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Great Outdoor Hubs

Open Data

US outdoor recreation gazetteer

Four federal and CC0 gazetteers, normalised into one file: the waters people fish, the river reaches they paddle, the ramps they launch from and the crags they climb. One schema, one licence, one download.

135,637

Named features

4

Feature types

5

Sources

52

States and territories

Released 16 September 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0, which means you can copy it, change it and sell work built on it, as long as you credit the source.

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What this adds to what is already out there

Each of these four layers is already public. None of them shares a schema, a name field or an identifier with any of the others, and two of them ship as multi-gigabyte geodatabases split by hydrologic unit. The work here is the flattening: one row shape across all four, a state on every feature, coordinates on every feature, and the source and its licence carried on the row rather than buried in a metadata file. If you want one layer at full national extent, take it from the source named in the table below. If you want all four in a dataframe, take this.

Read this before you use it

  • This is not a national census, and the gaps are not random.

    Each layer was assembled around the places our network covers, within a drive of a listing rather than across the whole country. The boat ramps are 8,852 of the 24,781 in the USGS national file, and the crags are a subset of OpenBeta. Coverage is dense where people recreate and thin where they do not. For a complete national layer, go to the source.

  • A river name appears more than once, on purpose.

    USGS hydrography splits every river at every confluence, so a named river arrives as dozens of fragments. We merge those fragments into continuous reaches, but we do it per place, so the same river can appear as several reaches in the file. There are 23,463 reaches carrying 8,186 distinct names. Group by name before you count rivers.

  • There are no trails, dive sites or ski lifts in here, and there will not be.

    Those layers are OpenStreetMap-derived, and OpenStreetMap is ODbL, a share-alike licence. Merging them into this file would pull the whole file into ODbL and make the CC BY release above a licence violation. We would rather ship four clean layers than seven contested ones. OpenStreetMap publishes all three of those directly and you should take them from there.

  • It names places. It does not tell you whether you may go to them.

    Nothing in this file records ownership beyond a public or semi-private flag on the ramps, and nothing records access, permits, closures, fees or conditions. A feature being in this file is not a statement that it is open, legal to enter or safe. Check with the land manager.

  • 398 features have no state assigned.

    All of them are fishing waters whose coordinates fall outside every state boundary we test against, which usually means a coastal or border water. Their names and coordinates are good. The state column is simply blank rather than guessed.

Where it comes from

Four sources, all of them public domain or CC0, each named on the row it produced. Nothing in this file comes from OpenStreetMap, from a commercial map provider, or from our own business directory. We assigned a state to every feature, gave each one a stable identifier, and changed no name and no coordinate.

SourceFeaturesStatesTerms
USGS Geographic Names Information System

The federal gazetteer of US place names. Supplies the fishing waters: lakes, ponds, reservoirs and streams, with their official names and coordinates.

96,29852US government work. Public domain, no restriction.
USGS NHDPlus High Resolution

Federal hydrography. Supplies the river reaches. NHD splits a river at every confluence, so these are our merges of those fragments back into continuous named reaches.

23,46350US government work. Public domain, no restriction.
USGS National Boat Ramps

The federal boat ramp inventory. The rows here are the ones within a regional drive of the waters our network covers, not the whole national file.

8,85250CC0 1.0. No conditions. DOI 10.5066/P9ZIRVF0.
OpenBeta

The open climbing database. Supplies the crags, with the discipline and route count OpenBeta records for each.

4,95641CC0 1.0. No conditions.
US state wildlife agency stocking feeds

Waters that appear in a state stocking record but not in the federal gazetteer. Each one inherits the terms of the agency that reported it, all five of which permit reuse.

2,0683Per agency. Audited before ingest; see the fish stocking dataset.

The OpenBeta and USGS boat ramp layers are CC0, which asks for nothing. USGS place name and hydrography data is a work of the United States government and carries no copyright. Our compilation is CC BY 4.0, so a credit to us covers the file; crediting the four sources as well is good manners and costs nothing.

What is in each row

One row per feature: 135,637 rows across four feature types. Every row carries a name, a feature type, coordinates, a state where we could assign one, and the source and licence it came from. Type specific columns are populated where the source recorded them and blank where it did not, so the file is sparse by design rather than by accident. Full field definitions, formats and source links live in datapackage.json, which is a standard Frictionless descriptor, so most data tooling can read the release without any of this page.

How to cite it

Great Outdoor Hubs (2026). US outdoor recreation gazetteer [Data set]. Assembled from USGS and OpenBeta public domain and CC0 sources. https://greatoutdoorhubs.com/data/us-outdoor-gazetteer

A link back to this page satisfies the licence. If you build something with it we would like to see it, and we will link to you from here.