How we score parks

Every park on parkverdict carries an Experience Score from 0 to 100. This page explains precisely how it is calculated so you can judge whether our priorities match yours.

What the Experience Score measures

The Experience Score measures the documented breadth of what a park offers and how accessible it is, using only structured fields from the official NPS Data API. It is a consistency tool: the same formula runs on all 474 units so they can be compared fairly. It rewards parks that document many activities, cover many topics, provide camping, are supported by good imagery, and are free or low-cost to enter.

What it is NOT

It is deliberately not a subjective beauty or quality rating, and we do not pretend it is. A small, spectacular park focused on one thing will score lower than a large do-it-all unit, because it offers less breadth - not because it is "worse". Read the score as "how much is here and how easy is it to access", then read our verdict and rankings for fit. We would rather be honest about a limited, transparent metric than dress up a guess as objective quality.

The formula

The score is a weighted composite of public NPS fields, capped and normalized to 0-100:

• Activity breadth (up to 48 points): the number of distinct documented activities, capped at 20.
• Topic breadth (up to 16 points): the number of documented topics, capped at 12.
• Imagery (up to 14 points): availability of official photographs, capped at 5.
• Camping (12 points): awarded if camping is a documented activity.
• Access (10 points): awarded if entrance is free.

The result is rounded and floored at 18 so that even the most minimal unit gets a fair baseline. Because it is computed identically for every park, the ranking that falls out of it is reproducible and free of any editorial thumb on the scale.

Theme rankings

Our "best for" rankings (stargazing, hiking, families, water, wildlife, winter, and more) are built by matching each park's documented NPS activities to a theme, then ordering the matches by Experience Score. A park appears under "stargazing" only if it genuinely documents astronomy or stargazing programming.

Facts, sources and freshness

All underlying facts come from the NPS Data API and are refreshed on a schedule. Fees, hours and closures change often; we show them for guidance and link to the official nps.gov page, which is always the authority before you travel. Found an error? Let us know.