Method
How I check this
I go to whoever sets the rule, write down the date I asked, and publish it when I get it wrong.
I'm Matt Werth — an engineer and a photographer who drives out to Garrett County from Delaware, usually with kids in the car. I don't live there, which is exactly why this site runs on phone calls rather than on what I remember about a park I saw two summers ago.
Swallow Falls started requiring a day-use reservation in May. Months on, plenty of pages still tell you to turn up and park. From Baltimore that mistake costs you three hours.
The checklist
The source is whoever sets the rule
The agency that runs the park, the town that sets the hours, whoever takes the money. Never another guide, even when it's probably right.
Every fact says how solid it is
Confirmed, or read from the source. The two are labeled separately rather than blurred into one word — see below.
Guides and review sites never publish here
A fact whose only origin is a write-up stays out of search until someone checks it. The build enforces that, not my memory.
"Not confirmed" is a real answer
A blank means I haven't checked it. It does not mean the park lacks the thing, and rendering it as "No" would invent facts ten at a time.
When sources disagree, whoever sets the rule wins
No averaging. Garrett County says Swallow Falls needs a reservation every day; Maryland DNR says weekends and holidays. DNR runs the park, so DNR wins and the county's version sits on the page as a recorded conflict.
I publish the mistakes
Fixed, dated, with the old claim left on the page saying what it used to say.
The two labels
- Confirmed
- I called, visited, or asked the people who set the rule. The stamp names them and gives the date.
- Read from the source
- Taken from a named primary source and linked, so you can check it yourself. Accurate as far as it goes, and not the same as having asked.
Most of this site is currently the second kind. I don't take free admission, tell a place I'm coming, or run paid listings, and I pay my own park fees.
Three I've already got wrong
Swallow Falls reservations. I published "every day" on the county's announcement. DNR runs the park and says weekends and holidays. A reader caught it.The correction is on the page.
The 4-H center. I had it as a lake open daily for swimming and canoeing. The people who run it put both on the private side, for booked groups only. My version would have sent a family out there to swim in water they couldn't reach.
Three parks marked "believed free". Believed by whom? I hadn't checked. That's a guess written in a soft enough voice to look like a fact, which is the exact thing this site exists to refuse.
The 4-H error is the one worth naming a cause for. Its only source was a tourism website, and the build gate at the time checked that somesource existed rather than a primary one — so rule three was decoration for about a week. The gate requires a primary source now, and three thin records dropped out of search the moment I fixed it.
Found something wrong?
Tell me. A note from someone who stood there yesterday beats another phone call, and there's a report box at the bottom of every park page. Or reach me through Werth Design, my studio, which builds and pays for this.