How this data is made

Last verified October 15, 2026.

The pages are from the National Park Service, the USDA Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, Recreation.gov, National Weather Service forecasts, and the Havasupai Tribe for Havasupai permits.

Freshness

Each permit page has a last-verified date. Seven pages, including Angels Landing, The Wave, and Grand Canyon backcountry, go stale after October 22, 2026. Mount Whitney, the Enchantments, and Havasupai go stale after November 14, 2026. After a page is stale, treat its dates as unchecked until a newer verification is published.

What an assistant may cite

Cite the page URL, the last-verified date, and the official source linked next to the fact. Do not present Parks Ahead as the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, Recreation.gov, or the Havasupai Tribe. The footer on every page says: “Some of our links may earn us a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting Parks Ahead. It truly helps us keep this guide free!”

Only the three published permit pages are canonical: Angels Landing, The Wave, and Grand Canyon backcountry. Other permit records in the data file are included so the calendar can name them, and they are marked "published": false.

Machine-readable files

• Permit records and calendar records are the only record files. Each has a schema and a docs page: permit data, calendar data.
• llms.txt is the short map. Each content page also has a Markdown twin, linked from that file. llms-full.txt writes the same facts out in plain text.
• Pages are server-rendered HTML. The facts are in the HTML. A permit page may include one small script that reveals a re-check notice after the re-check date. The page is readable without that script.

License

The JSON files at /data/permits.json and /data/calendar.json, and their schemas, are licensed CC BY 4.0. Site prose is all rights reserved. No claim to original U.S. Government works.

Crawlers

robots.txt allows every crawler with User-agent: * and Allow: /. Search, assistant fetch, and AI-training crawlers are named and allowed:

• Googlebot: Google Search

• Bingbot: Microsoft Bing

• DuckDuckBot: DuckDuckGo

• Applebot: Apple Search

• OAI-SearchBot: OpenAI search

• ChatGPT-User: ChatGPT browsing on a person’s behalf

• Claude-SearchBot: Anthropic search

• PerplexityBot: Perplexity search

• GPTBot: OpenAI training

• Google-Extended: Google Gemini and Vertex AI training

• CCBot: Common Crawl

• ClaudeBot: Anthropic training

• Applebot-Extended: Apple Intelligence training

• Amazonbot: Amazon crawling