How to read park alerts before you go

Every park page here shows the park's current official alerts, color-coded red, amber, and blue. They're not equally important.

Closures are the trip-enders. A road, a trail, an area, sometimes the whole park. The detail that matters isn't that something closed, it's whether it's your something. Tioga Road closes and Yosemite Valley doesn't care; your Tuolumne plans are dead. Read every closure against your actual route, not the park's name.

Danger alerts exist because something happened to someone. Flash flood watches, bear activity, heat protocols. Read all of them.

Cautions are livable. Rough road, water outage, trail damage. Adjust, don't cancel.

Information alerts are mostly noise with one exception: anything containing "reservation" or "permit." That's how new entry requirements announce themselves, and they rarely announce themselves loudly.

Our pages show what the Park Service had published as of the date in the footer. That's the right tool a week out, when you're shaping the plan. It's the wrong tool the morning of. So plan here, then re-check the official page (linked at the top of every park page) 48 hours before you travel, and call the visitor center same-day if one specific road or trail is the entire reason you're driving.

Calibration helps too. Yellowstone carrying six active alerts is a Tuesday. A small historic site can run silent for months. Count the closures on your route and ignore the rest of the number.