Welp, it’s that time of year again: July is just around the corner, which means it’s peak visitation season in national parks. School is out, families are on vacation, and parks are at their busiest. Below is the July peak, showing visitation across the entire National Park Service by month from 2021 to 2024:

Generally speaking, traffic to NPMaps is also high during these summer months, when my users are pulling up maps before hitting the road. But I’ve noticed that not all my pages follow this pattern, and many actually receive peak traffic in spring or fall. National parks naturally show the same variation. And since I’m a total dork, I wanted to actually get to the bottom of this and find out exactly: which parks clear out most in the summer?

So I turned to the official NPS source for an answer. Unsurprisingly, 85.7% of national park units have higher monthly visitation in June-August than they do during the rest of the year. But that means almost 15% of parks are quieter in the summer. Which ones are they?

To crunch the numbers, I used a 2021-2024 baseline, and considered parks that have visitation stats across this entire window and receive at least 1,000 visitors per month.

Where’d everyone go?
These national parks go quiet in summer

If you want to enjoy a park at its slowest, here’s your list! Below are the top 15 parks, ordered by biggest relative decline in visitation. Percentages show how the average summer month (Jun-Aug) compares to the average non-summer month (Sep-May). So using the chart below, you’d interpret it as: “an average summer month in Joshua Tree gets 52% of the visitation as a non-summer month.”

1. Tumacácori National Historical Park (31%)
2. Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument (35%)
3. Tonto National Monument (36%)
4. Big Bend National Park (38%)
5. Saguaro National Park (39%)
6. Chiricahua National Monument (41%)
7. Casa Grande Ruins National Monument (45%)
8. Organ Pipe National Monument (46%)
9. Joshua Tree National Park (52%)
10. Guadalupe Mountains National Park (58%)
11. Tuzigoot National Monument (62%)
12. Big Cypress National Preserve (68%)
13. Death Valley National Park (69%)
14. Montezuma Castle National Monument (69%)
15. Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park (75%)

So, what exactly do these parks have in common? Let’s map them. (This is a national park map website after all!)

Breaking news! People avoid the desert in the summer! OK, so this isn’t the most insightful thing I’ve ever done; we naturally see a heavy concentration in the desert landscapes of the Southwest. Smaller, quick-visit Arizona parks dominate the list, though we see a few larger iconic parks like Big Bend, Joshua Tree, and Death Valley. The most northern park on our list is, in fact, Death Valley…and that happens to be the hottest park of them all. So, nothing too groundbreaking here, but it’s nice to see our assumptions confirmed. And that did leave me curious about the inverse.

The gang’s all here
These national parks boom in summer

Of the 85.7% of parks that are busier in summer, I wanted to know which ones took it to the max: where do we see the most extreme summer surge in visitation? I’m not interested in raw visitor numbers (because the busiest parks would dominate) but relative visitation. And here they are! Percentages below show how the average summer month (Jun-Aug) compares to the average non-summer month (Sep-May).

1. Lake Clark National Park and Preserve (1,764%)
2. Wrangell-St Elias National Park and Preserve (1,398%)
3. Isle Royale National Park (1,371%) 
4. Katmai National Park and Preserve (1,307%)
5. Kenai Fjords National Park (1,293%)
6. Denali National Park and Preserve (1,035%)
7. Devils Postpile National Monument (910%)
8. Niobrara National Scenic River (903%)
9. Boston African National Historic Site (709%)
10. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (695%)
11. Lowell National Historical Park (683%)
12. Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts (672%)
13. Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial (664%)
14. Jewel Cave National Monument (650%)
15. Keweenaw National Historical Park (623%)

Let’s map these too:

