American Samoa

Some landscapes become part of our imagination long before we ever visit them. The National Park of American Samoa has been in mine for years — not because of famous photographs or Instagram posts, but precisely because of the absence of those things. It is the national park that almost nobody talks about, that almost nobody visits, and that sits further from the continental United States than any other unit in the system — 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii, deep in the South Pacific.