Today, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park gets the honored distinction of being the first historical park added to this site – eight new maps! I actually have another eight for the park coming down the pipeline, but sometimes real life gets in the way and I run out of time to do as much work as originally planned. So those will just have to wait. Edit: scratch that – I added the eight trail maps so now it’s up to sixteen.

I should clarify: there are other pages up featuring parks with a historical bent to them (Kennesaw Mountain, Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island, Bandelier…). It’s just that Harpers Ferry is the first of the designated “historical parks” I have up. A subtle distinction possibly only cared about by national park dorks? Absolutely!

That puts NPMaps at 85 map pages and 904 total maps now, after passing 800 not too long ago. Can I keep this momentum going?

Edit: thanks to backpackers.com for publishing a really nice interview with me about the site last week! I always enjoy getting a chance to talk about my project.

I’m always tweaking away, trying to incrementally improve the pages I already have up rather than only focusing on adding new pages. Today was a big change: every single map page now has an interactive Google map in the sidebar!

I realize this might seem pointless; after all, anyone can just google a park and pull up its result on Google Maps. However, I know from experience that this usually isn’t too helpful for driving directions; Google seems to often choose an arbitrary point inside the park to send you to. This results in a lot of visitors blindly following directions to somewhere they don’t actually want to go.

On this site, every single interactive map is centered on a visitor center or major point of interest that you’ll actually want to go to. So go ahead and use the pop-out interactive map for directions – you’ll probably want to actually go there! I’m not going to tell you to follow it blindly, but you now have much less of a chance of getting lost.

Yeah, sure, I got all 59 parks uploaded but that doesn’t mean I’m going to rest easy now. On my reddit post introducing the site this week, user iendandubegin said he/she lived in Missouri and would like to see Ozark National Scenic Riverways added.

Well, I had no Missouri parks nor any riverways, so I thought that was a logical next step. So, here’s Ozark Maps! I’ve got seven maps there so far, which seems like a good start.

That now brings me to 84 parks and 811 maps. What else is on my short term to-do list? Well, Lake Mead, Cape Cod, St. Croix, and John Day Fossil Beds are all probably coming up soon. I also need to create a clickable image map for the List By State page. A lot of reddit users requested national forests and BLM land, but I think I want to hammer away at more national park units first. After all, I did call this site National Park Maps; the least I could do is keep plugging away at parks before moving on to others.

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!