About Verdant Traveler

Verdant Traveler is a directory of 3,836 parks across 56 US states and territories, alongside 268 guides to camping and getting outdoors.

Where the park data comes from

Every park on this site has a record in a canonical registry before it gets a page. Identity — the name, designation, location and acreage — comes from public agency sources:

• The National Park Service API, for national parks, monuments, historic sites and the rest of the federal system.
• PAD-US, the USGS Protected Areas Database, for boundaries, acreage and management.
• State agency open data — each state's own parks department, read directly from the data it publishes.

Where those sources disagree, the more authoritative one wins: an agency's own record for its own park outranks a national dataset. Nothing is published without a location and a facility record from one of them, which is why some parks in the registry do not yet have a page.

Photographs

Images come from the National Park Service, Wikimedia Commons and other public-domain collections. Each one is credited on the park's own page, with its licence, and hosted here rather than linked from somewhere else.

The guides

The guides are written from scratch. They deliberately avoid prices, model numbers and statistics, because those go stale and a stale specific is worse than none.