Let a park ranger be your guide! The National Park Service App is the brand new official app for all 420+ national parks. Find interactive maps, tours of park places, on-the-ground accessibility information, and more. The app was created by National Park Service staff—people who know national parks—to help you make the most of your visit. With all of these parks and a brand new app, it will take some time to finish creating content for each park. If you don’t find what you’re looking for now, check back regularly as our rangers work to complete the experience for each of our parks.
Unlike other apps, NPS Mobile takes authoritative information from park rangers and combines it with a great suite of features. Here’s a quick look at some of those features.
Interactive Maps: Each park has a detailed map that includes points of interest, along with roads, trails, and other information to plan your trip.
Park Tours: What is there to see? Self-guided tours take you to interesting places in the park. Discover popular destinations as well as places off the beaten track. It’s like having a ranger by your side to guide your trip, giving you suggestions for places to go, directions to get there, and things to do once you arrive.
Amenities: It’s the little—and sometimes not so little—things that can make or break a park visit. Learn where you can find and access transportation, food, restrooms, shopping, and more.
Accessibility: The app offers a fully accessible experience with tools to benefit visitors with accessibility needs, such as audio descriptions of exhibits along trails and roads and in visitor centers.
Offline Use: No internet access? No problem! You can download content from entire parks for offline use. It’s especially handy if you’re exploring remote areas in parks or concerned about data limits.
Share Your Visit: Tell your friends and family about the fun things you did by creating and sharing virtual postcards with scenes from the park.
Things to Do: What do you want to do in a park—hike? Take a bus tour or scenic drive? Visit a museum? Join a ranger program? Become a junior ranger? Discover all the fun, entertaining, and educational activities parks have to offer.
News, Alerts & Events: What’s happening? Get news and events for all parks—or selected parks of your choosing.
And that’s just a start! The NPS Mobile app also includes passport stamp locations, fees, visitor center hours and locations, and more.
This one single app includes every one of the 420+ sites in the National Park System, no matter how big or small. Here are just some of the parks you’ll find: Acadia, Arches, Big Bend, Bryce Canyon, Crater Lake, Death Valley, Everglades, Glacier, Golden Gate, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Great Smokies, Joshua Tree, Mammoth Cave, Mount Rainier, Mount Rushmore, Olympic, Redwoods, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia and King Canyon, Shenandoah, Statue of Liberty, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion.
This is less functional then a standard park map! Yes you can pull up a map of the park, but then no trails are labled. It’s also missing all the info like estimated trail times. True for Death Valley, Zion, Bryce, and Capitol Reef. The GPS feature of the map is the slowest version I’ve seen, I gave up and used another app. Dear NPS, lable your trails. Make it so if I mark a favorite trail, it highlights on the map, same with points of intrest. Give estimate of hike times and expertise levels.
I’m a new user as of today and I realize the app is under development. This has a lot of great stuff but I do have a suggestion. In the section under weather for a particular park, there are multiple web addresses listed. However, the reader cannot select them to copy and paste, and they are not active hyperlinks. This is one spot that would be a huge improvement, and I think an easy one for you to make. Otherwise, nice job so far.
Pretty decent app. Useful info and alerts for each park and you can create lists of places you’ve visited or list of favorites. One area that needs improvement is the maps. The most important feature that is missing is trail names on the map! They are present on some trails, but most are missing. If you can also see trails by difficulty, this would be an incredible feature to add as a filter! Start with national parks first, then work on the other NPS sites.
I really enjoy this app, and especially the webcams (although I can’t figure out what order they’re arranged in–seems quite random) and the checklist of places I’ve visited. The Find a Park by Name list is tedious to scroll through each time–maybe alpha tabs would help? It would be great to have a version for my laptop, with the ability to print occasional bits, rather than having to carry my phone with me at all times. Not compatible with Amazon Fire tablets, apparently.
Awesome details about the parks, like events, directions, location, photos, and other things you’d want to know. Easy to search and will be great for discover more parks near wherever I am at the moment. I wish there was a way to easily add a park to “Visited” because I’d really like to use it to keep track of where I’ve been, and maybe even add notes and photos. Would be cool to have a U.S. map view of the ones I’ve visited too.
Big problems with this app. Had it installed for well over a year now, but in last week or so, takes forever to open. Seems to be doing an update that will rarely ever finish before I can start using app. Sometimes I can get to the point of selecting a park, and then very slow – too slow to really use. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app. I’ve tried restarting my cell phone. But no help. Anyone else experiencing this problem? It’s unusable now. I’m on Android 12.
Pathetic interface. I loaded it up for the sake of looking around my local parks and after the “swipe left to continue” slides were exhausted, the app essentially broke. Unable to navigate at all. It sits on the image of a sunset and looks stupid at me, reloading doesn’t help when the touch interface isn’t recognizing input. This app has potential but, right now, it’s a joke.