Now we’re getting somewhere! There’s a bit more to unpack here. Unsurprisingly, the top slots are dominated by Alaska, where some parks can be nearly impossible to visit (Alaska Air won’t exactly be dropping you off in Katmai). Similar considerations apply to Isle Royale (icebound in the middle of Lake Superior) and Devils Postpile (snowbound in the Sierra Nevada). (Also, how wild that California has a park on this list too, just a few hours from Death Valley? It really speaks to the state’s geographic diversity.) We also see a couple more Michigan parks and some sparsely populated regions of South Dakota and Nebraska. And then some surprises. Lowell National Historical Park appears here thanks to Lowell’s annual folk festival, which increases park visitation ten-fold in July. Wolf Trap appears because it’s a performing arts venue and most events happen during the summer. But the biggest surprises to me are Boston African (in Boston) and Lincoln Boyhood (in southern Indiana). Similar parks in their regions don’t show such extreme summer spikes, so I confess that I’m unsure whether there’s something exceptionally unique about these parks or if it’s an artifact of how their staff counts visitors.

It really doesn’t matter when
These national parks are most steady

And because I’m me, I couldn’t resist going a little further: which parks have the steadiest monthly visitation? Where can you visit anytime and experience the same level of crowding all year? For this, I simply looked at the lowest standard deviation of visitation across all months.

1. Natchez Trace Parkway
2. Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park
3. War In The Pacific National Historical Park
4. Haleakalā National Park 
5. Kaloko-Honokōhau National Historical Park
6. Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area 
7. Big Thicket National Preserve 
8. Cabrillo National Monument 
9. Richmond National Battlefield Park
10. Coronado National Memorial 
11. Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park
12. Christiansted National Historic Site 
13. Moores Creek National Battlefield 
14. Cowpens National Battlefield 
15. Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park

Let’s go to the map!

We can tease out some obvious commonalities here. Six parks are located on tropical islands without major seasonal weather variation: Hawaiʻi, Guam, and U.S. Virgin Islands. Four parks are battlefield sites from Virginia to Georgia, where winters are relatively mild (and visitors to these sites don’t exactly require perfect hiking weather anyway). Once again, some California parks show up here, and they’re located near Los Angeles and San Diego for a steady supply of local and tourist traffic. (San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area similarly just missed making the cut.) Topping the chart is the Natchez Trace Parkway, which sees only a minor dip in winter traffic. And of course we have……wait, Southern Arizona?! The region that dominated our first list?! Coronado National Memorial is actually tucked up near a mountain pass, which gives the park a milder climate than the surrounding desert and a reason for visitors to stop by at any time of year.

Well, this was fun. Did I have a major point and grand conclusion to this effort? Not really. But we’ve learned some things! Now this summer you can:

1. Use the first list to visit a park when absolutely no one else is crazy enough to do so. Because you’re strong and badass and tough. You won’t let a little heat stop you! (But please stay safe.)
2. Use the second list to visit a park when everyone else does. Because you’re an extrovert to the max, and nothing quite tickles your fancy like accepting the wisdom of the masses. People give you energy, and what’s better than seeing everyone else enjoy the same thing as you?
3. Use the third list to conduct your own experiment. Visit now and during a different season to see firsthand if the data is lying to you. Or at the very least, take comfort in knowing that you can see any of those parks whenever is convenient rather than waiting for the perfect time of year.

OK, OK, so maybe this isn’t the most actionable post full of relevant trip-planning advice, but sometimes I’m just curious to learn something. And this time I figured I’d share what I found even though it doesn’t tie directly to NPMaps content. But isn’t that what a bully pulpit is for? Smashing people in the face with knowledge and statistics? (Or maybe I’m doing it wrong.) If nothing else, I hope this helps you appreciate the incredible diversity of units in the U.S. national park system. It’s this very diversity that has made the National Park Service such a vital steward of our nation’s natural wonders, cultural history, and national identity for over 100 years.

It turns out life gets busy when you get married, have a kid, and move multiple times. Who  would have thought? So NPMaps has been on my backburner for some time now. Fortunately, in recent months, I’ve finally been able to tackle some changes I’ve been eyeing for years. I’ll highlight these changes below in way more detail than you might ever want.

