Where the data comes from
2225 parks across 29 states
Every park fact on this site — coordinates, hours, fees, campsite types, maps, alerts — is read from the managing agency's own website. Nothing is bought in, crowd-sourced, or copied from another guide.
Agencies
What we take, and what we don't
- Facts, not prose. We use published facts. Every park description on this site is written by us from those facts — agency copy is never reproduced.
- Hours are the one exception, and they're quoted as the agency words them, because “8 a.m. to sunset, whichever comes first” only survives in its own phrasing.
- No staff names or email addresses, even where an agency publishes them on every park page.
- Links are checked when the data is refreshed, and dead ones dropped — agency sidebars outlive the files they point at.
How current it is
Alerts, closures and events refresh regularly; the slower-moving facts are re-scraped less often. Each park's page shows when its data was last checked, and a closure reading older than two days is flagged as possibly out of date rather than stated as fact.
Agencies rarely retire an alert — several publish notices years old — so a notice whose dates have plainly passed and which makes no claim about the present is dropped. Anything still saying it is in force is kept however old, because hiding a live closure is worse than showing a stale one.
Maps and search
Location search is powered by Nominatim; map tiles and styling by OpenFreeMap and © OpenStreetMap contributors. Weather forecasts come from the US National Weather Service.
Something wrong?
The agency's own page is linked from every park here, and it wins. If this site disagrees with it, believe the agency — and it's worth telling us, because a mismatch usually means a scraper needs fixing.
Park Finder is an independent, unofficial project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any state parks agency.