How this site is made

outdoorstime turns public measurements into pages about outdoor places: the temperature of a hot spring at its source, the flow of a river above a waterfall, the length of a trail, the months a road is open.

The numbers

Every figure starts in a public record: the NOAA Thermal Springs List, USGS stream gauges, NOAA climate normals, Census place data, and the pages that the Forest Service, the BLM, the National Park Service and state parks publish for the places they run. Each source is named on the Sources page and under the table that uses it.

The writing

The text around the numbers is drafted with AI writing tools. The tools do not supply facts: distances, fees, dates and temperatures are taken from the sources above and checked against them, and places whose facts we could only find on unofficial sites are left out.

The checks

Before anything is published, scripts test every page: links, page structure, banned wording, the length and originality of the text. Each week someone on our team reads a sample of the newest pages and corrects what is wrong; what we learn from those reads changes how the next pages are made.

Mistakes

Access changes fast outdoors. If a road, fee or closure on a page is out of date, tell us on the Contact page. Confirmed errors are fixed and the check date on the page is updated. We do not publish reviews, invented visits or quotes from people who do not exist.