NPS Park Conditions, Alerts & Data Scraper

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Scrapes the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) API across seven resource types: parks, alerts, campgrounds, events, news releases, things to do, and visitor centers. Returns unified, flat records you can use without reading NPS API documentation.

A free NPS API key is required. You can get one instantly at nps.gov/subjects/developer/get-started.htm — no waiting, no approval, just an email address.

What It Scrapes

The NPS API sits behind developer.nps.gov/api/v1. Seven endpoints, one actor. You pick which resource types to fetch.

Why alerts matter: park closures, wildfire road conditions, and danger advisories change constantly. Trip planners, travel apps, and AI agents that need to know whether a park is actually accessible have to poll this data somehow. The alerts endpoint is the recurring-monitoring use case — daily or hourly runs filtered by park code or state.

Input

Leave resourceTypes empty to fetch all seven types in one run.

Example Input

{
"apiKey":"YOUR_NPS_API_KEY",
"resourceTypes":["alerts","parks"],
"stateCode":"CA",
"maxItems":100
}

Output

Each record has a resource_type field identifying its endpoint. Fields that don't apply to a given type are returned as empty strings.

Sample Record (Alert)

{
"resource_type":"alerts",
"park_code":"grba",
"title":"Winter Road Closures",
"description":"Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive is closed at the Wheeler Peak Summit Trailhead due to snow.",
"category":"Park Closure",
"url":"https://www.nps.gov/grba/planyourvisit/conditions.htm",
"last_indexed":"2026-05-19 00:00:00.0"
}

Sample Record (Park)

{
"resource_type":"parks",
"park_code":"alca",
"park_full_name":"Alcatraz Island",
"state_codes":"CA",
"title":"Alcatraz Island",
"description":"Alcatraz reveals stories of American incarceration, justice, and our common humanity...",
"url":"https://www.nps.gov/alca/index.htm",
"latitude":"37.82676234",
"longitude":"-122.4230206",
"activities":"Food, Wildlife Watching, Birdwatching, Museum Exhibits, Shopping",
"topics":"Colonization and Settlement, Forts, Incarceration, Maritime",
"operating_hours":"[{\"name\":\"Alcatraz Island\",\"standardHours\":{\"monday\":\"9:00AM - 6:30PM\",...}}]",
"phone":"415-561-4900",
"directions_url":"http://home.nps.gov/alca/planyourvisit/directions.htm"
}

Use Cases

Trip planning tools — pull parks and campgrounds filtered by state. Include entrance fees and operating hours directly in destination cards.

Closure monitoring — run daily against the alerts endpoint filtered by state. Filter output for category: "Park Closure" or "Danger" and route to push notifications or a status dashboard.

AI agents and RAG pipelines — NPS data is public domain. Feed current park conditions into retrieval-augmented generation for travel queries.

Geospatial and research projects — 470+ NPS units with coordinates, activities, topics, and fees in a clean flat format.

Rate Limits

The NPS API enforces rate limits per key. The actor paginates at 50 records per request with a ~1 second delay between calls to stay within NPS's documented guidance.

The default maxItems: 10 is intentionally conservative. Raise it for production runs. Set to 0 for an unlimited full-catalog pull.

Getting Your API Key

1. Go to nps.gov/subjects/developer/get-started.htm
2. Enter your name, email, and a brief use description
3. Key arrives by email within seconds

No approval process. No billing. Free tier is sufficient for most use cases.

Data source: U.S. National Park Service API (developer.nps.gov). NPS data is in the public domain.