About YourNPGuide

YourNPGuide helps travelers plan national park trips around the places that make an itinerary work: parks, lodging, campgrounds, food, trails, activities, gateway towns, and practical trip-planning guides.

Who Runs This Site

YourNPGuide is written and edited by one person who publishes under the pen name Andy Smith (founder and editor). It is a pen name, not a claim of credentials: there is no ranger background, guide license, or academic title behind it, and we do not pretend otherwise. What is behind it is a planner’s obsession with getting the details right and a fact-verification system built specifically for national park trips.

Where the first-hand experience is: the Glacier National Park guides draw on field notes from a late-August 2024 trip (entrance-line timing, cell service, Going-to-the-Sun Road logistics, campground booking). Where a page says “we noticed” or “when we visited,” it is backed by one of those dated notes. Every other park is covered through research checked against National Park Service and provider sources, and those pages do not claim a visit. As first-hand notes are added for other parks, that list will grow here.

A Planning Site Built Around Real Places

Park hubs are the starting point. Individual listings supply the places to sleep, eat, hike, visit, and book. Support guides connect those places into useful plans. Listings that have not yet earned a place in search are kept out of Google’s index until they carry enough original, verified detail to deserve it.

Park Hubs

Start with a national park, then move into access, timing, activities, places to stay, and nearby services.

Individual Listings

Explore specific lodging, campgrounds, restaurants, trails, tours, natural features, gateway towns, wildlife pages, and relevant gear.

Planning Guides

Use month-by-month weather pages, day-by-day itineraries, comparisons, fee and reservation guides, and safety information to connect the pieces.

How Content Is Made

  • Facts come in through receipts. Fees, dates, reservation rules, road openings, and policies enter the site only with a source URL and a verbatim quote from an official page (NPS.gov, NOAA, Recreation.gov, park concessioners). Each fact carries a re-check schedule and a “last verified” date.
  • Weather and daylight are compiled, not paraphrased. Month pages use NOAA climate normals for the nearest station plus computed daylight hours.
  • Software and AI tools are used to research, draft, structure, and maintain content at the scale of 63 parks and thousands of places. Drafts are checked against the fact records before they publish, and anything that fails those checks is held. AI is never used to invent an experience, a visit, or a review.
  • Some links earn a commission. Where a page links to a booking or gear partner, the link is marked as sponsored and a disclosure sits next to it. Commissions never change which places we recommend. See the affiliate disclosure.

The full method, including how corrections are handled, is on the editorial policy page.

Found an Error?

Dates, prices, hours, road access, reservations, and seasonal operations change. When a detail affects your trip, follow the official source linked on the page before you travel or purchase. If you find something wrong, use the contact page; material corrections are made on the page and noted in its update date.