How to check if a national park is open before you drive

Very few national parks close completely. What usually happens is narrower: a road closes, a ferry stops running, a tour is cancelled, a campground shuts for the season. The park is technically open, but the thing you drove there for isn't. Here's a quick routine using official sources that catches most of these problems before you leave the house.

1. Read the alerts on the park's nps.gov page

Every park has an official page on nps.gov, and current alerts appear in a banner at the top. NPS also collects every park's alerts on one Active Alerts in Parks page, which you can filter by state, park or alert type. NPS uses four alert types:

• Danger: an immediate hazard.
• Closure: the park, a major facility or an area is closed for a reason other than an immediate safety concern.
• Caution: a possibly hazardous situation.
• Information: something that may affect your plans.

Read all of them, not just the ones marked Closure. For example, Mammoth Cave currently lists its trail closures as Information. Also check the date on each alert. Some stay up for months or years, and a very old one may describe something the park has already fixed or changed.

2. Check the park's conditions or road status page

Alerts cover the unusual. The everyday details, like seasonal hours, which loops of a campground are open and how far up a road you can drive, live on a park's "Current Conditions," "Road Status" or "Operating Hours & Seasons" page. A missing alert doesn't mean everything is open. At Big South Fork, for example, the Blue Heron Interpretive Center closes for the season after Oct. 31. That's in the park's visitor center listing, not in an alert.

Some parks give extra ways to check:

• Text alerts: Yellowstone (text "82190" to 888-777) and Glacier (text GNPROADS to 333111).
• Recorded road lines: for example, Yellowstone at (307) 344-2117.
• X feed: Mammoth Cave posts Green River Ferry status at @MCNPRoadsFerry.

Look for these on the park's directions or road pages.

3. Check the weather for the park itself

Forecasts for a nearby town can be very different from conditions up in the park. Use weather.gov from the National Weather Service. You can search a place name or click the map to get a forecast for a specific spot, and any active watches, warnings and advisories show up with it. Mountain parks are the obvious case. Mount Rainier, for instance, requires every vehicle to carry tire chains from Nov. 1 to May 1, and roads at higher elevations can close for snow at short notice.

4. Confirm your tickets and reservations

Some experiences need a ticket or reservation, and they're often booked through Recreation.gov, the federal booking site. At Mammoth Cave, you need a ticket to go into the cave, and the park strongly recommends booking ahead because walk-up tickets aren't guaranteed. At Cumberland Gap, Gap Cave and Hensley Settlement tours are booked by phone, and a tour with no reservations by noon the day before is cancelled. Before you drive, make sure what you booked is still on: check your Recreation.gov account or call the park.

5. Call if you're not sure

Every nps.gov park page lists a phone number under "Contact Us." For a long drive, a two-minute call to the visitor center on the morning you leave is the most reliable check there is. Also look at the park's directions page. Some parks warn that GPS gets you there by the wrong route. Mammoth Cave says so outright, and Glacier notes that some park entrances and roads are seasonal.

Two more tools

The official NPS App is free for iPhone and Android. It shows news, alerts and events for the parks you pick, and you can download a park's content for offline use, which helps in places with no cell signal.

Park Lookout pulls every park's active NPS alerts and nearby National Weather Service warnings into one page per park, checked daily. It labels each site Open, Partial closures or Closed based on the alerts NPS has posted. "Closed" only appears when NPS posts a closure of the whole site. We're an independent site, not the National Park Service, so use us as a quick first look and confirm on nps.gov before you go.