About
Who writes this
Matt Werth. Just me, not a team.
I'm a software engineer and a photographer, and I travel all over the US to look at parks. Garrett County isn't home. I drive out from Delaware, usually with two kids in the back and most of their belongings in the trunk.
So I'm not local. That's partly why the site runs on phone calls and source documents instead of on what I remember. The photographs are mine though, which is the one part I can vouch for personally.
I run Werth Design, a studio in Wilmington, and it pays for all this. Nothing here is sponsored today. If that changes, the page it changes on will say so.
Why I built it
I drove to a park with a car full of kids and the thing I'd read about turned out to be wrong. That's the whole origin story. Not dramatic. It happens to everybody.
And the wrong fact wasn't really the annoying part. It was that I couldn't tell how old the answer was, or who'd said it in the first place. A page written in 2019 looks exactly like a page written last week.
So every fact here carries a date and a source. Where I haven't checked something, it says so.
That makes the site look thinner than the ones it's up against. Fine by me.
How I work
I ring whoever sets the rule. Maryland DNR for a state park, the town for a town park, the organizer for an event. Then I write down the date and who I spoke to.
If I only read something off an official page and didn't actually speak to anyone, the page says that instead. They're different claims and you should get to see which one you've got.
Being an engineer, this ends up mostly tables. I don't trust my own memory of a park I saw two summers ago. (You shouldn't either.)
I get things wrong in public
Three so far, all still up with the date and what I used to say. The Swallow Falls reservation rule. Swimming at the 4-H center, which I had as open to anybody when it's actually for camp programs. And three parks I'd marked "believed free", which is just a guess in a nicer sweater.
All three are on the method page. They stay up. A guide that promises checking and then quietly edits its mistakes away is worse than one that never promised anything.
Tell me when I'm wrong
There's a report box at the bottom of every park page. Takes about ten seconds. People who live there know these places far better than I do, and one note from someone who was standing in the parking lot yesterday is worth more than another phone call from me.
Most of what's been fixed lately came in that way.