Methodology

What counts as a source

Only primary official sources: the National Park Service (nps.gov), Recreation.gov, and park-specific official reservation systems that NPS itself links to as the booking channel. Travel blogs and competing checkers are sometimes useful for understanding how visitors phrase a question. They are never used as evidence of a rule.

Every rule record stores the URL we read, the page title, the owner, the date we checked it, and a short verbatim excerpt. Those excerpts are shown on the park page so you can judge the evidence rather than trust us.

Six categories, kept apart

The central design decision is that these are different things and are never collapsed into one “reservation required” label:

• Entrance fee or pass — what you pay at the gate.
• Timed entry — a dated, often hour-bounded permit to enter.
• Vehicle, road, or corridor — tied to a vehicle or a named road, including parking tags and seasonal road closures.
• Shuttle — mandatory or optional, ticketed or free.
• Campground and lodging — which reservations an in-park booking does and does not satisfy.
• Activity permits — summit hikes, cave tours, cliff-dwelling tours, and the like.

Rules are bounded by date, not by prose

Each rule carries an effective start and end date, and where relevant a daily start and end time in the park’s own time zone. Deciding whether something applies is then arithmetic on your visit date, not an interpretation of a paragraph. A rule that ran 22 May to 13 October simply does not apply on 14 October, and the site says so.

Visit dates are treated as calendar dates in the park’s local time zone. That matters more than it sounds: Guadalupe Mountains observes Mountain Time despite sitting in Texas, and Theodore Roosevelt’s two units are in different time zones from each other.

We do not carry a season forward

This is the single most common way these questions get answered wrongly. A park that required timed entry last summer may not require it this summer — in 2026, Yosemite, Arches, and Glacier all dropped reservation requirements they had previously run, and Mount Rainier announced it would not implement one.

Each park records how far its published rules actually extend. Ask about a date beyond that horizon and you get “not yet published” plus a link to the park’s official alerts page — never an extrapolation.

What we publish and what we hold back

A park page is only allowed into search results when every factual claim on it traces to a source we read. That threshold is sourcing, not perfection: a park is held back only when a rule is missing its source URL or its verbatim excerpt. Of the 63 parks in the cohort, 42 carry no recorded gap at all and the remainder carry a smaller one — most often a permit that is genuinely walk-up, so there is no booking link to record. Every gap is listed in sources and in the published data quality report.

A park that fell below the sourcing threshold would carry noindex, follow and be excluded from the sitemap, and would say so on the page itself. As of the current dataset no park is in that state, so all 63 are indexable.

Query states — a specific visit date in the address bar — are a view of the park page rather than a page of their own. They carry a canonical tag pointing at the clean park URL and are served noindex, follow. We do not generate an indexable page for every date.

Numbers, unrounded

• 63 parks in the cohort.
• 401 individual rule records.
• 42 parks with no recorded sourcing gap.
• Every rule carries an official source URL, an excerpt, an effective period, and a confidence rating.

Corrections

If something here disagrees with what a park publishes, the park is right and we want to know. See corrections.