What this site is
National Sites Guide is an independent almanac that turns official National Park Service visitor-use data and NOAA climate normals into per-park crowd, weather, and access calendars. We don't run a reservation system, we don't sell anything, and we are not the NPS. We render federal data into plain-English pages with a documented methodology.
Your right to use the maps
Original maps explicitly offered for download on the National Parks map page and its linked state map builders are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, publish, crop, recolor, annotate, adapt, and use those maps commercially.
You must give appropriate credit, link to the National Sites Guide homepage, and indicate if you changed the graphic. The preferred credit is: Map: National Sites Guide, CC BY 4.0. The National Park Service and U.S. Census Bureau source data used in the maps remain public-domain federal works. This license applies only to map assets expressly marked CC BY 4.0; it does not license the site's logo, wordmark, page templates, or editorial articles.
Your right to use the data
The underlying datasets we render are public-domain US-federal works under 17 U.S.C. § 105:
- NPS Visitor Use Statistics (irma.nps.gov/Stats/).
- NOAA NCEI U.S. Climate Normals 1991-2020.
- NPS Data API metadata and images (subject to any image-specific notice attached by the NPS).
- NPS road and seasonal-operations pages.
Our compiled, processed CSVs in data/processed/ (the cleaned, joined, normalised tables that drive the pages) are released under CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication). You can copy them, transform them, redistribute them, and build on them without asking permission. Attribution is appreciated but not required.
What is not CC0: the editorial strings on every page (the one-line verdict per park, the audience-segmented summer/family/winter/foliage paragraphs, the field-band copy), the scoring formulas in src/scoring/, the page templates, and the brand wordmark and logo. Those are retained as site IP. You may quote short passages with attribution; you may not republish the pages or templates as your own product.
Your right to use the site
The site is provided as-is. You may read it, copy it, link to it, and quote from it. We don't track you across other sites. Do not use the wordmark or logo in ways that imply endorsement of your work by this site, by the NPS, or by the site's operator.
What we don't promise.
This site is provided without warranty of any kind. Numbers may contain errors despite the methodology. Visitor counts are NPS-reported estimates; climate normals are 30-year averages, not forecasts; road and lodging windows change. Do not use this data for anything where an error would cause material harm without cross-checking against the issuing authority. If you spot a defect, tell us at /contact/.
What you agree to
- Don't scrape excessively. The compiled CSVs are intended to make scraping unnecessary; if you need bulk data, use them.
- Don't republish this site as your own. Using the data in your own project is fine. Mirroring the pages and claiming them as yours is not.
- Don't use the wordmark or logo to imply that this site, the National Park Service, or the operator endorses your work.
- Don't use the contact form to send unsolicited promotional material. Submissions are managed by a human.
Outside those constraints, the data and site are free to read, copy, link to, and build on.
Changes to these terms
These terms may be updated. The date below moves when a substantive change ships.
Jurisdiction
In the event of a legal dispute, United States law applies. The operator is identified on /about/: NMajor Studios; Wyoming, USA.
Contact
For terms questions, use the contact form. No email address is published; the form is the only contact path.