National Park Site Information In One Convenient Spot

This being the time that the kids, out of school for the summer, begin their loud and ceaseless lobbying for family excursions to our nation’s national parks and historic sites, your Web correspondent had planned to do an entire column on the home pages of our nation’s national parks and historic sites.

Then, we discovered that they’re all collected in one gigantic and gigantically useful site, the National Park Service’s ParkNet.

Here, you’ll find everything you need for your family vacation, except for the entire lyrics to 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

After you locate the park or historic site you’re looking for - from Abe Lincoln’s Birthplace to Zion National Park - and you can seek them out by name, region, state, or even keyword (fishing, Lincoln, geysers, etc.), you’re directed to each site’s home page, whence you can seek all manner of further information, including fees, reservation info, phone numbers, and what you need to do in preparation for a visit.

And there’s more: plenty of detailed information on various aspects of each individual site, directions on how to get there, histories of the parks and sites and, well, let’s just say ParkNet is all you need if you want to know about any of these fine places unless you want to know virtually everything, such as every kind of plant and vertebrate you can find in the parks. For that data, you can swing by the Species in Parks site, compiled by the University of California at Davis in conjunction with the National Parks Service.

This is a phenomenal undertaking, and one that’s still evolving. They haven’t got every park done yet, but quite a few are up and you can either download the massive lists of creatures or, if your computer has enough memory, scan the Noahesque listings on line.

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Where to find them ParkNet: http://www.nps.gov/index.html Species in Parks: http://endeavor.des.ucdavis.edu/NPS