Like the look and the features, in theory. In actuality, I started to create a list of parks I have visited, saved it, and came back to finish later. When I try to add new parks, the app loops me back to the home screen. This keeps happening despite a hard restart of the phone. Just needs a little tweaking to be a really high quality experience. Update 3/11/21: The new version of the app has fixed the bug. Nice work! Now I’d like to know how to transfer my park visitation data to my new phone.
FINALLY!!! I’ve been checking a few times a year for what feels like a decade to see if there was an NPS app and today my perseverance was rewarded! Thank you! It’s got all the features and discoverability options I could want. The only issue I’ve found so far is the inability to tap on non-park locations on the search map, such as National Monuments. I’ve figured out the work-around — locate them on the map, then search for it by name. A couple of extra steps, but should be an easy fix.
Very excited about this app. As I understand it, this is still a work in progress: not all 420 parks have yet added all their information. When that’s complete, it will be even better! I’ve already been fortunate enough to be able to use it at Yosemite and it’s a game changer: suddenly there’s a granularity to being able to find trails, views and other attractions, that you just couldn’t get from the park brochures. And saving everything offline was a life saver with no cell signal!
I can see a couple areas for improvement. A button for quickly adding a park to the visited list. It is not straight forward on how to do this. Go to the my list then… a simple check mark icon when you are on the park much like the star for favorites or maybe make favorites & visited the same. The star indicating you’ve visited. I do like the app though. Also after you’re first use, it would be nice if you didn’t have to swipe 4x to get into the app. This was a Great Move! Thank You!
Be extremely careful with data download. I started dowloading park data at home over fast WiFi. The progress indicator was moving fast. In the park, it turned out the download was at 77%, the map wasn’t working. When I got back home, it took about an hour before the download was completed. The data size was just 50 Mb. Either the data server is very slow, or the app is not downloading anything in background, or both.
I am hoping to be able to come back and change my rating, but I’ve had a pretty bad experience with this app so far. I downloaded the app and attempted to download the offline version of the Channel Islands NP for use on a day trip out there. I couldn’t get the download to work. I tried deleting and reinstalling the app and have tried to look for any permissions issues or settings that could be causing issues, but nothing seems to get it to work. The app itself has been slow and weird
Really great. Obviously brand new, so a few UI tweaks needed. But the interface is snappy and intuitive. Maps are just right and the events page(s) are current and easy to navigate. I especially love that I can save favorites, create various lists, download offline maps, etc ALL without creating some silly profile to sync that stuff to some cloud. I very much look forward to seeing more content loaded from the sites, like Teddy’s birthplace virtual tour, etc.
App gives a good overview of what’s where within a park, and helps you wade through to find what you’re looking for (hikes, food, etc). GPS positioning on the map is very accurate, and the trail maps have topo lines and stream crossings marked. But beware – the app is not regularly updated for current park conditions. They do tell you when a visitor center is closed, but closed roads/trails are not shown or described. (e.g. the road closures in Yosemite valley)
I downloaded this app over the weekend while we were visiting Jamestown (with our 4th grade pass – thank you!). Helpful for finding info quickly. I love being able to tag all the parks we’ve visited. It would be helpful to be able to add a park to a “list” directly from search results the same way I can add it to my “favorites.” Add to the “parks I’ve visited” or a custom list. I also agree with other reviewers that having a way to synch between devices is critical!
Good concept, poor execution. Had problems downloading the maps, overall UX/architecture is confusing, and worst of all, the map won’t let you click on/view trails on it. I just spent a week hiking in Utah at national parks, and the only way to view information about a trail was to manually navigate to it. There were also many (popular) trails inexplicably missing. Just can’t recommend this as is right now…
NPS has beautiful paper maps & brochures they hand out to visitors. Online PDFs of these are a great way to plan a trip. Why aren’t these available in the app? Imagine flipping through these and dreaming. Would be really cool if they were georeferenced so you see your location. The “mapbox” is terrible. No places of interest are labeled. No trail distances. No wider detailed view for planning. If I used this app for planning hiking/driving, I would probably get lost and miss half the sites.
This is the app NPS should have come out with years ago. Tons of information about parks and locations of important places like visitor centers, picnic areas, and restrooms. You can also download all the park information for offline use. Just ignore the no data connection warning. Two features I’d love to see: 1. A button to add a park to visited list. 2. Highlight the whole trail on the map not just the trail head.
Nice start…but VERY cumbersome to use…I saved a list of parks visited and the map features does not work. No place on the AP that I could find to provide feedback. not sure why you have to scroll past 4 screens after you create an account…the information for each park is awesome…still haven’t figured out how to save personal photos to a park either…
I have several issues with this app – but the biggest, most annoying, and worst feature of this app is that you have to have some form of data service when using it. It gives you the option to download all of the information related to the park you choose so you can use it offline, but if you are in an area with no service, you can’t access any of the offline data you downloaded. In my case, Yellowstone. There is almost no service in the park, except around the visitor centers. Please fix!
Great information! “Downloaded” park information was not accessable with no signal. For example, in the middle of Yellowstone with zero cell signal, we had a flat tire and could not pull up the location of the nearest service station within the park. Even though I had the park downloaded. We were very happy for paper maps.
