While watching a Merry-Go-Round from a bench in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, Walt Disney was struck with inspiration for the creation of Disneyland.
100 Mind-Blowing Park Facts
Somebody hid an episode of South Park inside Tiger Woods 99 as an Easter egg, causing EA to do a massive recall.
It costs almost $290,000 per year in fees to run a hot dog cart near the Central Park Zoo in New York City. This does not include cart incurred costs.
Ice pops were invented by an 11-year-old by accident. In 1905, an 11-year-old boy named Frank Epperson left soda powder and water outside overnight with its wooden stirrer still in the cup. The mixture had frozen in the chilly nighttime weather, and so the Epsicle was born. He sold the treat around his neighbourhood and a nearby amusement park and even patented the recipe. Years later, he changed the name to Popsicle because that’s what his kids called their pop’s concoction.
The world’s largest national park is located in Greenland. There are a lot of weird facts that people don’t know. Northeast Greenland National Park is conveniently also located on the world’s largest island. This remote national park is huge at 375,000 square miles.
A park ranger from the U.S. was once hit by lightning 7 times. This occurred between the years 1942 to 1977 at the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. This park ranger holds the name of the Human Lightning Rod in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The largest living thing on Earth is a tree. This Giant Sequoia is named General Sherman and can be found protected at California’s Sequoia National Park. The tree is recorded to be 52,500 cubic feet in volume.
The cast of Stand By Me accidentally got high from pot cookies. According to Kiefer Sutherland, the Stand By Me cast once went to a Renaissance Fair near their shooting location. They bought cookies from the fair. However, they had accidentally eaten pot brownies. The crew found Jerry O’Connell high and sobbing somewhere in the park.
Forrest Gump has more CGI than Jurassic Park. When Forrest ran through a jungle in Vietnam, and showed his table tennis skills, that was CGI. Even the feather in the opening scene is computer-generated. Overall, Forrest Gump has more minutes of CGI screen time than Jurassic Park. Another one of those funny facts that are hard to believe.
Jurassic Park raptor cries are tortoise sex noises. The screeching noises made by the raptors in Jurassic Park were taken from recordings of mating tortoises.
The most layers on a sandwich are 60. The world record for the most layers in a sandwich is 60. It was achieved by the DiLusso Deli Company at Madison Square Park in New York, USA on October 22, 2016.
Yosemite National Park in California is about the same size as the entire state of Rhode Island.
Babe Ruth was the first baseball player to hit a home run in the All-Star game, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1933.
Velociraptors were feathered dinosaurs. If you know about velociraptors from Jurassic Park, then this may come as quite a surprise. While scientists have been able to figure out that these vicious hunters used to have feathers, the question of how feathered they were is still unanswered. It’s possible that they just had tufts of feathers on their arms, head, or possibly all over!
Velociraptor noises in Jurassic Park are mating tortoises.
Missed. In 1800 George III survived two assassination attempts in one day. On the morning of 15 May, he was shot in Hyde Park, but the bullet narrowly missed and hit a civil servant, who survived. That evening the king was shot at again at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, by a mentally disturbed army veteran, who also missed. George insisted that the play go on.
Dartmoor delights. The highest concentration of Bronze Age remains in Britain is on Dartmoor, South Devon. In the 400 square miles of national park, every type of monument above can be found, including 18 stone circles and 75 stone rows.
The most Instagrammed mountain is Scafell Pike: Represent Clothing published a study in July 2022 where they found the most Instagrammable mountains in the UK. They did this by investigating the number of geotags photos of the mountains had on the app, and the top English mountain was Scafell Pike with 85,100 tags. Across the UK Scafell Pike came in third place, with Snowdon sitting in first place with 168,000 tags and the Brecon Beacons peak of Pen y Fan in second place with 146,000 tags. There was little doubt that a Lake District mountain would make the list, with the national park sporting a wealth of beautiful peaks. If you want to explore Scafell Pike yourself and snap a picture from the summit, why not give the Scafell Pike Circular Walk a go?
The South East of England is mostly flat: England’s topography is quite varied, with the Lake District National Park being a great example of the country’s high elevation. If you venture towards the South East, you’ll find the opposite. This part of the country is mostly low-lying, offering flat countryside with uninterrupted views. Some of the best places to experience these views are the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, including the Cotswolds and Chiltern Hills. The glorious South Downs National Park offers a stunning mixture of coastal and countryside sights, including the Seven Sisters cliffs. It’s well worth checking out!