How do you, readers, benefit from me house- and pet-sitting over the last several days? Of course – it means I had time to create eight new park pages for you. Which brings me to 107 parks added! Of course, when I started this site, there were only 401 park units; now there are 412. Yep, the President keeps creating more work for me. Thanks, Obama.

Here’s an overview of my new pages:

I gave the upper Midwest some love with Saint Croix River Maps, located in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. It’s the second park I’ve added for each state.

My most requested park was Buffalo National River, so I present to you Buffalo River Maps. I’m happy to bring some more attention to Arkansas, as Hot Springs often gets overlooked as it is.

Poor Mississippi had been shut out so far, but I got Natchez Trace Maps up, allowing me to also give Alabama their first page as well (and Tennessee’s second).

In Mississippi, when it rains, it pours so I continued that tradition by uploading my second Mississippi park in a row with Vicksburg Maps. Just five maps to start with here.

And more for Tennessee! Cumberland Gap Maps also allowed me to tick off another historical park, which my site has definitely been lacking in so far. The South definitely got lots of love with this update.

Now a quick jaunt west, to get the missing Mojave desert park, Mojave National Preserve Maps. I feel like California has too many pages added already, but hey, they’ve got a lot of parks.

Up north: my fifth cave park and third Oregon park added: Oregon Caves Maps. Make sure you check out the underground maps; there are some fun ones here!

And finally, a traveling a little bit northeast from Oregon, we have Little Bighorn Maps – one of the few western parks with a historical focus. Gotta get more history!

First up: I recently received a few emails from users asking how to stay in the loop and be notified when new maps or pages are added. A mailing list and newsletter seemed like too big of a hassle for me, so I went the route of Facebook; you can now follow the National Park Maps Facebook page and I’ll post all updates to the site there. Hopefully that means you don’t have to keep checking back to this Updates page all the time (which I’ll of course continue updating).

Two recent emails stood out for their common theme:

From Jerilyn: Thank you for all this information. Wonderful job. I live in Vermont and could not find any of our parks. Thanks again.

From Alex: Hey Matt, I love what you’re doing, but nothing for Vermont??? We’ve got some great parks and some darn old mountains.

My apologies to the entire state of Vermont; I am deeply sorry if I’ve offended Ben, Jerry, or Bernie Sanders. So today I gave Vermont some love and added Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park maps, featuring five maps for now. Am I still missing states? Sure. But as of today, I am missing one fewer. And now I have my first “unnecessarily long and unwieldy park name” park added, which naturally was a tremendous oversight on my part.

So does this mean I’m saying you should all make your requests and I’ll immediate add your favorite park? Well, no. Here is a selection of some of the requests I’ve received over the last month or so:

Gulf Islands, C&O Canal, Whiskeytown, Organ Pipe Cactus, Santa Fe Trail, Wilson’s Creek, Pecos, Natchez Trace, Padre Island, Silos and Smokestacks, Herbert Hoover, Santa Monica Mountains, Fort Matanzas, Vicksburg, Cape Canaveral, Castillo de San Marcos, Morristown, Buffalo National River, Pea Ridge, George Washington Memorial Parkway, Selma to Montgomery, Mojave, Lewis and Clark, Saratoga, El Malpais, Saint Croix Riverway, Booker T. Washington, Greenbelt, Andersonville.

Whew! And that doesn’t touch on the dozens of requests I got for national forests, state parks, BLM sites, and Canadian national parks. So – sure – go ahead and request a park, but as you can see I certainly have no shortage of things to do right now.

I found a bit of time for a fun update: I am pleased to present my first ever NPMaps.com exclusive! That’s right – I’ve actually uploaded five maps that were previously unavailable anywhere online, including the official government nps.gov sites. I’m the first to host them. Exciting stuff, huh? So, let’s get to it…

So, which is the lucky page? Why it’s none other than Glacier National Park maps! Through secret sources (ooooooh!), I’ve been given four new trail maps for Lake McDonald, Logan Pass/St. Mary, Many Glacier, and Two Medicine that are free to use and distribute. Enjoy! These are better than the ones the park includes in their free hiking handouts.

Oh, but that’s not all – I actually have a second exclusive to share with you! This one is slightly less exciting, however; it’s just a campground map for East Portal Campground on the Black Canyon of the Gunnison maps page. So what makes it an exclusive? Well, this is a map I’ve never been able to find online; I actually got this map by visiting in person, taking a photo of the campground registration board, and digitizing it myself. (Never let it be said that I’m not dedicated.) So for now, this is the only place online you’ll be able to find this map.

