If you’re willing to go as far as Kentucky or West Virginia anyway, you should consider the Red River Gorge area in Daniel Boone in KY, or the Spruce Knob/Seneca Rocks area in WV. Neither are national parks – they’re both national forests.

Both will be considerably less touristy and less crowded than (at least the popular) national parks, and you don’t have to pay just to get in, either. These two areas have some of the most bodacious geology on display on the East Coast, in my opinion, and if you’re into that sort of thing it’s well worth checking out.

The heyday of the Seneca Rocks region seems to have passed and getting accommodation there that’s not camping is trickier than it was a few decades ago, since most of the motels and hotels around the region have folded. But you can rent cabins if you plan in advance from various outfits, and there are two quite nice national forest camp sites there plus oodles of commercial/independent ones. Seneca Rocks itself is a quite striking geological feature you can hike up and stand on top of, and Spruce Knob is just a hop, skip, and a jump away and is the highest point in WV with some great and very easily accessible views from the top. Don’t forget to stop by Yocum’s general store and pet the cats when you’re there.

Dispersed camping is no longer allowed within the Seneca Rocks/Spruce Knob sphere of influence, but it is in the rest of the adjacent greater Monongahela National Forest, including in the Dolly Sods wilderness if you’re into that sort of thing. Backpacking in Dolly Sods is quite possibly the best way to see the most varied terrain anywhere east of the Mississippi within the span of a weekend and without owning a private jet. The north, east, south, and west extremities of it may as well be on different continents; it’s pretty wild.

Dispersed camping is allowed in Daniel Boone if you go there. You have to buy a permit to leave your car anywhere overnight to go backpacking but it’s only a couple of bucks. The Red River Gorge area in Daniel Boone has some incredible sandstone formations including massive arches (some of which you can climb), shelter caves, cliffs, and overlooks. It’s also home to the Nada Tunnel which is pretty cool but maybe not so appealing to people who are afraid of caves because it’s basically a cave with a one lane road you can drive straight through. (It was actually originally a railway tunnel. I cannot possibly conceive of what it must have been like to cram a coal burning steam locomotive through that tiny passage, and if you see it you’ll know why. But that’s what they did back in the day.)

Civilized accommodations are easier to come by there including plenty of cabins and motels, and also hotels you can find near the interstate. If you’re into rock climbing there are also a ton of climbing routes all over the Red River Gorge.

Forget Yellowstone. Yellowstone is so popular and yet so fragile and so dangerous that the entire place is on lockdown. You spend your entire stay there on rails, pretty much literally. Everything is boardwalks and pavement and everything else that isn’t is cordoned off. Yes, this is so dumbasses cannot fall into geothermal features and be boiled alive. But it also has the net effect of causing you to take the exact same route in the exact same way and take the exact same pictures that everyone else already has. So you can have the same experience by just finding some rando’s Flickr album or whatever and looking at their pictures, because they’ll be just the same as yours. Plus the whole place stinks. Sulfur, don’t you know.

Oh, and you get to contend with access roads clogged by all the dimwits from the midwest who stop dead in the middle of everything to try to fit baby bison into their minivans, or whatever the fuck else. I went once and that was enough. I came, I saw, I bought a mug. I have no desire to go back. (Nearby Shoshone National Forest, however, is friggin’ awesome. So is Big Horn. Be sure to check out Shell Falls while you’re there and annoy your nearest creationist.)