry, and South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore). Regions were then balanced by state into Pacific, Southwest, North, and East and each park was seeded by annual visitors (data from 2018, according to Wikipedia).