A better mobile experience

When I launched this site 12 (!!) years ago, the vast majority of visitors were on desktops or laptops. I admit that the mobile experience wasn’t great, as I never paid much attention to it since I rarely used my phone to browse the web. But nowadays, a ton of users are browsing on phones (including me), so I finally took the time to fix all the formatting issues that plagued the mobile site. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s far more usable than before.

Brand new interactive maps

There’s nothing quite like seeing a big unexpected charge to your bank account!

Right now, I have 141 park pages on the site and 141 interactive Google Maps to go with them. (These appear in the sidebar if you’re on desktop or at the bottom of each page if you’re on mobile.) I like having them because *I* use them all the time when researching parks, and it’s so nice to flip between Satellite and Terrain view to get a better sense of place.

Here’s the problem: last month, Google changed their fee structure. Out of the blue, it suddenly cost me more to display those 141 maps than it cost to host the entire rest of NPMaps. The easiest solution would have been to delete the interactive maps and call it a day, but instead, I found an alternative way to implement Google Maps that doesn’t cost me anything.

So, you’ll see that the interactive maps are back online (they’re just served differently behind the scenes). The small embedded map boxes aren’t super detailed by default, but if you click the “View larger map” button, you’ll open a full-sized Google Maps interface that’s much more useful. I’ve centered each map on a major park location for easy viewing.

At 10 minutes per map, redoing 141 of them was no easy lift, but it was worth it to keep interactive maps available.

Better transparency

One challenge of maintaining a site like this is deciding how much I should care about trying to earn anything off it. It costs money out of my pocket to pay for web hosting, bandwidth, domain names, and everything else, and at the very least, I’d like to recoup those costs, and maybe even earn something for the thousands of hours I’ve put into the site.

But pretty much every way of monetizing a website makes the user experience worse, almost without exception. Don’t you hate those “Join our newsletter!” or “Buy my recipe book!” pop-ups you’re always closing? Videos autoplaying in the sidebar? “Enter your email to continue reading”? It makes me nostalgic for the early days of the web.

And I wrestle with this. I very well could make decent money by putting up barriers between you and the free maps. But I don’t want to. So, what’s the appropriate middle ground?

For now, the route I’ve chosen is to use affiliate links only — no ads, no pop-ups, no tracking cookies, no email lists, no nothing. I’ve chosen partners that seem relevant to what a user might already be looking for, so that means links to waterproof trail maps on Amazon, links to lodging maps on Expedia, and links to art prints and gifts on Zazzle.

Over the years, though, I realized the affiliate links weren’t as obvious as I wanted them to be. I never wanted anyone to be surprised they were leaving NPMaps when clicking a link. So I recently taught myself a bit more about web design and experimented with some different options. And now, as I mention in each page’s introduction, links are now color-coded: internal links sit against a plain white background, and affiliate links sit against a colored background shade. I also specify where each link will take you, so no one should ever feel misled.

The ironic part is that this actually reduces my income, as there’s more money to be made by fooling people into clicking affiliate links. But I feel better about transparency, so in the end, I chose to painstakingly update every page to make this change.

A bit more on dollars and cents

Since I’m on the topic of transparency, I want to dive deeper because I’m genuinely uncertain about the best way to move forward. Both Amazon and Zazzle have significantly reduced their payout percentages since I first started NPMaps, and there’s so much competition on Google that my site is often hard for users to find. This means that each year, I take in a little less money while hosting fees creep a little higher.

So I’m stumped on what I can do to turn the tide. Especially now that I have a toddler at home to provide for, the last thing I want to do is lose money to keep the site online. So what are my options?

Well, I could add more affiliate links. For the most part, I do feel like my links aren’t too intrusive, especially on the pages with dozens of maps. A couple of links to lodging and hiking maps seem appropriate on a long page. And now that I have a better system for identifying affiliate links, I plan to add in lodging maps to the pages currently without them. That might earn me enough for a free lunch a couple times a year.

