Lake Guntersville State Park
Lakeside trails, lodge overlooks, hardwood forest, golf, camping, and a major bald-eagle wintering tradition spread across a broad Tennessee River reservoir landscape.
Places and wildlife — page 57
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Sipsey Wilderness
The Bankhead National Forest’s wilderness protects bluff shelters, old forest, tributary canyons, waterfalls, and a dense trail network often called the Land of a Thousand Waterfalls.
Dismals Canyon
A cool privately protected canyon holds waterfalls, giant boulders, hemlock-like forest, and colonies of bioluminescent fungus gnat larvae known locally as dismalites.
Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge
Dunes, scrub, maritime forest, lagoon, freshwater wetlands, and beach provide crucial habitat for migratory birds, sea turtles, and the Alabama beach mouse amid intense coastal development.
Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge
Shoals, forest, rare fish and mussels, and spectacular Cahaba lilies protect a segment of one of North America’s most biodiverse rivers.
Walls of Jericho Trail
A strenuous out-and-back drops from the Cumberland Plateau to Turkey Creek, Clark Cemetery, springs, and a high-walled limestone bowl on the Tennessee line.
Pinhoti Trail — Alabama
More than 170 Alabama miles connect Talladega National Forest, Cheaha, Dugger Mountain, road walks, shelters, and the Georgia line as part of the Eastern Continental Trail.
Mobile–Tensaw River Delta
The Blakeley, Spanish, Tensaw, Apalachee, and Mobile rivers spread through cypress swamp, marsh, bayous, islands, and estuary in one of the continent’s largest river deltas.
Natural Bridge Park
A short forest walk reaches a broad natural sandstone bridge, rock shelters, seeps, and weathered walls in northwestern Alabama.
Bellingrath Gardens and Home
Sixty-five acres combine an azalea ravine, rose garden, Asian garden, bayou overlooks, conservatory, Great Lawn, and a 1935 home shaped by architect George Rogers.
Huntsville Botanical Garden
A native-plant teaching garden, aquatic garden, woodland paths, children’s spaces, seasonal butterfly house, and changing displays spread across a large former soybean field.
Birmingham Botanical Gardens
Japanese gardens, native wildflowers, camellias, roses, tropical houses, Alabama woodlands, herbs, and a major horticultural library occupy 67 acres beside the zoo.
Aldridge Gardens
Thirty acres preserve the home of Snowflake hydrangea, native azaleas, a lake trail, bonsai terrace, bird habitat, and an extensive group of Frank Fleming sculptures.
Birmingham Zoo
African elephants, primates, predators, reptiles, birds, Alabama species, children’s areas, and conservation programs fill a hilly campus beside the botanical gardens.
Montgomery Zoo
Animal habitats, Waters of the World, keeper talks, and the Mann Wildlife Learning Museum combine living behavior with preserved comparative collections.
Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo
Big cats, primates, reptiles, birds, domestic animals, encounters, and shaded paths occupy a newer inland campus designed after repeated hurricane threats.
Red Hills Salamander
A long, dark, mostly subterranean salamander survives only in cool forested ravines across six south Alabama counties.
Alabama Red-bellied Turtle
This large basking turtle is centered in the lower Mobile–Tensaw system, where freshwater marsh, submerged vegetation, and nesting ground meet tidal influence.
Alabama Sturgeon
A small shovel-nosed sturgeon persists at vanishingly low numbers in the Alabama River system and is not an ethical sighting target.
Spring Pygmy Sunfish
This tiny sunfish survives in clear vegetated springs of the Tennessee Valley, where groundwater quantity and aquatic plants matter more than open water.
Black Warrior Waterdog
This permanently gilled waterdog lives beneath rock and ledges in streams of the Black Warrior River basin, surfacing a biodiversity story hidden below turbid water.
Flattened Musk Turtle
This small aquatic turtle is restricted to the upper Black Warrior drainage, where clean rocky streams and crevices offer feeding and refuge.
Alabama Canebrake Pitcher Plant
Tall yellow-green pitchers with reddish veins trap insects in sunny seepage bogs where groundwater keeps acidic soil wet but not deeply flooded.
