Methodology

Data sources

Every landmark page is sourced from three public, permissively-licensed datasets:

• U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) — the federal register of place names. Public domain. Provides feature name, classification, county, USGS topographic map reference, and decimal coordinates.
• Wikidata + Wikimedia Commons — enrichment for features that have an entry, contributing elevation (P2044), imagery (P18), and Wikipedia article links. Licensed under CC0 (structured data) and CC-BY-SA (text, images).
• OpenStreetMap — fills gaps left by the 2021 GNIS schema reduction (covered bridges, trails, access roads). Licensed under ODbL; attribution to OpenStreetMap contributors.

How features are selected

We filter GNIS to natural features within 80 km of Chapman Inn’s coordinates (44.4048° N, 70.7889° W) and drop administrative classes (populated places, civil boundaries, census designations, military installations).

How each page is built

Distance, compass bearing, and drive time from the Inn are computed per feature using the haversine formula. Best-time-to-visit recommendations derive from feature class, latitude, and (when available) elevation. Nearby-feature tables are recomputed by spatial query against the full landmark set.

How often this is refreshed

USGS republishes the GNIS export roughly every two months; we pick up changes weekly via a scheduled job that compares the remote Last-Modified header and re-runs enrichment for affected features only.

What we do not do

We do not write travel narratives about features we have not visited. We do not guess elevations for features Wikidata does not have. We do not fill empty sections with placeholder text — if a datum is missing, the section is omitted.