I’m also toying with the idea of partnering with other sites. Could I integrate with AllTrails somehow? What about collaborating with tour guide sites, like Viator or GetYourGuide? Or instead of Amazon links, would it be worthwhile to include referrals to Patagonia or REI? The last thing I want is a site cluttered with affiliate links, so I’ll need to be conservative lest my site begin feeling spammy.

A friend suggested creating downloadable PDF trip-planning guides to the parks I know well. That does sound kind of fun, but it also seems like the worst possible time to start something like that when anyone can ask AI to plan a trip for them. Would anyone really pay for that? Along similar lines, I could sell little trip-planning Zoom consultations or try to make myself into some sort of national park travel guru/travel agent, but I have neither the time nor charisma for something like that.

So…stay tuned as I muddle ahead. (“Muddle ahead” is pretty much my life motto at this point.) My goal is to keep NPMaps in the green while still easy to use, so I’ll keep experimenting to see what makes sense without compromising the site’s spirit. For now, I’ve added the (maybe somewhat tacky?) donation link in the sidebar of each page. It felt like some low-hanging fruit to help keep the lights on while I figured out a longer-term plan.

Thanks to those of you who’ve sent in supportive emails and donated. It puts some wind at my back and keeps me motivated to move forward.

OK, enough behind-the-scenes talk. Onward! 2,000 maps is inching every closer…

All of our lives have ebbs and flows, and therefore a passion-project website created by someone in his free time has them as well. Since I’ve really committed to spending time on updating NPMaps, I’ve moved multiple times, got married, and had a baby. So understandably my attention has waned a bit.

But in recent weeks I’ve been back on the case, fixing broken links, correcting formatting errors, and replacing out-of-date maps with new versions. There’s so much more to do — I’m not smart enough to figure out how to automate this website so I had to update every page, word, and map individually — but it’s a good first step. Please let me know if you see any glaring issues that need fixing for me to prioritize first using the Contact form here.

I hope everyone is having a safe and healthy summer! With no opportunity to go on international trips, it’s a great time for Americans to stay local and visit their nearby parks.  (International visitors: we’ll see you next year.)

I’ve been updating pages with new map upgrades, adding a few dozen within the last week, with many more to come. I have to say, the National Park Service is getting better and better at publishing visually-pleasing and interesting maps. Take a look at some of the recent map edition updates:

Compare the new Lassen Volcanic National Park brochure map on the left with the old one here. I love the trail mileages and topography; what a difference! View the rest of the maps on the Lassen Volcanic maps page.

We see the same upgrades to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park brochure maps. To the left is the new South Unit map, and here’s the old one. See other updates on the Theodore Roosevelt maps page.

Even the grand ol’ parks like Yellowstone got facelifts! The new map is on the left and the old one is here.  Great job by the NPS maps team! View the rest of them on the Yellowstone maps page.

And at long last, I’ve finally got a new map of all national parks uploaded as well. This one is current as of today, featuring all 419 units.

Those are just a few examples of the many behind-the-scenes map upgrades I’ve made to this site. More to come later! And yes, I will eventually get around to creating some new pages as well — Gateway Arch National Park is feeling left out, I’m sure…

I realize this is my first posting in quite a while, but have no fear — the site isn’t dead! As life has gotten busy, I’ve been more in “maintenance mode,” updating pages with current maps rather than creating new pages. I realize I’m a little behind, as we have two new national parks since my last update: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is now Indiana Dunes National Park, and Jefferson Expansion National Memorial is now Gateway Arch National Park. Stay tuned!

What I’m especially pleased with is that I can finally remove this note I’ve had on the Yosemite maps page for over three years:

Please note: starting March 2016, the National Park Service renamed some locations in the park pending the settlement of a trademark lawsuit. This page and these maps continue to refer to the traditional names, as the site author has faith that the name change will only be temporary.

The court case has now been settled, so we are seeing the return of the classic place names such as Badger Pass, Curry Village, The Ahwahnee, etc. My Yosemite maps are once again accurate!

Thanks to all those who have written in with kind words over the years. It’s nice getting an affirmation every once in a while that people are finding this site useful. Thanks, and you’re welcome!