About
The national parks newsletter with opinions.
Park Banter is a national parks newsletter and a campsite alert service. In one sentence: the friend who has actually dragged their kids through every park, and will tell you which entrance to use, which campground to skip, and when the trail gets crowded.
Why this exists
Most national parks content lives in two camps. There's the institutional camp: NPS, NPF, official park websites. Helpful but soulless. They tell you the rules. They don't tell you which entrance is a one-hour bottleneck in July.
Then there's the influencer camp: drone shots, golden hour, arms raised at sunset, "5 hidden gems" listicles. Aesthetically gorgeous and operationally useless. They don't help you plan a real trip with real kids and a real car.
Park Banter is the third option. Opinionated, practical, family-tested.
It tells you the stuff the brochures leave out and skips the parts the influencers add.
What we publish
One newsletter a week, free. Park spotlights, trail notes, campsite hacks, news and closures, and one weekly hot take. Subjects get planned around what's happening this season, not what makes a clean Instagram grid.
We also run a campsite alert service. You tell us a park, a campground, and a date range. We watch for cancellations around the clock, and the moment a site opens up, you get an email (or a text, if you want one). The alerts are a paid product. The free newsletter is how most people find us first.
Who runs it
Jay. One operator, plus an AI agent that does the grunt research and the scanning so the human side can focus on the part that needs a human: the opinion, the editing, the family stuff.
How we make money
The newsletter is free and stays free. We make money two ways, both optional. The campsite alert service is paid, and that's the main one. We also sell per-park guides one at a time, deep practical write-ups on a single park. No display ads, no sponsored "5 best products for camping" listicles. Maybe the occasional affiliate link to gear we actually use, clearly marked.
What we don't do
No brochure-speak. No "10 hidden gems" listicles that funnel everyone to the same five overrun spots. No fake urgency, no clickbait subject lines. No pretending a trail is empty when it's a parking-lot scrum in July. No drone shots over Half Dome with a copy of Walden in frame. We tell you the annoying true stuff instead: which entrance backs up, which campground to skip, when the crowds actually hit.