Keep Wild

Know when you're inside US national park and designated wilderness boundaries — online and offline. Know when to keep the drone in the bag so the wilderness stays wild.

Wilderness boundaries don't come with a fence.

Keep Wild draws every US National Park and Designated Wilderness boundary on your phone, names the ones you're standing in, and shows you the actual rule that closes them to drones. Online and offline.

WHAT YOU SEE

Protected land is shaded on a USGS topographic map. Walk into it and the marker appears, your dot changes color, and every area you're inside is named. Tap the marker for the rule itself, quoted with its citation and explained in plain English:

National Park units — 36 CFR § 1.5, NPS Policy Memorandum 14-05 (2014) Designated Wilderness — 36 CFR § 261.16, Wilderness Act of 1964, 16 U.S.C. § 1133(c)

Walk out again and the marker goes. That is not a green light. It is the absence of a boundary, and it is the whole of what Keep Wild knows.

NO SIGNAL NEEDED

Download a state, an Alaska region or a territory before you leave. Map and boundaries come down together, so at the trailhead where your bars aren't, the lines are still there and the app still tells you the moment you cross one.

A badge on the map always says where the boundaries on screen came from — live, or from what you downloaded. Somewhere no download covers and no signal to reach out? It says so plainly, instead of showing you an empty map that looks like good news.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Two kinds of protected land, and nothing else.

Keep Wild has no opinion about airspace. Controlled airspace and LAANC, active TFRs, national security areas, and whatever your state, county or tribe has to say are all invisible to it. Those stay your homework, every single flight.

It never says "go ahead". It says "not here".

WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM

Basemap — U.S. Geological Survey, The National Map National Park boundaries — National Park Service Designated Wilderness boundaries — USDA Forest Service

All public federal services. The lines are only as good as the agencies' own data, so near an edge treat the boundary as a rough guide: GPS error and boundary error stack up. Give it a wide berth. Rules are applied unit by unit and can change — confirm with the managing agency before flying.

PRIVACY

No account, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no server of ours for anything to be sent to. While you're online, looking up boundaries tells those federal services roughly where you're looking, because that's how the lookup works. Download the region you're headed for and even that stops.

WHY

Sooner or later you round a bend and someone is unpacking a drone in the middle of a National Park. Usually they have no idea. Keep Wild makes that a ten-second conversation rather than a debate: show them the screen, tap the marker, there's the rule.

Every drone that stays in its bag is one less reason for the next round of restrictions.

Keep the wilderness wild.