How We Make Guides

Where our information comes from

Our source material is public and government data: the National Park Service (NPS), state departments of natural resources (DNRs) and wildlife agencies, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). How much of it any single guide draws on varies. When a guide cites an official source, the link is in the text — and a page has to carry a citation like that before it is eligible to appear in search results at all.

Live conditions from verified stations

Where a guide shows live or near-live conditions — river gauges, air quality, weather alerts — those readings come from public monitoring stations (for example USGS and NOAA networks), not invented numbers. Every reading is stored with the time it was fetched and, for river gauges, the time the gauge recorded it. When a reading ages past its limit, or a station cannot be resolved, the section renders nothing rather than showing you a stale number.

How often each kind of data is refreshed

• Weather forecasts (National Weather Service): refreshed about every three hours; hidden once six hours old.
• Weather alerts (National Weather Service): checked every ten minutes; hidden after an hour without a successful check.
• River gauges (U.S. Geological Survey): refreshed about every half hour; hidden once our copy is three hours old, or once the gauge's own reading is six hours old.
• Air quality (AirNow): refreshed about hourly; hidden once six hours old.
• River flow statistics and species observation counts: recomputed weekly from USGS daily records and iNaturalist observations.
• Guide text: drafted once from public data and not re-checked on a schedule. A “Last checked” date appears on a guide only after a person has checked it against its sources.

Automated checks, and their limits

Drafts run through automated checks: page structure, SEO copy rules, link health, and schema validity. These are code checks, and it is worth being precise about what that means — they catch a malformed title, a broken link, or a missing section. They cannot tell whether a fee, a trail length, or a season date is correct.

How these guides are written

Guides are drafted by AI tools working from the sources above, then published through our pipeline. They are not individually written or fact-checked by a person before publication. We do not invent credentials or attach personal bylines to individual articles; every guide is bylined to the How To Hobby Research Desk, part of How To Hobby LLC. We state this plainly here, and for AI agents in our llms.txt.

What we don't do

• No paid placement. No one can pay to be included in a guide, to be ranked in one, or to change what it says. Some guides contain affiliate links, which can earn us a commission — see our advertising and affiliate disclosure.
• No invented facts, as a rule. Every fact in a guide should trace to a public record. Because guides are drafted by AI and not individually checked by a person, a guide can still contain a statement no record supports. When we find one, or you report one, we correct it or remove it.
• No copied text. Guides are drafted from source data rather than copied from other publishers. If you find a passage that copies someone else's work, report it and we will take it down.

Who publishes these guides

How To Hobby LLC publishes How To Hobby. The How To Hobby Research Desk, part of How To Hobby LLC, is responsible for the guides: which sources we draw on, which checks we run, and correcting what turns out to be wrong. Write to us at team@howtohobby.com, or by mail at 1000 Brownwood Ave NW, Grand Rapids, MI 49504. You can read more about How To Hobby and about the data sources we use.

Corrections

If something in a guide is wrong, email report@howtohobby.com. Every guide ends with a “Report an error” link that names the page for you. How corrections work.

Always verify in the field

Conditions, fees, seasons, and regulations change, and no guide on this site has been checked by a person against the agency that sets them. Use our guides to plan, then confirm with the official agency before you go.