I’m an avid bumper-sticker reader when I’m on the road, especially if I recognize a national park connection. I apologize if you’re that car with two dozen stickers on the back window that I’ve tailgated as I did a park inventory. Know that I’m super-jealous of your car’s adventures.
One common sticker is an oval, usually white with black lettering and an outline, with a four-letter code for a national park. I can often decode it, but they’re not always obvious. Sometimes there's a different pairing of letters. And a few of them are a bit more creative.
Warning: You're entering National Parks Nerd Country.
Here’s the NPS.gov website that lists these four-letter codes for just about every National Park Service unit, and it’s a fairly simple system when it comes to decoding the 63 national parks. (The other 350+ entries are a bit more jumbled.)
Twenty of the park codes are simple: For many parks with only one word in the name, it’s the first four letters. Think Acadia (ACAD), Olympic (OLYM), and Yosemite (YOSE).
Thirty-six parks have two words in their names, and their codes are combinations of first two letters of each word. Examples are Grand Canyon (GRCA), North Cascades (NOCA), and Indiana Dunes (INDU).
That leaves seven oddballs. Three of them are obvious once you see them:
- Gates of the Arctic is GAAR, which makes sense when you skip the small words in the middle of the name.
- National Park of American Samoa is the only national park whose code incorporates the park designation: NPSA. Note the reversal of the S and A.
- Wrangell-St. Elias pulls from both sides of the hyphen: WRSE.
Finally, three have codes that don’t match any of those:
- Carlsbad Caverns is, appropriately, CAVE. It’s an upgrade over it’s old code, which followed the two-word combination pattern, resulting in a not-so-nice word for scat.
- Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the two-parks-in-one, reflects that partnership with SEKI.
- And then there’s Gateway Arch, an unusual park since it’s the only park centered around a structure built in the last century. Before it was added to the national park roster, it was the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, and it still carries JEFF as its code. But you can't name it ARCH, since Utah’s Arches already claimed that, or GATE, since that's claimed by Gateway National Recreation Area in New York and New Jersey. And as we just saw, GAAR belongs to Gates of the Arctic. So JEFF it remains.
So the next time you see that oval with ARCH, CARE, CAVE, EVER, JEFF, YELL, or ZION (the only words in the national park codes), you’ll know a little about that driver’s national park adventures. Enjoy! (And no tailgating.)
—Brad