Finally a HN project that isn't about technology or social networking but rather something more refreshing, nature. I browsed through the site for about 10 minutes and here is what I think. Please do not feel I am being critical for the sake of being critical. I am an avid kayaker and love camping, hiking, and exploring in federal and state parks around the US South East. Every Friday night, I'm online looking for my next destination. I would love to have a 1-stop-shop to find where to go next.

1. Competition - http://www.floridastateparks.org/ - This is my current favorite parks site and the official source for Florida State Parks. I love most of the features on this site and despite plain-jane design, it's very well developed. I am a kayaker and this site lets me find the parks at which I can go kayaking. However, it does not have an advanced search where I can say "parks with +kayaking, <100 miles from zipcode 33708, +picnic tables" or something similar. If you had a similar search for entire US, that would be wonderful. You already seem to have a lot of the data.

2. Localization - most people want to look for places around their hometown. You have a great start by using ip-location to find my local parks. However, presenting a plain list of 50 parks around my county doesn't help much. You need to tell me what I can do where, easily. While this: http://www.floridastateparks.org/FindaPark.cfm?dist=Southwes... may seem messy, it is better than no activity information because last thing I want to do is end up driving 3 hours to find there is no kayak launch at a park despite the proximity to a river.

3. The front page should have at least one "featured" local park with pics + text. Thay would definitely entice me to give this random park a second look. You can tally up the searches or popular pages for each county/state to determine how to automatically feature a park.

4. State list needs to have names and not just abbreviations.

5. "Related Google Search results" is pretty useless for pages like: http://www.recreationparks.net/FL/seminole/lower-wekiva-rive... - at least to me. It takes up valuable center-screen space. I understand this is an easy way to provide a link to the official site of a park but it doesn't always work and seems very cluttered. I would rather see 'key' park activities or Flickr pics there. Or a featured comment by a user.

6. Can you classify/filter by types of parks? I would rather not see baseball parks and only focus on state parks while someone else would rather see sports parks but not nature parks. Too many parks spoil the google map view. Would be much better to fine-tune the kind of parks that I am interested in. You could have a toggle bar in the header area with: Show "nature parks", "wildlife preserves", "sports parks" and enable all of them by default. If I make a change, save it in a cookie/session and apply it to all the search results. I know this kind of feature is easy and works because I made it for sched.org and users loved it.

7. In addition to type for each park, give each park a type-icon. So it's easier to identify and put it in every place the park is mentioned.

8. A few dream features I have are distance-based. Sort the county list based on the distance from my home county. Sort the search results based on the distance too. Allow me to easily set my home zipcode. Save that in a cookie/session and use that for every page.

9. Contact info - this will be difficult for you but as a user, I want the phone number for any park I am looking at to make sure the river is in navigable condition or to find the parking rates. If you can bring in more information like that into one system, wonderful. If not, figure out a way to link to each park's official site. I would love to know the park hours, entrance fees etc. on your site but I can dig in given the park's official site. If I have to go to Google to find that, I might as well go to other sites like http://www.floridastateparks.org/wekiwasprings/default.cfm that have a lot more information already.

10. Great work so far. Like I said above, do not think I am being critical just to be critical. Me and my friends at http://www.clubkayak.com/greenwave/default.asp would love more resources for parks around the nation. However, given existing valuable sites like http://www.floridastateparks.org/wekiwasprings/default.cfm you have quite a challenge to become our favorite destination. I have only listed Florida-centric links but I can assure you most states have their own recreation park guides and that is what people use. Trying to be a central destination for something that very local is not an easy task. You can accomplish it successfully, if you become a better, easier-to-navigate resource than the local sites.

I understand a lot of your site information will come from users/volunteers so hopefully with time, the value of your content will appreciate. Till then, you will have to get some of that data yourself (hopefully you will pursue legal, moral methods - e.g. NO SCRAPING). You have a long way to go and best of luck with it all.