🏞️ National Park Service Parks Scraper

🚀 Export the U.S. National Park Service catalog in seconds. Pull 470+ parks, monuments, historic sites, seashores, and recreation areas with hours, fees, activities, alerts, and contacts. No login, no manual CSV wrangling.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-21 · 📊 22 fields per park record · 🏞️ 470+ NPS units · 🇺🇸 56 states & territories · 5 datasets

The National Park Service Parks Scraper exports the official NPS catalog maintained by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Each park record returns 22 fields, including park code, designation, states, coordinates, full description, weather and directions info, contact details, entrance fees and passes, operating hours per unit, activities, topics, addresses, and a gallery of representative images.

The catalog covers every NPS unit: 63 designated National Parks, plus National Monuments, National Historic Sites, National Seashores, National Recreation Areas, National Battlefields, and more (470+ in total). Coverage spans every U.S. state plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Travel apps, RV and camping platforms, outdoor brands, trip-planning startups, GIS analysts, journalists	Park directory enrichment, trip-planning autocomplete, fees and hours lookup, alerts and closures monitoring, campground inventory, activity-based filtering

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📋 What the NPS Parks Scraper does

Five datasets in a single Actor:

• 🏞️ Parks. Every NPS unit with full metadata, hours, fees, activities, and images.
• ⚠️ Alerts. Active park alerts, closures, and advisories.
• 🏕️ Campgrounds. NPS-operated campgrounds with reservation info, amenities, and accessibility.
• 🎫 Events. Ranger talks, junior ranger programs, special exhibits, and seasonal events.
• 💲 Fees & passes. Entrance fees, vehicle permits, annual passes, and free-day calendars.

Each park record carries identifiers (ID, park code, designation), location (states, latitude, longitude), descriptive text (description, weather, directions), contacts (phone, email), monetary info (entrance fees, passes), operating hours (per unit with standard hours and exceptions), classification (activities, topics), addresses (physical and mailing), and a gallery of titled images.

💡 Why it matters: NPS data is the backbone of every U.S. travel and outdoor recreation app. Pulling it yourself means handling per-endpoint pagination and joining sparse sub-resources. This Actor returns a clean per-park row with every sub-resource flattened into ready-to-use arrays.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded NPS dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
endpoint	string	"parks"	parks, alerts, campgrounds, events, or fees.
stateCode	string	""	Two-letter state filter. Empty = all states and territories.
parkCode	string	""	Comma-separated park codes (e.g. yose,grca,zion).
searchQuery	string	""	Optional free-text keyword.
apiKey	string	""	Optional personal key for higher rate limits.

Example: every park in California.

{
    "maxItems": 100,
    "endpoint": "parks",
    "stateCode": "CA"
}

Example: campgrounds in Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Zion.

{
    "maxItems": 50,
    "endpoint": "campgrounds",
    "parkCode": "yose,grca,zion"
}

⚠️ Good to Know: the bundled key works for casual use. For production workloads, request a free personal key from the data service to lift rate limits. Field completeness varies by park unit; flagship parks return rich fees, hours, and image data, while smaller units may carry empty arrays for those fields.

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📊 Output

Each park record contains 22 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 id	string	"77E0D7F0-1942-494A-ACE2-9004D2BDC59E"
🏞️ name	string	"Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park"
🏷️ parkCode	string	"abli"
🏛️ designation	string	"National Historical Park"
🇺🇸 states	string	"KY"
🔗 url	string	"https://www.nps.gov/abli/index.htm"
📍 latitude	number	37.5858662
📍 longitude	number	-85.67330523
📄 description	string	full park description
⛅ weatherInfo	string	seasonal climate notes
🧭 directionsInfo	string	how to get there
☎️ phone	string	"2703583137"
📧 email	string	"ABLI_Administration@nps.gov"
💲 entranceFees	array	per-fee objects
🎫 entrancePasses	array	annual and lifetime passes
🕒 operatingHours	array	per-unit standard hours and exceptions
🎯 activities	array	["Hiking","Stargazing","Picnicking",...]
🏷️ topics	array	["Presidents","Geology","Night Sky",...]
🏢 addresses	array	physical and mailing addresses
🖼️ images	array	titled image gallery
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-20T22:14:00.000Z"
❗ error	string | null	populated only on failure

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🏞️	Full NPS catalog. Every National Park, Monument, Historic Site, Seashore, and Recreation Area in one Actor.
🔀	Five datasets. Parks, alerts, campgrounds, events, and fees, all accessible per run.
🇺🇸	All states and territories. 50 states plus DC, PR, USVI, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
⚡	Fast. 10 parks in under 5 seconds, 470 parks in under three minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls live NPS data, so your dataset reflects current hours, fees, and alerts.
🇺🇸	Official source. Maintained by the National Park Service and the U.S. Department of the Interior.
🚫	No keys to manage. Default sample key works out of the box.

