Looks like this whiteout winter may finally be waning. Time to soak up a little sunshine; so grab your bike, backpack, rod, oars, harness and a Pocket Ranger official State Park Guide app for Android or iOS and get yourself outside. Why a Pocket Ranger app? Because it’s stuffed full of info about anything and everything related to state parks in your area — for free.

I don’t recall ever tapping into as complete a motherlode of information as one of the Pocket Ranger apps. The app lists nearby state parks by activity, displays park news an events, gives you digitized versions of park maps and lets you cache Apple or Google map segments so you can use the rudimentary map tools (tracks, waypoints, points of interest) even while offline because you can’t get a signal. There’s even a feature that allows you to track a friend and the ability to upload photos straight to Flickr.

Lots of great features — in fact, maybe too many — and everything’s free. The downside? The apps are only available for state parks and forests, and only for about 20 states (we’ve linked here to Pennsylvania’s on iOS and Android).

There’s also an annoying overabundance of wait time while the app is accessing info on some screens. But hey, that just means more hammock time under the sun while you’re waiting.