National Park Service

National Park Service

About this app

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.

Ratings and reviews

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.

What's new

This version includes stability and UI improvements.
This includes how the app requests, processes and views images which improves the user experience and requires less bandwidth.