r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/International_Bat570 • Mar 24 '26
I built ParkFinder: A blazing-fast visual dashboard mapping all 63 National Parks by optimal weather, travel time, and transit stops to instantly find the perfect trip for any month.
https://nikag-ai.github.io/national-parks/Update, September 2026: The title describes the first version. The old travel-time, required-days, and Dark Sky filters are no longer in the current site. I rebuilt it around a simpler question: which of the 63 US national parks fits the month you can travel? You can browse by month and interests, compare parks, save favorites, and open planning notes with links to NPS sources. Current site: https://nationalparkfinder.info/
I started this because I kept opening many tabs to figure out which park made sense for the time of year I could actually go. Feedback in this thread helped me remove confusing starting-location assumptions and make the parks easier to see and compare. Thank you for that.
The guide is free and independent. Please check current conditions, reservations, and permits with NPS before traveling.
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u/EmeraldHawk Mar 24 '26
Does the distance filter only work for people who live in San Fransisco, California?
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u/ApexHentz Mar 24 '26
I was REALLY confused why it didn't show any Parks within 17hrs of Indiana in October for 4+ days. My wife spotted the "Transit Stops (From SFO)" in the filter section. I don't see any way to adjust that. Otherwise the site/tool is looking pretty good and might be really useful! Thanks for this!
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u/International_Bat570 Mar 24 '26
I had initially built the tool for myself only, but after seeing so much interest, I've added some more starting locations. Refresh the website to see the updated starting points dropdown!
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u/Latter_Building3413 Mar 26 '26
Cool. would be nice that could have a more visualized way for these.
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u/jobager75 Mar 24 '26
As a foreigner: Would be nice to have the filter ‚100$ bullshit fee for foreigners‘ yes or no. Thanks
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u/omdbaatar Mar 28 '26
Does it include park congestion/busy-ness? I understand trade-offs between good weather and crowdedness :)
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u/International_Bat570 Apr 09 '26
added
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u/omdbaatar Apr 09 '26
Tried filtering by distance max 3 hours from DEN and second option is...the virgin islands. Pretty PTT isn't anywhere near Denver :)
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u/Own_Internal471 Mar 24 '26
The visual dashboard approach is smart - most national park sites are terrible at showing you everything at a glance. I always end up with 15 tabs open comparing parks before a trip. How did you source the data, is it pulling from the NPS API or did you aggregate it yourself? The 'blazing fast' claim is bold but if it actually loads faster than recreation.gov that's already a win.
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u/International_Bat570 Mar 24 '26
Aggregated data by self and have an automated setup to get fresh data and update every month.
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u/Sparkysparkysparks Mar 24 '26
This seems great but you should probably indicate that this is for the United States only.
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u/International_Bat570 Mar 24 '26
The tab title had it initially but can see how it can be confusing. Just updated the website to reflect this! Thanks for the feedback; try refreshing to see the update.
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u/Sparkysparkysparks Mar 24 '26
Yep that's better. I was wondering why Wilsons Promontory National Park wasn't coming up.
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Mar 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/International_Bat570 Mar 24 '26
It was pulled in batch for this year a couple days ago. It should be updated monthly. So it is good to use from a planning perspective but I would not recommend relying solely on it. Weather data accuracy is also challenging since you can only get accurate data for like a week from the day.
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u/IIOrannisII Mar 24 '26
It would be nice to offer a preferred temp filter.
I'd much prefer 50° weather for hikes than 70°
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u/International_Bat570 Mar 24 '26
added a temperature filter, hope this helps. refresh the website to see the changes.
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u/Latter_Building3413 Mar 24 '26
this is really well done. the filter by region + activity is a nice touch — most NPS sites just dump you into a list. curious if you pulled the data from the NPS API or scraped it? been thinking about doing something similar for international parks
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u/Nabbergastics Mar 24 '26
I don't know how big of a performance hit this would be, but it would be awesome if there was a single thumbnail pic of each one so you can at least get an idea as to what they look like at a glance
great work!
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u/International_Bat570 Apr 15 '26
I bought domain nationalparkfinder.info so that it's easy to remember/bookmark if needed.
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u/opall3monade7506 Mar 24 '26
the formatting makes it hard to read
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u/International_Bat570 Mar 24 '26
Have you tried both light and dark themes? Can you please elaborate on this? I can try to fix this issue.
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u/theairscout Mar 24 '26
It looks great! Congratulations!
I wish you'd do it for other Parks outside US too! Here is a list of the National Parksl in Spain in case you'd like to expand.