Trip routes
Trip routes in Parks Manager are an ordered list of up to 60 stops with a travel mode on every leg between them.
A national park trip is rarely one drive. It is a flight, a rental pickup, four hours to a gateway town, a shuttle, and a trailhead — and the parts that go wrong are the joins.
- 12kinds of stop
- 8travel modes
- 60stops per trip
- 3routing sources, always labelled
Twelve kinds of stop
Each stop carries a kind, because a ferry terminal and a trailhead are not the same planning problem. The kinds are home, origin, airport, station, ferry terminal, park, visitor center, campground, campsite, trailhead, lodging, and a free-form custom stop for anything else.
Parks and campgrounds picked from the catalog bring their own coordinates. A custom stop is searched against OpenStreetMap, so a named pullout or a friend’s house lands on the map with the rest.
Eight travel modes
A leg joins two stops and records how you cross it: drive, walk, hike, bike, flight, train, ferry, or other. The mode decides which routing service answers, and it decides whether a distance means anything at all — a straight line between two airports is not a flight time.
Where the distances come from, and when they are guesses
Driving legs are routed through Mapbox Directions. Walking, hiking, and cycling legs go to OpenRouteService. When neither service is configured or reachable, Parks Manager falls back to straight-line distance at a planning speed.
Every leg stores which of the three produced it. That matters more than the number: a routed 4 hr 10 min and a straight-line 4 hr 10 min are different claims, and the page says which one you are looking at.
| Mode | Source | Fallback |
|---|---|---|
| Drive | Mapbox Directions | Straight line at a planning speed |
| Walk, hike, bike | OpenRouteService | Straight line at a planning speed |
| Flight, train, ferry, other | Straight line between the two stops | None needed |
Auto-fill from the parks you already added
A trip with parks on it and no route yet can seed one: your home place from Settings, then the parks in a sensible order, then home again. The seeded route is flagged as such.
That flag is the point. Once you reorder a leg or add a trailhead, Parks Manager stops treating the route as disposable and will not overwrite your version with a fresh seed.
Handing the drive to your phone
Any drive leg opens in Google Maps or Apple Maps with the endpoints filled in. Parks Manager plans the order; the phone in the windscreen mount does the turn-by-turn.
What it does not do
This is a planning tool, not a navigation app.
- There is no turn-by-turn guidance, no live traffic, and no rerouting.
- No elevation profile is computed for hiking legs, so a flat 8 km and 8 km of switchbacks read the same.
- Flight, train, and ferry legs are straight-line only. Parks Manager reads no timetables.
- A trip holds at most 60 stops.
- Seasonal road closures are not modelled. A route over a pass that shuts in October will still be drawn in January.
Common questions
How many stops can one Parks Manager trip route hold?
Sixty. Each stop is one of twelve kinds, including airports, trailheads, campgrounds, visitor centers, lodging, and free-form custom places.
Are Parks Manager drive times real routing or estimates?
Driving legs are routed through Mapbox Directions where it is available, and every leg records which source produced its number, so a straight-line estimate is visibly labelled as one.
Can a trip route include hiking and ferry legs?
Yes. Each leg picks from drive, walk, hike, bike, flight, train, ferry, or other, and hiking legs are routed through OpenRouteService rather than a road network.
Will Parks Manager overwrite a route I edited?
No. An auto-filled route is flagged as seeded, and that flag is cleared once you change it, which stops a later auto-fill from replacing your version.
All Parks Manager features are indexed in one place.