No U.S. national park has a name that starts with the letter Q. The National Park Service manages 63 parks that carry the title “National Park,” and not one of them begins with Q. The list jumps from Pinnacles and Redwood in the middle of the alphabet to Rocky Mountain, with nothing in between. Q is one of the rarest starting letters for place names in the United States, so this gap is not a surprise.

The main reason is language. English has few common words that begin with Q, and most place names come from English, Spanish, French, or Native American languages. Many national parks are named after landforms, such as mountains, canyons, and lakes, or after the people who lived there. Very few of those names start with Q. Spanish and French names usually use other letters for the same sounds, and many Native American names were written down in ways that do not use Q at the start. The parks were also named over more than a century, and no major site ended up with a Q name.

Some places come close. Quartz Mountain in Oklahoma is a state park, not a national one. Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts is a large protected area, but a state agency runs it. Quaker Run and Quechee Gorge are known natural spots that also fall outside the national park system. The National Park Service does manage other kinds of sites, such as monuments, historic sites, and recreation areas, and a few of them have names near this letter. If you are looking for Q-named nature areas, state parks and local preserves are the best place to start.