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Channel Islands National Park
Five wild islands off Southern California, called North America's Galápagos
Within sight of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, five islands have evolved on their own for thousands of years. Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel and Santa Barbara hold 145 plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth, including the island fox, a housecat-sized relative of the gray fox that nearly vanished in the 1990s before a recovery effort brought it back. Half of the park lies underwater, where kelp forests shelter garibaldi, sea lions and seals, and the surrounding national marine sanctuary extends protection six nautical miles offshore.
The islands also hold one of the longest records of people in the Americas. Bones found at Arlington Springs on Santa Rosa Island are about 13,000 years old, and the Chumash built villages on the northern islands, crossing the channel in plank canoes called tomols. Tongva people lived on islands to the south. Ranching shaped the 19th and 20th centuries, and today the Nature Conservancy owns the western 76 percent of Santa Cruz Island while the Park Service manages the rest. Anacapa and Santa Barbara became a national monument in 1938, and the five-island park was created in 1980.