Oh, Ranger! ParkFinder™ app review: your virtual guide to the outdoors

Oh, Ranger! ParkFinder™
 

Price: Free

Oh, Ranger! ParkFinder™ by American Park Network is an app that will help you find what parks are near you and which parks are offering what activities. The app was updated to April 11, 2013. It is available in English only and requires just over 58MB of storage space.

User Experience
This is one app those who love the outdoors need to go and download right now. You can launch it, enter in your location, and you’ll see which parks are near you that offer the activities you want to do. Say, for example, you want a park with fishing, hiking trails, and maybe a swimming area, too: you can do that. Or maybe you want to play baseball and then go horseback riding. Perhaps you’d like to camp overnight. This app lets you plug in any activity or combination of activities to search out the best park(s) for your needs.

Features
This app has more than 50,000 local parks in the database, plus including National Forests, National Parks, public lands, wildlife refuges, State Parks, and federally-managed recreation destinations.

There are park overviews, nearby attractions, maps and directions, seasonality and weather, activities descriptions, important phone numbers, lodging and concession information, links to events and related websites, and related articles.

You can search or filter through more than 30 different activity categories, like auto touring, golfing, playgrounds, tennis, water sports, baseball, climbing, picnicking, volleyball, fishing, historic and cultural touring, RVing, bicycling, caving, hiking, hunting, and water sports.

Update Info
The app is currently running on Version 1.2.7. The update fixed a review submission bug.

Customer Ratings and Feedback Comments
The app has 415 customer ratings with an average of four out of five stars. The one feedback comment so far is positive, stating that the app also finds playgrounds and is great when you’re traveling with kids.

Personal Comments by Reviewer
My family is constantly looking for fun activities and new parks to check out. We are avid RVers and checking out all the parks where we could possibly visit is especially fun. I like that you can choose the specific activities you want to have access to and filter out results that don’t include those activities. Like the one comment indicated, this also includes public playgrounds, which is awesome.

Pros

• Has tons of parks
• Tons of features
• More than 30 different categories to help you find the perfect park
• Many different types of parks plus 50,000 local parks

Cons

• Sponsored by Ford so there are ads but they’re tolerable

For: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad with iOS 5.0 or later