Well it only took me two-and-a-half years, but I finally got pages up for all 59 national parks! I rounded out the last few missing pages of Alaskan parks. These were kind of boring pages, and combined with their lack of visitation, explains why I’ve been procrastinating on them for so long. Still, I managed seven maps so far on Wrangell-St Elias Maps, five to start on Lake Clark Maps, but only two for Gates of the Arctic Maps and Kobuk Valley Maps. Still, it’s a start!

How many maps have I uploaded? Rounding out the Alaska ones pushed me over 800 for the first time. Here’s how the number of maps on this site have increased over time:

I now have 803 maps hosted sitewide. That includes 59 national park pages, 10 national monuments, 3 national recreation areas, 4 national lakeshores, 4 national seashores, 1 national memorial, 1 parkway, 1 national battlefield park, and a partridge in a pair tree. Whew. Here’s the complete list of parks completed so far.

What’s next? Well I still another 300+ national monuments, historic sites, and recreation areas to go….!

I wanted to get some geographic diversity with this next update, so say hello to my newest three pages!

Honestly I’m wondering if creating the new Fire Island maps page was sort of a waste of time – is anyone honestly ever looking for maps of Fire Island? This isn’t exactly a destination park, but a locals park. Who’s really going online to find maps? Either way, I’ve grabbed 7 maps for this one.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes maps page was a long time coming – I should have created this one a while ago. Some of the best backpacking and hiking in the state of Michigan and it took me this long? The 24 maps I found for Sleeping Bear helped me complete the upper-Midwest lake series – Apostle Islands, Indiana Dunes, Pictured Rocks, and Isle Royale. (I suppose you could throw Voyageurs into there as well.)

Maybe the most underrated park in the country is Dinosaur National Monument. So enjoy the 14 Dinosaur maps of some pretty spectacular country. Here’s one park I think should be upgraded from National Monument to National Park – if Dinosaur isn’t national park-worthy, I don’t know what is. One of the best!

Besides the new pages, I’ve also uploaded and saved as JPG a number of USGS topos for a bunch of different parks – Acadia, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, Zion, and Grand Canyon. More coming! It’s just pretty time-consuming to find, convert, and upload these maps compared to others, so it hasn’t been on the top of my list. More later!

I’m a numbers nerd, as you may have figured out from a previous blog entry. I decided to take a look at what my most popular pages are currently and compare them to the total number of page views each one has had since I created the site in October 2013. So, let’s take a look at the Top 10:

Most viewed pages (October 2013 to present)

10. Yosemite maps
9. Grand Teton maps
8. Death Valley maps
7. Mount Rainier maps
6. Glacier maps
5. Zion maps
4. Grand Canyon maps
3. Joshua Tree maps
2. Big Bend maps
1. Bryce Canyon maps

Unexpected! I can’t totally figure out why some pages do better than others. For example, Grand Teton maps has 37 for free download, while Bryce Canyon only has 7. Then you’ve got Big Bend with 13 and Joshua Tree with 34. My worst pages seem to be the ones with fewest maps – not totally unexpected – but among the top-viewed, there isn’t a strong correlation. Now let’s see what pages are currently the most viewed:

Most viewed pages (January 1, 2016 to present)

10. Yosemite maps (+0)
9. Glacier maps (-3)
8. Mount Rainier maps (-1)
7. Sequoia maps (+4)
6. Zion maps (-1)
5. Grand Canyon maps (-1)
4. Bryce Canyon maps (-3)
3. Death Valley maps (+5)
2. Joshua Tree maps (+1)
1. Big Bend maps (+1)

If anything, I’m surprised at how steady it’s been! Generally speaking, things are ranked pretty similarly to how they’ve been overall. Some of the parks with high winter visitation – Big Bend, Joshua Tree, and Death Valley – are understandably more popular right now; they’ll surely drop in the rankings come summer. But otherwise, no major changes, other than seeing Sequoia make it onto the list and Grand Teton drop off of it.

That’s it. No major revelations or fascinating trends, but sometimes that’s just how research works. Going into this, I thought I’d have something more interesting to say…but apparently I was wrong. If I was really feeling ambitious, I could look at past dates and pull up web statistics see if there are some interesting seasonal variations. But I’m not feeling ambitious. So, that’ll just have to wait.

Every once in a while I’ll run into a strange issue when creating a new maps page. Take Sequoia maps and Kings Canyon maps, for example – how do I construct those pages? Technically the two parks are actually managed together as one park, with one website, and one series of maps – and you drive through both parks if you take the entire loop road. Yet visitors aren’t usually aware of these strange cases and think of them as separate. So, I ended up creating two pages, just with duplicate maps.

Today I had a new dilemma – what to do about Glen Canyon National Recreation Area? It makes sense to create a Glen Canyon maps page, since that’s what the park is called. Unfortunately, most visitors don’t know it as Glen Canyon – it’s just “Lake Powell.” So, maybe I should create a Lake Powell maps page instead?

I ended up creating both, but removing a few maps on the Lake Powell maps page that focused elsewhere in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (such as Lees Ferry). I think this makes the most sense and hopefully won’t be too confusing for users. Thus, there’s an entry for both Lake Powell maps and Glen Canyon maps in the navigation menu.

I also added a lot of new maps to Mesa Verde maps, Capitol Reef maps, and Carlsbad Caverns maps. Check them out! I’m up to 710 maps total now. (And yes, that’s without double-counting both Glen Canyon and Lake Powell – it was tempting to double count to increase my total number, but I just can’t handle the dishonesty!)

For once, this update isn’t about a new page that I’ve created. (Although I added a bunch of maps to both Cuyahoga Valley Maps as well as Yosemite Maps.) Instead, I’m sharing a random chart that might interest no one but myself, but I was curious enough to create it so I figured I might as well share it.

Below you see the number of park maps I’ve uploaded since I created my site in October 2013. Not surprisingly, you see a huge jump at the beginning, as I created many pages all at once. I continued slowly adding during spring of 2014, and then you notice about a year of nothing – life got busy! In early 2015 I added a few more, and then again in August 2015. And you’ll see that now, at the beginning of 2016, I’ve renewed my dedication and have zoomed past both the 500 and 600 marks; I’m currently at 677 total maps. (I keep a count on the site home page.)

Anyway, nothing too profound I realize, but I had fun checking out the numbers all the same. Thanks for humoring me!