📊 NPS is the canonical reference for U.S. national parks and is used by every major travel, outdoor, and trip-planning product.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ NPS Parks Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	470+ NPS units	Live per run	endpoint, state, park code, keyword	⚡ 2 min
Build your own pipeline	Free, but engineering hours	Full NPS if you build it	Manual	DIY	🐢 Days
Commercial travel data vendors	$500+/month	Vendor-curated subset	Vendor cadence	Vendor's	⏳ Hours
Per-park manual lookups	Free	One park at a time	Manual	None	🕒 Weeks

Pick this Actor when you want every NPS unit in a single normalized shape with hours, fees, activities, and alerts ready to drop into your app.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the NPS Parks Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a dataset (parks, alerts, campgrounds, events, or fees), optionally filter by state or park code, set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

🧳 Travel & Trip Planning National park autocomplete with canonical park codes Trip-planning maps with coordinates and activities Hours and fees overlays for itinerary builders Activity-based filtering for adventure trips	🏕️ RV, Camping & Outdoor Campground inventory with amenities and accessibility Reservation-page deep linking Activity catalogs for outdoor gear and content brands Off-season planning with alerts and closures
📱 Mobile Apps & Tours Self-guided tour data with addresses and directions Push notifications tied to live alerts Gallery feeds for app onboarding screens Multi-park itinerary builders	📰 Media, Journalism & Education Park profile pages for travel publications Educational content for K-12 and homeschool curricula Investigative reporting on closures, fees, or events Public-interest data visualizations

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🔌 Automating NPS Parks Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Daily refreshes of the alerts endpoint keep your trip-planning app aligned with current closures and advisories.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

National park data powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Conservation-science research with cited park boundaries Tourism-economics studies using fee and visitation data Coursework in geography, ecology, and public administration Reproducible studies with versioned dataset pulls	🎨 Personal and creative Personal bucket-list trackers for park visitors Indie travel apps and photo portfolios Educational content for outdoor creators Map-art and visualization side projects
🤝 Non-profit and civic Friends-of-the-Parks group communications Indigenous-history advocacy tied to park topics Volunteer-coordination for park stewardship Civic transparency around fees and alerts	🧪 Experimentation Train park-classification or image-matching models Prototype agent pipelines that recommend parks by activity Build dashboards correlating alerts with weather Validate trip-planning recommendation engines

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Pick which dataset you want (parks, alerts, campgrounds, events, or fees), optionally filter by state or park code, and click Start. The Actor pulls the matching NPS records and writes a clean per-record row to the dataset.

📏 How fresh is the data?

NPS updates its catalog regularly as parks change hours, post new alerts, adjust fees, or add events. Every run of this Actor pulls live data, so your dataset reflects the current NPS state at run time.

🌐 Which parks are covered?

Every NPS unit: National Parks, National Monuments, National Historic Sites, National Seashores, National Recreation Areas, National Battlefields, and more (470+ total across all 50 states and territories).

🏕️ Can I get campground info?

Yes. Set endpoint to campgrounds to pull NPS-operated campgrounds with reservation info, amenities, accessibility, and contact details.

⚠️ Can I monitor alerts and closures?

Yes. Set endpoint to alerts and schedule a daily run to track active closures, advisories, and safety alerts across the system.

💲 What is the difference between fees and passes?

Entrance fees are per-visit costs (e.g. a 7-day vehicle pass at $35). Entrance passes are longer-term passes (e.g. an annual park pass at $70 or the America the Beautiful interagency pass). Both are returned per park.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval. Daily refreshes of the alerts endpoint are ideal for trip-planning apps; weekly refreshes of parks keep your directory current.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

NPS data is published as U.S. government open data. The values are free to use, including for commercial products, subject to the NPS terms of service.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes. Public NPS data is widely used in commercial travel, outdoor, and trip-planning products. You are responsible for complying with the NPS terms.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What happens if a run fails or gets interrupted?

Apify automatically retries transient errors. If a run still fails, you can inspect the log in the Runs tab, fix the input, and re-run. Partial datasets from interrupted runs are preserved so you never lose progress.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

NPS Parks Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe park data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh NPS data into your travel-app backend, or alert your team in Slack.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. National Park Service or the U.S. Department of the Interior. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available NPS data is collected.