Recreationer Lives

David Puckett
Recreationer web map showing campgrounds, trailheads, and picnic sites
Recreation sites outside Boulder Colorado

I developed a web mapping application in 2015 that showed federal recreation sites on a slippy map (do we still say that?). Recreationer. Somewhere along the way, it broke. I assumed that the technology just got too old and/or the recreation.gov API had been deprecated so it sat for a long time. I even updated the original blog post to give it a send-off last year. That's right, the post is titled outdoorsy-nerds.

Turns out, it wasn't all that dead. The Mapzen Search feature certainly died (RIP Mapzen) but the only thing that truly changed was, well, boring and technical. The way the request to the Recreation Information Database (RIDB) was made had changed. (No CORS support meant making the request required JSONP and somewhere along the way CORS was enabled and JSONP disabled which, cruelly, broke my requests). Fix the fetch and boom, it started working immediately. In fact, the same API key I was issued lo those many years ago still works.

And then switching to the Mapbox Search widget rounded out the full resurrection. After 10+ years.

A nice touch was also switching the basemap style to the wildly handsome Mapbox Outdoors basemap, but not required. A simple glowup for the ages.

I also added a feature to include a location in the URL.

Let's call it v1.1

I didn't bother updating Leaflet or the marker cluster plugin used, it just, still works.

I was interested in revisiting the Recreationer when I learned about and eventually commented on the EXPLORE Act that was signed into law last year: it includes a Section that mandates pilot projects that measure dispersed outdoor recreation use. The resulting visitor use data should absolutely be tied back to the official RIDB facility data shown right here in Recreationer. The data exists now, and will in the future, but it isn't tied to the ground. This is bad.

The original Recreationer, resurrected
https://recreationer.brightrain.com


This will take you to Pingree Park in the Roosevelt National Forest
https://recreationer.brightrain.com/?lat=40.57341&lng=-105.54085&zoom=12

Recreationer web map showing campgrounds, trailheads, and picnic sites in the Poudre Canyon area of Roosevelt National Forest

So now, I await visitor use results from the pilot projects and the birth of...

Recreationer TWO