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.
This is just such an awesome gift. Thank you!
THANK YOU! What an amazingly generous and useful project and site. I shudder to think how much time I will be spending plotting future adventures with this bounty of maps.
Huge gratitude to you! Your project certainly fills a gap in info…you are an inspiration!
Thank you so much!
You and your generous labor of ‘national park’ love are much appreciated!!
Thank you for such a great website and resource. Your hard work is appreciated.
Thank you so much! A great National Parks 100th Birthday gift to the world!
Thank you so much! This is an amazing resource. Please consider adding a donation button to help with the bandwidth costs. Many people don’t mind donating a couple of bucks.
I really do appreciate the sentiment. I’ve had a few people suggest it to me before, but honestly I think I would feel strange accepting donations and don’t plan to at this time. I do have some other possible ideas to earn some money without harming the user experience by featuring ads, so I might explore those opportunities instead of putting up a donation link. Regardless though, it does mean a lot that there are some willing to donate; even if I never make that possible, I’m glad to know people are willing to.
So your map site has also made it over to Australia. (Courtesy of the Mother Nature Network newsletter) Brilliant work – particularly in this day and age of obsessive copyright legislation. I’ll be sharing on social media for sure 🙂
This site is BRILLIANT! I hope you find many opportunities to earn money for your hard work.
So cool! I am an avid paper NPS maps collector, and have been dreaming of something like this for years! Thanks!
If you can figure out a way to get some National Forest maps on here, that would be even more awesome, than the awesomeness that it already is!! Good work … thanks!!
I hope to get there eventually! Since I named my site “National Park Maps,” understandably my priority is on national park units. But I know the Forest Service website can be even tougher to navigate than the NPS one to find maps, so I might get some popular forests up sooner rather than later. I appreciate your feedback!
This site will be immensely helpful for my National Parks Marathon Project. Thank you for taking the time and effort to put it together.
Thank you so very much for your initiative and effort to create such a helpful and amazing site.
Thank you for your generosity. You are my hero. I am an environmental educator and find your site invaluable. A+
Amazing. Awesome. Generous. A+.
This is some AWESOME work you’ve done here! Wish I found it sooner! I know NPS has legal reasons why their brochures can’t all be posted like this, but your work here puts them to shame. Great job!!!
Thank you thank you thank you! Just found out about this site from a Smithsonian article–so amazing! Every American adventurer’s dream come true!!! Many many thanks!