How Yosemite's official map was loaded a quarter-million times.
A map-first destination met visitors where the decisions actually happen — on the trail, offline, phone in hand — and embedded on the destination's own website.
Live data since 2025
The context
Few destinations are as map-native as Yosemite Mariposa County. Visitors arrive ready to hike and explore — often far past the last bar of cell service. The challenge was never inspiration; it was getting the official, right-now information into a visitor's hand at the moment of decision, and keeping it working when the signal disappears.
What they did
Yosemite published an official, curated Wander map — the trails, viewpoints, food, and stays that define the destination — downloadable for offline use and embedded directly on yosemite.com. Once that embed went live in spring 2026, loads climbed from a few hundred a month into the tens of thousands, sustained month over month.
The results
The official map has been loaded 264,029 times, and visitors didn't just look — they generated 170,241 interactions with specific places. That's the data destinations rarely get: not just how many showed up, but exactly which experiences they cared about most.
- Mist Trail — 20,719 times chosen
- Yosemite Valley Loop Trail — 14,996 times chosen
- Vernal Falls — 11,683 times chosen
- Upper Yosemite Falls Trail — 5,417 times chosen
The takeaway
Yosemite shows Wander's reach model: the destination's own web presence becomes a distribution channel for an official, offline-ready map — and every place a visitor chooses is a signal the destination can act on.