# The 13 Greatest American Explorers of All Time

> Rivers, ice, jungle and orbit. The map has been finished for a while, which only makes the people who filled it in stranger.

*By YPB Team · Published August 12, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-13-greatest-american-explorers-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Meriwether Lewis**
   Co-led the expedition that crossed the continent to the Pacific and back between 1804 and 1806.
2. **William Clark**
   The mapmaker of the Corps of Discovery, whose charts stood as the best of the West for decades.
3. **Neil Armstrong**
   Commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on another world.
4. **Sacagawea**
   The Lemhi Shoshone interpreter and guide whose presence and knowledge kept the Lewis and Clark expedition alive.
5. **Robert Peary**
   Led the 1909 Arctic expedition that claimed the North Pole, a claim argued over ever since.
6. **Matthew Henson**
   Peary's co-explorer on eight Arctic voyages and, by several accounts, the first man to stand at the Pole.
7. **Theodore Roosevelt**
   Co-led the 1913–14 descent of the Amazon's River of Doubt, now the Rio Roosevelt, and nearly died doing it.
8. **John Wesley Powell**
   Ran the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 with one arm and four boats.
9. **Amelia Earhart**
   First woman to fly the Atlantic solo, and the century's most famous disappearance.
10. **Charles Lindbergh**
   Flew the first solo nonstop crossing of the Atlantic in 1927 in thirty-three and a half hours.
11. **Robert Ballard**
   The oceanographer who found the Titanic in 1985 and turned deep-sea robotics into exploration.
12. **Sally Ride**
   The first American woman in space, aboard Challenger in 1983.
13. **Zebulon Pike**
   Explored the southern Louisiana Purchase and left his name on the Colorado peak he never climbed.

Tags: historical-figures, nature, usa, adventure