Cahaba Lily
Broad white flowers rise from rocky shoals in fast, sunlit water, with Alabama’s Cahaba River supporting the best-known and largest accessible display.
High Museum of Art
European and American art, photography, decorative arts, African art, folk and self-taught work, and contemporary installations occupy a white ramped campus designed by Richard Meier and expanded by Renzo Piano.
Georgia Museum of Art
American painting, decorative arts, works on paper, European art, and the state collection share a university museum built around research, teaching, and changing exhibitions.
Telfair Museums
Telfair Academy, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, and the contemporary Jepson Center connect art collecting, urban slavery, architecture, and new work across three nearby sites.
Morris Museum of Art
Painting, works on paper, photography, and changing exhibitions examine artists of the American South across race, region, training, and historical period.
Columbus Museum
American art, Chattahoochee Valley history, decorative arts, interactive spaces, and the Bradley Olmsted Garden connect collection objects to the region around them.
Museum of Aviation
Four hangars and outdoor fields hold military aircraft, missiles, cockpits, engines, uniforms, and stories linked to Robins Air Force Base from World War II onward.
National Infantry Museum
Immersive galleries move from the Revolutionary War through contemporary conflicts with weapons, uniforms, vehicles, oral histories, and the Last 100 Yards ramp.
National Center for Civil and Human Rights
Civil-rights history, the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. collection, interactive testimony, and global human-rights cases connect organized movements to choices made by individuals and institutions.
Atlanta History Center
Exhibitions, archives, gardens, the 1928 Swan House, Smith Farm, cyclorama painting, and Black community histories examine a city repeatedly remade by war, transportation, segregation, and growth.
Fernbank Museum of Natural History
Large dinosaur mounts, Georgia geology, cultural collections, science interactives, giant-screen films, and 75 acres of old-growth and restored woodland join deep time to a living Piedmont landscape.
Tellus Science Museum
A vast mineral gallery, fossil hall, transportation collection, planetarium, and hands-on fossil and gem areas connect earth processes to engineering and extraction.
Booth Western Art Museum
Large contemporary Western paintings and sculpture, presidential letters, Indigenous works, Civil War art, and temporary exhibitions reveal how national myths travel far from the places they depict.
Delta Flight Museum
Historic aircraft, a restored 1940s hangar, uniforms, route maps, advertising, and a full Boeing 747 trace Delta from crop dusting to global aviation.
World of Coca-Cola
Archives, advertising, bottling displays, scent and flavor interactives, the vault story, and international tasting turn a familiar product into a lesson in branding and distribution.
National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force
Aircraft, mission planning, POW testimony, archival film, artifacts, and a memorial garden interpret the Eighth Air Force’s European war.
Tubman Museum
Murals, folk and contemporary art, inventions, music, local history, and temporary exhibitions center African American creativity in Georgia and beyond.
Augusta Museum of History
Augusta’s river economy, transportation, medicine, military history, golf culture, and James Brown share galleries with a restored 1914 locomotive and trolley tours.
Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park
King’s birth home, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Fire Station No. 6, family businesses, streetscape, and gravesite connect biography to Black Atlanta institutions.
Jimmy Carter National Historical Park
Plains High School, the Boyhood Farm, campaign depot, railroad corridor, and community landscape connect Carter’s rural formation to civil rights, agriculture, faith, diplomacy, and public service.
Andersonville National Historic Site
The Civil War prison site, reconstructed stockade corners, Andersonville National Cemetery, and National Prisoner of War Museum address captivity from the 1860s through later conflicts.
Fort Pulaski National Monument
Fort rooms, breach damage, earthworks, river channels, Cockspur Island trails, and stories of confinement and emancipation connect engineering to the Civil War’s technological and political changes.
Fort Frederica National Monument
Archaeological foundations, tabby ruins, regiment history, river position, and live oaks preserve the town built to contest Spanish Florida in the 1730s.
Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park
Battle lines, earthworks, fields, mountain trails, artillery positions, monuments, and museum exhibits preserve a pivotal landscape of the 1864 Atlanta Campaign.
Roosevelt’s Little White House State Historic Site
Roosevelt’s cottage, unfinished portrait, pools museum, cars, correspondence, and rehabilitation history show how polio and the surrounding community shaped a presidency.