But I haven’t just been sitting here content with only a few exclusives. Nope; enjoy the 28 maps I’ve just uploaded to the new Gateway National Recreation Area maps page. Honestly, I’ve been procrastinating on this one for a while as I knew it would take me a long time. And it did. But hey, now it’s up and I can move on to something more fun. New parks coming soon…

Creating this website was frustrating. “Come on Google, find this site! It’s really great, I promise – people will totally like it.” But over the first year of existence, I received about 20,000 total webpage views.

Over the last two days alone, I tripled that number. Wow! Thank you.

It’s been so much fun seeing it spread throughout social media this week, as users (Chelsea Clinton?!) have been enthusiastically sharing blog posts about this site from CityLab, Unofficial Networks, Teton Gravity Research, Mother Nature Network, the Oregonian, Mental Floss… the list goes on.

It’s been a blast. Why? It’s not really a money thing – you’ll notice I don’t have any web ads so I can keep things as simple as possible to get you to the maps quickly. I make enough money from the Amazon map referrals to cover my web hosting fees, so I’m hoping to keep things ad free unless my web hosting costs increase from all the new traffic.

Rather, it’s just fun to see my hard work appreciated; really, isn’t that all we want in life? Yes, it was frustrating to try filling (what I thought was) a need and not having anyone notice, but it’s totally worth it now that people have noticed.

Thank you for that. I hope I’ve made your national park visit a little easier and a little better.

I know I’ve been a bit slow about creating new pages over the last few weeks; honestly, summer is here and the weather is getting nice so I just haven’t spent as much time indoors. I’ve been out visiting the parks instead of just writing about them – what a concept!

So I appreciate your patience. I’ve received lots of requests by email asking me to upload maps for Local Park X and Favorite Park Y. Keep them coming! It does help me decide which pages to focus on next. But this is just a “whenever I have free time” project of mine, and I find I have less free time during the summer. More will be coming! I don’t plan on stopping until I have a page for each park.

And then I have national forests, state parks, BLM land…  You might as well just consider this site to be a work in progress for, say, the next 10 years.

Hot off the presses!

New pages

The Alcatraz maps page was tricky, as I didn’t know what to call it. Technically Alcatraz is just one small part of the much larger Golden Gate National Recreation Area, so it shouldn’t really get its own page since it isn’t its own national park site. But really, who that’s looking for a map of Alcatraz will do a search for Golden Gate? So the 4 Alcatraz maps get its own page. This was a practical decision, if not technically correct.

I got a request to include more historic sites in the northeast U.S., so I added the Valley Forge maps page with 11 maps. Technically the request was for battlefields, and while Valley Forge doesn’t quite fit the bill, I had a lot of maps for it so it seemed like a good start.

I also had a visitor point out I didn’t have any Iowa parks yet. This was true. But not anymore, as Effigy Mounds maps is now in the books! 4 Effigy Mounds maps to start with for Iowa. Maybe Herbert Hoover National Historic Site will come soon to give it some company.

Another request I received was for Women’s Rights National Historical Park. I’m pretty lacking in the historical park category – and really don’t have any urban parks yet – so here’s 3 maps for the Women’s Rights maps page.

For the rest of you who wrote in with requests: don’t worry, they’re coming too!

Page updates

Some old pages got new updates. My biggest overhaul was to Yellowstone maps, adding 15 new maps to bring it up to 37 total. Grand Canyon maps wasn’t left out either – I found some new maps of North Rim (and did some major page reorganization), leaving me with 22 Grand Canyon maps.

I had to give Alaska some love, so both Glacier Bay maps and Katmai maps got a couple new maps each, giving each page a total of 6 maps… so far. I hope to add more later.

And a new map each to each of the following pages: Craters of the Moon maps, Mount Rushmore maps, Hawaii Volcanoes maps, and Indiana Dunes maps.

Other changes

I also had a request to add social media share buttons to my map pages to make them easier to share trip-planning information with friends. I actually tried this out when I first started my site, but ended up removing them since I felt it looked spammy and just increased page load time. But after seeing the way the Smithsonian article about my site spread through social media, I decided to give it another shot. This time, however, I put the buttons on the bottom of each page. While that might mean things get shared less since not everyone will find them, I don’t like having it on top since I want the content to come first.