National Park Service 4+

The official app of 420+ parks

National Park Service

Designed for iPad

    • Free

Screenshots

Description

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.

What’s New

Version 1.10.1

Additional support for fees and passes data and other stability enhancements. 

Please leave a review and tell us about features you would like to see in a future update.

Ratings and Reviews

4.1 out of 5
605 Ratings

605 Ratings

SteveW1599 ,

Very good app. Maps need improvement

Overall, I think this app is pretty well put together, and anyone visiting a National Park or NPS-maintained site should have this app downloaded. It is very nice that you can download individual parks for offline use. This is especially helpful for parks where there might not be cell service. However, there are a couple things that I would change about the app.
First, there should be a way to link your park passes (daily entry, tours, A the B, etc.) to the app. That way you can have everything organized in one place.
Second, the maps for individual parks, especially the larger ones, are way too cluttered. Using Yellowstone as an example, there are 515 unique markers on the Yellowstone map. Before it was shuttered, the old Yellowstone app had the PERFECT setup for the map. It would have large markers for the most used points of interest (Old Faithful, Grand Prismatic, Mammoth Hot Springs, etc.), while having smaller markers for less used points (trailheads, vault toilets, picnic areas, etc.) Then, when you zoomed out on the map, you would only see the large, important markers. As you zoomed in, the smaller, less used markers would appear. This helped tremendously by keeping the map from being too littered with markers and by making it easy to find the famous points of interest that most people will be looking for.

Jentropy ,

Awesome start. Hoping for many more features.

Honestly this is one of my favorite apps. Even if I’m not traveling, I like to load the app and explore parks from afar. I love how much love and energy went into this app. It’s obvious that the content comes from people who love the parks as much as we do. Here’s what I’d love to see:

Improve offline access: being able to save parks for offline use is awesome. However, the app spends a really long time trying to load when you don’t have internet access before finally giving an error message and then loading after a delay. I wish the app would start in offline mode (offline is default) and then access the internet once the app is loaded.

Sort by ability or activity level: I wish I didn’t have to load every single item in a list to see if a trail or thing is ADA accessible. Maybe add an icon to the items on a list… or add a filter.

Passport stamp locations: I love this feature. Can the items on this list be clickable? Take me to the entry for that visitors center, so I can find info on accessing it.

More pictures: I’m disabled and physical access can be an issue. It’s so cool to be able to see places I’ll never be able to visit. Show me the super advanced hikes I’ll never get to. And show us more wildlife we might have trouble seeing on our visit!

I’ve got a million suggestions but you all are busy people. Thanks for making a cool app. Looking forward to updates.

jade six ,

Good resource, needs updating

My wife and I have been using this app for the past couple years and it’s been a good resource for visiting national parks. We appreciate being able to download parks for offline use, and the hiking trails listed for some parks is very useful. However, some parks are lacking info, such as trail info, and we’ve recently noticed that some national monuments are missing altogether. For example, we’re currently in Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, east of Las Cruces, NM, which isn’t listed, and we were in Ironwood Forest National Monument near Tucson, AZ last week, which is also missing. We like to keep the list of places we’ve visited (also a great feature of the app) updated as we travel, but can’t add these national monuments until they’re included in the app. We’d appreciate seeing these updates in future versions.

App Privacy

The developer, National Park Service, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

  • Usage Data
  • Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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