Yellowstone National Park's website just might be the very best in the National Park System.

Across the National Park System there are 419 units, large and small, from "national parks" to "national battlefields" and "national recreation areas." In theory, they are treated equally under the National Park Service Organic Act. But their individual web presence is anything but equal. That's because there are, in the park system, haves and have-nots.

Park websites are intended to be a respository of information to help travelers figure out how to enjoy their visits to a specific park. And most accomplish this rudimentary task. You easily can find links for planning your visit, learning a little something about the park in question, and opening a map of the park.

But then parks diverge, greatly in many cases, depending largely on how much money is taken in at the entrance stations. That's because parks can keep 80 percent of the money they collect for use in their parks to improve the visitor experience by, in this case, hiring IT staff, writers, and photographers to build incredible webpages. As a result, Yellowstone has much deeper pockets than, for instance, Cape Lookout National Seashore, which doesn't charge an entrance fee.

Yellowstone just might have the most robust website in the park system. It's an embarrassment of riches when compared to just about all of the other 418 units. How many other park websites are there that offer some -- any! -- information in Chinese, Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish? How many have fishing pages that break down the park geographically to explain the options for anglers, or which have webpages to point out not just wheelchair accessible buildings, but also restrooms, restaurants, stores, cabins, campgrounds, and overlooks? You can even find information on the legalities of scattering ashes in the park.

Those pages are just the tip of Yellowstone's Internet iceberg. You can also find, if you look:

* Audio postcards.

* The sound Uinta ground squirrels make when they're trilling the alarm.

* What fumaroles in the park sound like with their bubbling and puckering and steaming.

* A video library of wolves, bears, geysers, research into snowfall and groundwater, and even a how-to on using bear spray.

* Reports ranging from historic Native American peoples that roamed this Yellowstone's landscape and Thomas Moran's diary to history on park locations, such as its historic backcountry cabins.

Indeed, it could take a separate story to point out all the wonders to behold on Yellowstone's website.

Glacier National Park's website lets you explore when the park's campgrounds filled for the day, whether you were looking at yesterday or last year.

Compare the park's site to others across the system, and you can pretty quickly appreciate the disparaties, if not the inequities. For instance, Arkansas Post National Memorial has no video library, but it does have a link to "An Assessment of Tick Density and Tick-Borne Disease Frequency at Arkansas Post National Memorial." Unfortunately, it's a dead link. As is the link to a list of reptiles found at the memorial. And the page on "accessibility" in the park is devoid of any information.

The webpages for the Appalachian National Scenic Trail are underwhelming for the country's oldest and most famous national scenic trail. Despite rambling for nearly 2,000 miles from Maine to Georgia, the site's page for Nature and Science offers scant information on what you might find while you walk the trail:

The Appalachian National Scenic Trail - traversing more than 2,180 miles across the highest ridgelines of the Appalachian Mountains, from Georgia to Maine, in a southwest to northeast gradient - crosses some of the world's richest assemblages of temperate zone species and is considered one of the most biodiverse units in the entire National Park System. This makes the Appalachian Trail uniquely situated to serve as a "barometer" for the air, water and biological diversity of the Appalachian Mountains and eastern United States - to explore scientific questions and monitor the effects of climate change.

That's it.

You can, however, follow a link on the page to another page of links and find an 11-year-old, 213-page document on natural and cultural resources found along the trail and any threats to them. And the photo gallery for the Appalachian Trail has two images, and a link to the park's Facebook page. There are no videos, no history, no audio files for this incredible footpath.

You have to work a little to uncover detailed informaton on the natural and cultural resources along the Appalachian National Scenic Trail.

One of the best web pages -- if not the best -- across the entire nps.gov domain for front-country campers resides on Glacier National Park's website. Not only can you find a rundown on all the front-country campgrounds in the park and links to make a reservation, but jump over to the Campground Status page and you quickly see what time a specific campground filled yesterday, for instance. Go to a specific campground's page and you can even look to previous years to get a feel for when it typically fills throughout the season. Great information when trying to plan your visit. Why is this not the template for all parks with front-country campgrounds?

