Discover America’s National Parks with the National Parks Explorer

With 63 National Parks spread across the United States, choosing where to go can be almost as much fun as the trip itself. From the mountains and glaciers of Alaska to the deserts of the Southwest, the forests of the Pacific Northwest and the tropical landscapes of Hawaii, every National Park offers something different.

But discovering a park is only the beginning. Where is it located? What can you do there? When should you visit? Are there current alerts? What will the weather be like?

That’s why we created the National Parks Explorer.

At the heart of the Explorer are Places: dedicated destinations that bring together useful information, inspiration and activities and connect the different parts of National Parks USA. The Place List helps you discover them. The Place View lets you explore each destination in much greater detail.

Together, they provide a new way to discover America’s National Parks and start planning your next adventure.

Browse America’s National Parks with the Place List

Not everyone arrives knowing which National Park they want to visit. Sometimes you’re looking for a particular park. Sometimes you know which state or region you want to explore. And sometimes you simply want inspiration.

That’s where the Place List comes in.

Instead of presenting the National Parks as a simple collection of names, the Place List provides a visual overview designed to make browsing and discovering destinations enjoyable. Beautiful park photography helps bring each destination to life before you even open its Explorer page.

You might arrive looking for Yellowstone or Yosemite and leave wondering why you’ve never considered Great Basin, North Cascades or one of America’s other incredible National Parks.

Discovery is an important part of the Explorer.

Find the National Park You’re Looking For

As the National Parks Explorer grows, having a structured collection of Places becomes increasingly important. The Place List gives the parks a central home within National Parks USA and provides an easy starting point for exploring them.

Rather than having information scattered across unrelated pages, the Explorer connects destinations with the information and experiences associated with them. Select a National Park from the Place List and you’ll arrive at its dedicated Place View.

That’s where the real exploring begins.

A Dedicated Explorer Page for Every National Park

Each National Park has its own Place View within the National Parks Explorer. These pages are designed to provide a useful overview of the destination while connecting you to more detailed information when you need it.

A Place View can bring together information such as:

• Park descriptions and essential information
• States and geographical information
• Current National Park alerts
• Climate information
• Weather forecasts
• Directions and location information
• An interactive local map
• Things To Do
• Official park information and resources

Instead of treating each piece of information as something separate, the Place View brings it together around the destination you’re actually interested in. That makes it useful both when discovering a park for the first time and when researching a destination you already intend to visit.

See Important Park Information

Conditions in National Parks can change. Roads may close, trails can be affected by weather or seasonal conditions, facilities may be unavailable and other circumstances can influence a visit. That’s why current park information is an important part of the Explorer.

Where available, park alerts are displayed prominently so that important information is easier to notice while researching a destination.

The Explorer also connects visitors with official information. It is designed to help with research and discovery, while official park sources remain essential for checking the latest conditions before travelling.

Climate and Weather in One Place

Weather can completely change a National Park experience. The conditions you encounter in Death Valley are very different from those in Mount Rainier — and even within the same park, conditions can vary enormously throughout the year.

Place Views therefore combine climate information with current weather information where available.

Climate information helps answer the bigger planning questions: What are conditions normally like? How do temperatures change throughout the year? What should you generally expect during a particular season? Weather information helps with the much shorter-term picture.

Together, they provide useful context when deciding when to visit a National Park.

Go Beyond the Park: Discover Things To Do

Knowing where you want to go is one thing. Knowing what you can actually do when you get there is another. That’s why Places are closely connected to Things To Do in the National Parks Explorer.

From a National Park Place View, you can continue exploring activities and experiences associated with that destination. Depending on the park, these might include hiking trails, scenic drives, overlooks, historic sites, guided experiences and many other activities. Things To Do can also contain practical information such as duration, seasonality, fees and access requirements.

This creates a natural journey through the Explorer:

Discover a Place → Learn about the National Park → Find Things To Do → Start planning your visit

And when you find an interesting activity, its dedicated Things To Do page can provide more information.

Maps Where They’re Most Useful

Maps play an important role throughout the Explorer. Individual Place Views include geographical information to help you understand where a park is located and provide additional context while researching your visit.

But sometimes you want to do the opposite.

Instead of choosing a National Park first and then looking at its location, you might want to start with the geography of the United States itself. For that, we created something else.

Explore All National Parks on the Interactive U.S. National Parks Map

The Interactive U.S. National Parks Map gives you another way to explore. Rather than browsing the National Parks as a list, you can see them geographically across the United States — including Alaska, Hawaii and the U.S. territories.

Park markers connect directly with their corresponding Place Views in the National Parks Explorer. That makes the map particularly useful for discovering parks near each other, comparing locations or getting inspiration for a National Parks road trip.

See an unfamiliar park marker? Select it and start exploring!

The Place List and Interactive Map therefore offer two very different starting points for the same Explorer:

Browse visually with the Place List — or explore geographically with the Map.

From Inspiration to Trip Planning

One of the advantages of bringing Places, maps and Things To Do together is that the Explorer can support different stages of planning. You might begin without having a destination in mind and browse the Place List for inspiration. Or perhaps you’re planning a road trip through Utah and use the National Parks Map to see which destinations could fit together.

Once you’ve chosen a park, its Place View becomes the starting point for learning more. From there, Things To Do can help answer the next question:

What do I want to experience while I’m there?

That connection between discovery, destination information and activities is something we intend to continue developing.

Explore at Home or While Travelling

The National Parks Explorer is designed for desktop, tablet and mobile devices. A desktop or tablet provides plenty of room when researching destinations and comparing information, while the mobile version makes it easy to return to a Place View or Things To Do page while travelling.

The information remains part of the same Explorer whichever device you use.

Built as Part of National Parks USA

The National Parks Explorer isn’t intended to replace the National Parks USA community. It adds another layer to it. The Explorer provides structured destination information and discovery tools, while the forum remains the place for conversations, questions, experiences, recommendations and trip reports from real travellers.

A National Park database can tell you where a trail is. Another traveller can tell you what it felt like to hike it. We believe both have value.

By developing the Explorer alongside the existing National Parks USA community, we can increasingly connect useful information with the experiences and knowledge of people who actually love visiting these places.

Looking Ahead: Your National Parks Passport

Places also create the foundation for something we’d like to explore further in the future: a National Parks Passport.

The idea is simple. National Parks shouldn’t only be destinations you research — they can also become part of your own Explorer journey.

In the future, we would like to develop ways for National Parks USA members to keep track of the parks they have explored and build a more personal National Parks experience around their visits.

Imagine being able to look back at the National Parks you’ve visited, continue building your own collection and watch your personal journey across America’s National Parks grow over time.

The exact features are still something we’ll develop and refine, so there’s more work ahead before the Passport becomes part of the public Explorer.

But the Places being built today provide an important foundation for what could come next.

🌎 The National Parks Explorer Will Keep Growing

The Place List and Place Views are much more than a new collection of pages.

They form the heart of a growing National Parks Explorer.

Places give every destination a home.

The Place List helps you discover them.

Place Views bring useful information together.

Things To Do helps you discover what you can experience.

And the Interactive National Parks Map lets you explore America geographically.

Over time, we want to connect these parts even further and add new ways to discover, plan and remember your National Park adventures.

For now, there are 63 extraordinary National Parks waiting to be explored.

Browse the Place List. Open a park you’ve never considered before. Check out its Things To Do. Find it on the map.

And perhaps start planning your next adventure.

Welcome to the National Parks Explorer. 🌲🏞️🇺🇸