Park Otter is an independent trip-planning guide. Every campground, cabin and park comes from the agency that runs it, and anything visitor-reported is labelled as such. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any agency listed here or any state or province. Always confirm fees, rules and current status with official sources before you go.
National Park Service unit descriptions, hours, fees and photos are the NPS's own, credited where the NPS credits a photographer. Parks Canada unit names, locations and boundaries are from Parks Canada's open data. State and provincial park descriptions marked "From Wikipedia" are Wikipedia text used under CC BY-SA 4.0, with unit lists from Wikidata. State and provincial park photos are from Wikimedia Commons, each shown with its photographer and licence (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA) linked under the picture. Alberta's provincial parks, recreation areas and natural areas are from the Government of Alberta's Parks and Protected Areas layer (contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Alberta); Yukon's territorial parks from the GeoYukon parks layers (Open Government Licence – Yukon).
Map tiles and the optional RV dump station, water fill, propane, gas station, rest area, grocery, hardware, pharmacy, laundromat, auto parts, RV service, hospital, coffee shop and Starbucks station layers are © OpenStreetMap contributors, used under the Open Database License (ODbL). Those points are mapped by volunteers and are not checked by this site — each one links to its own OpenStreetMap page, where anyone can correct it. The satellite and topographic views and the drive page's night map are Esri's World Imagery, World Topographic Map and Dark Gray Canvas tiles (© Esri — Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, HERE, Garmin, Intermap, GEBCO, USGS, FAO, NPS, NRCAN, GeoBase, IGN, Ordnance Survey, OpenStreetMap contributors and the GIS User Community), credited on the map. The "Low clearances" layer is every bridge with under 14 ft 6 in of headroom on or under it in the Federal Highway Administration's National Bridge Inventory (2025, public domain), placed at the inventory's own coordinates; the height is the clearance as inventoried, which can differ from the sign on the bridge, so read the sign. Driving routes for "Along my route" come from openrouteservice (HeiGIT) on OpenStreetMap data, with the public OSRM demo server for alternative roads. Scenic byway routes come from the Federal Highway Administration's HEPGIS scenic byways layer (as of June 2022), with byway names, designations and descriptions from FHWA's America's Byways. Elevations are from open elevation data; weather from Open-Meteo and the National Weather Service. A listing's "Past years, week by week" is the last ten years of daily weather at that point from the ERA5 reanalysis (ECMWF, via Open-Meteo's historical archive, CC BY 4.0), reduced to one row per week; it is modelled, not measured at the campground. The drive page's radar layer is the National Weather Service's NEXRAD composite served as map tiles by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet (public domain) and, over Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada's radar through its GeoMet service (open data); its weather warnings are the National Weather Service's active alerts (api.weather.gov, public domain). Its traffic rows in Tennessee are the Tennessee Department of Transportation's SmartWay events (the public map service behind the SmartWay traffic map; TDOT publishes it as is, without warranty), read every few minutes while a drive is on the map; in twenty other states the rows are the state DOT's work-zone feed, published in the Work Zone Data Exchange format and listed in the U.S. DOT's WZDx feed registry (work zones and detours only, as each DOT publishes them; several are CC0, the rest as is). Rest-area dump stations are read from each state DOT's own publication (Caltrans' and Nevada DOT's rest-area layers, WSDOT's RV dump stations page, DelDOT's Smyrna Rest Area page), each point naming its source; stations close and change fees without notice. BLM recreation sites (boat ramps, trailheads, picnic areas, overlooks, interpretive sites, OHV areas, water, visitor centers) and the Long-Term Visitor Areas come from the Bureau of Land Management's recreation-site layer and BLM's own pages (public domain). The "Visitor & welcome centers" layer joins four sources, each point saying which: the National Park Service's visitor centers from the NPS Data API (public domain, with the Service's own hours and descriptions), the state DOTs' welcome centers from their rest-area layers, BLM's visitor centers from its recreation-site layer, and OpenStreetMap's information offices (ODbL, volunteer-mapped, not checked by this site). On the parks map, BLM's national monuments and national conservation areas come from the National Conservation Lands boundary layer and the Forest Service's national monuments, recreation areas and scenic areas from its Other National Designated Areas layer (both public domain); their descriptions are Wikipedia's, under CC BY-SA 4.0, credited on each. State rest areas and welcome centers come from 29 state DOTs' own inventory layers (Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, West Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Texas, Indiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, Oregon, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, California, Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, Washington, Nevada, Missouri, New Jersey; North Carolina's welcome centers from its Department of Commerce), each point naming its source and carrying only what that DOT states; rest areas close for work without notice. Its live-traffic panel is Waze's own live map, embedded as Waze offers it to any site, with hand-offs to the Waze and Google Maps apps; nothing from it is read or stored here.
The Bortle scale shown on each listing is derived from Falchi, F., Cinzano, P., Duriscoe, D., Kyba, C.C.M., Elvidge, C.D., Baugh, K., Portnov, B., Rybnikova, N.A., Furgoni, R. (2016), The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness, Science Advances 2(6):e1600377, doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600377, data via GFZ Data Services, doi.org/10.5880/GFZ.1.4.2016.001, used under CC BY-NC 4.0 (non-commercial use only). This dataset reflects satellite conditions around 2015 and does not capture light-pollution changes since; treat it as a general guide, not a current measurement.
The campground and cabin listings on this site represent a lot of real, ongoing research pulled together from many separate public sources. They're offered here for personal trip planning — bulk downloading, scraping, or republishing this dataset elsewhere isn't authorized without permission.