Glacier also has robust pages for Accessibility, offers some videos on science in the park, and there are some audio tours you can download. But...there is a bug of sorts on the site. If you go to the Park Videos page, and scroll down to GlacierRaw ("a series of short park videos created with minimally edited raw footage") and click its link, it takes you to the main Photos & Multimedia page, where you can click on Park Videos and it loops you back to the list of videos, including the mysterious GlacierRaw link to nowhere.

Denali National Park and Preserve also has a robust web presence. Click over to the Research page and you can find additional pages that look at such things as Sled Dogs and Science, Migration (human and wildlife), and even Permafrost. Dig around a bit more and you can find a page with sounds from around the park, such as chortling sandhill cranes, yammering bear cubs, and the sounds of nature waking to the sunrise.

You can go to the Panorama page and "push around" an interactive image to get a 360-degree view of the Lower Kahiltna Glacier. There is also a map with pins that, if you click on them, will open up panorama photos from around the park; places such as Wonder Lake, the Toklat Valley, and Polychrome Mountain (an interactive image).

Rocky Mountain National Park has an extremely detailed, and somewhat complicated, section for securing a backcountry campsite. You start at the Wilderness Camping page, then click over to the Campsite Reservation Request Application, where you have to add your payment information, then head over to a page where you enter your group's information (trip leader name and address, number in group, trailhead in and trailhead out, vehicle license plate and state), and, (phew!), then click to a campsite availibility list. There you click, again, on the date you want to head into the park's backcountry, and you find a wonderful list that supposedly is tracking campsite availibility in real time.

Somewhat complicated, for sure, when compared to Yellowstone's approach for handling backcountry reservations: You fill out and mail in your reservation request form, with $25, before April 1, at which time all those applications go through a lottery of sorts to assign campsites. The alternative, after April 1, is simply to show up in the park and ask what backcountry sites are available. The mail-in approach is not as immediately gratifying, perhaps, as Rocky Mountain's approach to let you see what is available on a daily basis. 

Arguably a better model for planning backcountry trips and reserving sites can be found on Great Smoky Mountains National Park's website. Though the reservation fee system at this park was controversial, the reservation process is straightforward and makes it easy to select your desired campsites, see the available dates, and reserve the sites.

Getting back to individual park websites in general, Fort Stanwix National Monument in New York can't compete with Yellowstone, Glacier, or Denali, but its Research page is fairly robust for the size of the park. Visit it and you'll find links to papers on archaeological excavations done to locate the original fort, An Analysis of Faunal Remains From Fort Stanwix New York: 1758-1781, and the Roseboom Ledgers, which were written by two brothers and "provide a glimpse into the Roseboom's military, trade, and personal experiences with the people they encountered between 1757 and 1775."

Though Fort Stanwix National Monument can't compete with Yellowstone, its website has some interesting history.

Exactly how much, or how little, information a specific park's website offers can be a bit tricky if you don't frequent the site often enough to sift through its information. A good way to get a feel for a park's website is to open its Site Index. Even then, you'll have to click through to specific pages to see if there is any information. Most will provide some information, some will be dead-ends.

As with the main nps.gov domain, individual park websites range from robust with information and how it's presented, to disappointingly poor for a 20,000-employee government agency tasked with preserving and interpreting these places. At day's end, the haves will continue to manage very good, if not great, websites and continue to add content to them.

As for the have-nots, well, it's not that they don't aspire to improve their web presence. They simply lack the resources to make it happen and likely will require some outside support from the regional and national Park Service offices.

How much does the Park Service budget for this IT work? The page that's supposed to disclose some of that information, managed by the Office of Management and Budget, had its own bugs the times I visited and refused to give up the information. According to the Park Service's Washington, D.C., staff, "The content management costs have never been calculated since a high percentage of the cost is through collateral roles across parks and programs."

In light of the rich information that should be made publicly and digitally available here in the 21st century, more investment for the have-not parks would be greatly appreciated.