How RoamFound is built

Where the data comes from, what we add, and how to flag errors.

Why this exists

The information about where to go for outdoor recreation in America already exists — it's just scattered across federal databases, state agency websites, OpenStreetMap edits, individual blogger posts, and the occasional Wikipedia article. RoamFound is an attempt to consolidate it into one practical, fact-checked directory: every named waterfall, every public hiking trail, every documented hot spring, organized by the city you're driving from.

Phase 1 — waterfalls

We launched with waterfalls because the search-engine landscape is unusually open: there's no dominant national directory, and the existing competitive sites are mostly individual bloggers writing about one corner of one state. Our spine of 4,499 named waterfalls comes from the following public sources:

OpenStreetMap (primary spine)

OpenStreetMap is a worldwide volunteer-maintained map of the planet, comparable to Wikipedia for geographic data. Contributors tag features including waterfalls (using the waterway=waterfall or natural=waterfall tags), often along with names, heights, elevation, and links to Wikipedia or Wikidata articles. We pull the U.S. coverage state-by-state via the Overpass API and refresh the data periodically.

OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the Open Database License, which requires attribution. You'll find the attribution in our footer on every page.

Coming next: USGS GNIS, NPS, and Wikipedia

The first launch uses OpenStreetMap as the sole spine. Subsequent passes will integrate:

  • USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) — the official U.S. Board on Geographic Names database. GNIS catalogues approximately 30,000 named waterfalls and natural features, all with feature IDs, formal names, and geocodes. This will roughly triple our coverage and fill in most of the unnamed gaps. Public domain.
  • National Park Service API — for waterfalls within NPS units, this gives us official descriptions, trail access, parking, and fee information directly from the land manager. Public domain.
  • USDA Forest Service — for falls in national forests, similar coverage with ranger-district contact info. Public domain.
  • State parks departments (50 states) — varies by state, but many have public APIs or scrapeable directories.
  • Wikipedia + Wikimedia Commons — for waterfalls with full Wikipedia articles, we link to them and (where licensing permits) embed photos. CC BY-SA.

What we do — and don't do — to the data

We do: deduplicate, slugify, compute drive-times from the nearest U.S. metro, surface practical fields (height, elevation, seasonality, accessibility) prominently, and write descriptive text where the source data is sparse.

We don't: invent height numbers, claim a waterfall is dog-friendly when we have no source for that, write SEO-padding paragraphs that don't add information, or generate AI prose presented as if a human wrote it. Where source data is thin, the page is short.

Editorial principles

  • Cite the source. Every fact on a destination page should trace to a public record. We do not anonymise sources to look authoritative.
  • Verify with the land manager. Conditions in the outdoors change. Trails close. Water levels drop. Parking rules shift. We add visible reminders to verify with the relevant agency before going.
  • No paid placements. We do not accept payment to feature a destination, raise its ranking, or modify its description. The data is what the data is. (Affiliate links to accommodation booking are clearly disclosed; they don't influence which waterfalls we feature.)
  • Corrections welcomed. If we have something wrong, tell us. We update pages as we learn.

Indexability — why some waterfalls have detail pages and others don't

Of our 4,499 catalogued falls, not all currently get a dedicated detail page. We mark a waterfall as "indexable" (gets its own page) if it has at least one of: a recorded height, a Wikipedia/Wikidata link, a tourism-attraction tag, or a location within 75 miles of a top-100 U.S. metro.

The rest are listed on the per-state waterfall index pages with their name, location, and any other source data we have, but we don't generate a thin standalone page for them. As subsequent data passes (USGS GNIS, NPS, state parks) layer in, more falls cross the threshold and get promoted.

Reporting errors

If you visit a waterfall and our page is wrong — bad coordinates, wrong height, missing access info, dog policy that changed — tell us at /contact with topic "Correction or fact check". We acknowledge corrections within a few days and update the page.

Found a waterfall that should be listed but isn't? Same channel — pick "A place we should add". Include the name, state, approximate coordinates, and any source we can verify against (state park page, USGS quad, Wikipedia article, etc.).

Revenue model — for the curious

We earn revenue two ways:

  • Affiliate links to accommodation. If you book lodging through a contextual link on one of our pages (typically the nearest town to a waterfall), we earn a small commission from the booking platform. The price you pay is identical to booking directly. We disclose this clearly on every page where it applies.
  • Display advertising. Some pages carry Google ads. They are labelled and visually distinct from editorial content.

Neither revenue source influences which destinations we list, what we say about them, or where they rank in our database.