Good data.
Better adventures.

Official trails, places, parking, and boundaries

Our research directory uses the National Park Service’s public geospatial services. The records include named trails, trail surfaces, recorded uses, points of interest, parking features, and the coordinates needed to put them on a map. Park boundary outlines come from the USGS National Map’s National Park layer.

These are inventory snapshots, not live operational feeds. A trail classified as “existing” may still be closed. Parking polygons do not indicate vacancies, fees, or accessible-space availability. We retain missing values and show coverage gaps rather than filling them with assumptions. Trail records can represent a named route, a connector, a bridge, or several mapped segments. They are not equivalent to a count of recommended hikes.

Some agencies publish records for shared management units. Sequoia and Kings Canyon, for example, share official planning guides and some mapped features. Counts shown for individual parks are associated records, not necessarily unique physical features across the whole catalog.

Stay recommendations and daily plans

All 63 parks have an editorial first-visit recommendation and a day-by-day outline: 153 suggested park days in total. These recommendations are National Parkwise’s planning guidance, not an NPS endorsement. They exclude travel to and from the region and assume that you will adjust activities to the season, current access, mobility, fitness, and reservations.

Remote Alaska and island parks need individually arranged transport and weather contingency time. A suggested stop is a place to research, not a guaranteed accessible destination or a fixed navigable route. Each daily plan links to official activity information; park pages also include the relevant official planning excerpts.

Planning guides and trail details

We retain 1,361 usable official guide snapshots covering things to do, camping, access, fees, directions, pets, safety, hiking, and weather. Additional linked hiking and campground pages provide more detail where available. The source URL and import date remain visible.

Where official pages provide structured trail tables, we retain their original headers and values. The government GIS inventory does not consistently provide route distance, difficulty, elevation gain, or accessibility, so we do not invent those fields. Missing snapshot pages remain linked to the official park website.

The park database

Our directory covers the 63 designated national parks in the National Park System, including Alaska, Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands. Official descriptions, images, and visitor-information links come from the National Park Service.

Park reference coordinates, established dates, 2023 area figures, and 2025 recreation visits were imported from the factual tables in the Wikipedia national parks list. These are a research snapshot, not a live feed. The year attached to each measure matters.

Climate by Weatherchirp

Monthly climate records are a snapshot of our own Weatherchirp dataset. The underlying 1991–2020 normals are derived from ERA5 reanalysis. For each park, we find the geographically nearest available town with a complete climate record and retain its name, location, distance, elevation, and reference period.

Daytime highs and nighttime lows are monthly typical values. Precipitation is the monthly total in millimeters, including snow expressed as water equivalent. Daylight is in hours; wind is in kilometers per hour.

A source town is not a whole national park. Temperatures can change dramatically between valley and summit, coast and interior. Some remote parks have source towns hundreds of kilometers away. Their values are labeled as regional context, and those parks are excluded from climate rankings when the source is more than 150 km away.

What “lovely this month” means

Seasonal suggestions rank the existing Weatherchirp monthly climate comfort score among parks with source towns within 150 km. This score favors comfortable outdoor conditions. “Best climate months” shows a park’s three highest-scoring nearby-town months.

It does not account for road openings, trail snowpack, wildfires, stream crossings, permits, wildlife activity, or visitor crowds. These are climate suggestions, not universal best travel dates. Always check the linked official park conditions and reservation information.

Our mild-day filter uses a typical daytime high of 15–27°C (59–81°F). Our drier-month filter uses less than 40 mm of precipitation per month. Both use the same 150 km source-distance limit.

Your research stays with you

Saved parks, trip order, notes, and temperature preferences are stored in your browser. We do not require an account. Source links and import dates remain visible throughout the site.

Dataset imported October 17, 2026. Official NPS imagery may include third-party credited material; consult each linked source page before reusing images. Map boundaries: US Atlas, based on US Census Bureau data.