The app was recently changed. Prior to this I was able to go to a link that would take me directly to the park web site. That feature is no longer available. The web site has much more info including videos etc. which makes it a great feature preparing for a visit. Please consider reinstating this feature. Otherwise, the app is a great planning tool.
Great start! One suggestion, it would be nice to be able to add a location to a list while viewing the location. Currently you can only add it to favorites. I am planning a trip for next summer and want to add locations to my “Want to Visit” list, but I can not do it when I am looking at a location. After I read about a location, I have to back out, go to my lists, edit the list, find the location, and add it there.
I’ve only used it for a day so far, but this is such a great app! I like that you can favorite and pin certain parks, making it easier when planning a trip; you can also filter real-time updates and news from those parks, making it easy if there are any park closures. It’s great not having to dig around for this info!
This is a waste of time and space. The same info is easily reached online. And the map is terrible. One would think the park service would have a better map. I hope the rangers don’t use this app, maybe the map is why people get lost in our national parks? It almost like they went out of their way to provide the worst possible map. No map filters. No topo, not even Google earth. Nothing a 1990s computer generated piece of work. Thanks.
Has great descriptions of hikes, overlooks, things to do. But… Skyline drive mile markers on map are practically illegible due to their small size, color (black text on dark gray background). Also add mile markers to the filter. Need option on list of all Shenandoah hikes to sort by length, difficulty, etc. No saved profile to use app across devices. Add login profile feature maybe?
Update: needs a user login option so you can bring all your visited Parks etc. to new phone!! Finally a new, and good, National Park app! The old Passport app was decent, but we’ve been left without anything since that went away. Clearly still a work in progress, but a fabulous start and great information already in for many of the parks! Let’s hope this continues to be populated with data, stays up-to-date, and doesn’t go away! Excited to finally have a great NPS tool!!
Nice app with a lot of background information about the parks. However, the content is not update with the current status of the trails, amenities and visitor centers,which makes the app pretty much useless for planning your visit. What’s the point of downloading the data for an entire park if it doesn’t include this crucial information? Once you enter a park with no cell service you have no way to know what’s going on.
Map has less detail than the paper map you get at the park. No trail information at all. I downloaded the park for offline use before I went to the park, because I knew there wouldn’t be cell service. It still took 5 minutes for the app to open, and still had a pop-up error saying I’m offline. I can’t think of a use for this app.
Disappointed. After collecting over a hundred visits we upgraded to new phones, all of our progress has been lost. This app is awkward and buggy. Not sure I will recreate our progress. I can do better with my own spreadsheet. And NO one is monitoring the comments. No responses since February 2021!
Alerts are not updated and descriptions are too exaggerated. I visited Sequoia Park 12/26/23 where alerts for this park had tire chains enforced, indicated close roads and snow storms, when after taken my chances, I could get very easy till General Sherman with all roads clear, no snow blocking or being a risk, no roads closed. Whole updates for attractions (at least in this park) need updates in more real time.
I enjoy the app a lot. I wish that it had a built-in virtual passport. It should track each park after visiting. And it could function in the same locations as the stamp stations but use QR codes and automatically add date/location tags.
Another update but still not usable. Does not let me log in , does not save places l havewisited. The only thing that works is parks near me! Hope one day it will be fixed and l will be able to use it as l did before
Great idea but buggy and idiosyncratic. Search for parks ALREADY downloaded requires Internet (why?!) Maps are very rudimentary- no road names, no landmarks, no elevation, etc. All points of interests use one symbol (and the number of nested ones) – terrible interface with endless zooming to actually see a POI. Use different symbols for different types of locations! Fix endless zoom. Categories and park information is very inconsistent both in same and across different NPs.
When you open the app, a totally useless screen pops up with a button you must press to “Explore the NPS.” Newsflash…. I wouldn’t have opened the app is I didn’t want to explore something in the National Park System. This screen is a huge time waster as it is very slow to respond.
Just recently downloaded this app,while visiting YellowStone. Its alright for just a basic information app but certainly could deliver a great deal more. Like the much needed info concerning YellowStones road closures ( North Entry). As well as dates & times within various parks activities. Trail maps,Points of interest especially within each parks tourist towns. Fund the upgrade via vendor fees to display there info. Make it more interactive so one can plan a trip itinerary within app.
I was so excited to find this and I love the entire idea of it. But I cannot get a single park to load. The app acts like I have poor data speeds and struggles to load any park data, but it acknowledges when I’m online or offline and my connection is fine (as in other apps and my browser are working fine). Very sad about this 😔
Startup time is ridiculously long. Could use more content. Maybe could use TTS to speak some more interesting facts about locations?
The links in app don’t work & if you try to use the website it force opens the app so you can’t ever get to the information you’re looking for. (e.g. Crater Lake has a link: “For accomodations outside the park visit the Lodging & Camping page on the website” Also, I don’t understand why the brochures you get at the parks are not included in app or on the website. It seems this would be both environmental & financially worthwhile. Less used brochures thrown out & less cost of printing brochures.