National Park Service

This app really works well. I wanted to write a review. I used it for Sequoia/Kings Canyon in California, and Hawaii volcano park. Both times it had excellent GPS to guide us through the trails, even when other GPS was not working. Very accurate maps, and they give updated information on road closures and path closures that are very useful to plan out your visit. Very useful and highly recommend if you were going to any national park. You can also purchase entrance tickets ahead of time through the app that you can save on your phone.

The first thing I wanted to look at was a list of every park! I’m getting ready to retire and one of my goals is to visit as many of them as I can. The app wants to show me parks near me, and I can find a national map, or search for activities, but I just want to browse an alphabetical list of all the parks. Otherwise, this looks like a great app, I’ll have to run down to the Everglades and give it a test!

However you can’t mark certain sites as visited.(ie James Garfield nhs)

This is government at its worst. If the developers of this app put themselves in the shoes of a visitor to a park for a moment, they would see that this app is basically useless as a practical assist to finding things to do nearby, quickly. I'm just exhausted trying to navigate it. Do you think the NPS will listen to all the negative feedback for this app and radically redo it? What are the odds? They've checked a box, no matter that it's completely unusable -- that it could be 10x better with some care and common sense.

After updating, can no longer find the My Lists feature where I was happily tacking my kids’ park visits separately from my own. Is there a way to regain that information? Thanks!

Would love to see a place where you can see a list of all national parks and check off which ones you have been to. And then have a list left of those you haven’t been to. There’s no place to narrow the list down to main 63, and no place to see list of ones you haven’t visited. A list of what i have visited isn’t as encouraging as a list of ones I still need to see. Give us a challange and maybe a way to track progress against friends or even general public. It would drive more people toward the app!

I updated to the newest version w/out reading reviews. I immediately regretted updating and even tried to reset my phone from an i-cloud backup. I had created lists of parks I had visited by year and parks I visited overall in the previous version and then those lists were completely gone. Now that I’ve remade my parks visited list (took a bit of time) I do really like the ability to add a note to each park and to customize my own list order, so maybe the hassle was worth it after all. It should serve as a reminder (to me as well) that this is NOT the most secure way to preserve you personal park travel history, though it is the most convenient…for now.

I used to really love this app and I made lists of places I went and want to go. But all the lists are gone now. Now its kind of useless and I just use the website.

It’s great to be able to download a park, and you can easily do that even over a wireless connection. I like that it notes parks near me and prompts me to take a look at them. I wish the mapping feature was more resilient. For example, when wandering through the National Mall I want to be able to look at a map that has the (hundreds of) points of interest on them so when I’m next to one of the (is it thousands?) monuments I can look at my phone zoomed in, click on the pin, read the blurb, then easily go back to the map. Some parks have maps you can navigate, some don’t, and most require you to go back to the park Home Screen to get the map rather than having a button back to the map. I will always want one of the printed brochures. But with this app, I could get behind having a free app and paying $1 for a brochure. Or, like Smithsonian museums do, ask for a $1 donation for the printed map.

I love the app and what it has to offer. It was helpful while I had no cell service in two parks. Lots of good info once you “download a map.” Seriously the best thing that would improve the app, is to allow for turn by turn directions while using CarPlay.