State Parks are a great way to spend a day getting back to nature, and many folks enjoy visiting these spaces on a regular basis to re-align their thoughts through fishing, hunting, hiking, or the variety of other activities available. Like the National Park system, they are spaces preserved and protected for the benefit of current and future generations.
It is relatively easy to find a State Park these days, with the plethora of information available at our fingertips. One can easily access a web site for their area and discover available options near through a map displaying the location of all of the parks in the state, or a listing of sorts, sometimes with an ability to filter by activity.
All of this is very helpful in finding a park suited to a particular need, but can be equally confusing in some situations. Meaningless regional divisions on maps, incomplete listings, or excess detail create unnecessary confusion.
Those seeking a more holistic view of the situation, living on the border of multiple states or traveling across the country, often find themselves entangled in multiple web sites.
It is truly unfortunate too, since all of the states host some fantastic parks containing truly extraordinary geographic and historical features. It is surprising that unlike the National Park system, there is not one map source for locating a nearby State Park anywhere in the United States. Equally surprising, there is no data set readily available to define such a map.
Leveraging information from individual State Park web sites, and verifying much of that against locations already present within Google Maps, resulted in the following web map. Limitations with Google My Maps application required division of the data into generally recognizable layers, but the map displays the location of all State Parks in the country.
Add the map to your saved maps in Google Maps and take it with you anywhere!
As with any digital map, do not just follow along blindly. The generalized park locations may or may not lead you directly to the entrance of the associated park. Always double check with the State authority to ensure the exact location of the park, accessibility, and suitability to need.
Alaska remains incomplete. Their web site does not provide a wealth of information about the location of their State Parks, and Google has very few of them plotted. Completing that state will likely require more time than it took to create the entire map.
State Parks additions occur continually and maintenance of this data necessary, to ensure the map remains a valuable tool. If you are interested in collaborating on this, send a note. It would be great to have someone from every state join in keeping their state updated and accurate.
