Trailhead Conditions – WordPress Trail Conditions and Weather Plugin

Description

Trailhead Conditions – Trail Conditions Plugin for Your WordPress Site

Give your visitors the conditions they check before every trip. Trailhead Conditions is a trail conditions plugin that adds a responsive dashboard to any page with current weather, a 7-day forecast, air quality, snow and avalanche information, fire danger and restrictions, and land-management alerts, all for the place you choose.

We built it for outdoor retailers, guides, campgrounds, gear shops, trail and conservation groups, and anyone who wants trip-planning information on their own website instead of sending visitors elsewhere. To get started, add it with a block or a shortcode and pick a location.

Everything visitors need before they head out

• Current weather and an hourly outlook
• 7-day forecast with temperature ranges, precipitation, and wind
• Sun and moon: first light, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, last light, day length, and moon phase, which your server calculates
• Air quality: US AQI with a pollutant breakdown and a 24-hour outlook
• Snow and avalanche: forecast snowfall, freezing level, nearest SNOTEL snowpack station, and regional avalanche danger (US)
• Fire: fire danger level, Red Flag Warnings, NOAA fire-weather outlook, nearby wildfires and prescribed burns, and campfire and fire restrictions
• Alerts and closures: National Weather Service, National Park Service, avalanche centers, your own RSS or Atom feeds, and manual notices

Let visitors explore

• Search for any town, park, or trailhead, or use the visitor’s current location
• Also, switch between imperial and metric units
• Light, dark, and automatic themes, plus full, compact, and stacked layouts
• Then save your own locations and choose which sections each one shows

A trail conditions plugin built for sharing and caching

• Data loads in the browser from your own site’s REST API, so page caching plugins never serve stale weather
• Your server caches upstream responses. As a result, one busy page makes one request per interval per section
• If a data source goes down, the plugin shows the last good data instead
• API keys stay on your server, so visitors never see them
• In addition, the plugin rate-limits requests for arbitrary places per visitor

Add the trail conditions plugin anywhere

Use the Outdoor Conditions block in the editor, or paste a shortcode into any page, post, or widget area:

Shortcode options include location, lat, lon, name, sections, layout, theme, units, and search. It also works with page builders and caching plugins, and it is translation-ready.

Fire restrictions, handled honestly

No national data feed exists for campfire and fire restrictions. Instead, Trailhead Conditions automates everything it can (Red Flag Warnings, fire-weather outlooks, nearby incidents, and restriction language in agency alerts) and lets you set a restriction status for each location, or read a public ArcGIS layer that your agency publishes. In addition, the plugin always reminds visitors to confirm with the managing agency.

Data sources and coverage

Weather, forecasts, air quality, sun, and moon work worldwide. Fire, avalanche, SNOTEL, National Weather Service, and National Park Service data cover the United States. Outside the US, those sections say local data is not available and still show weather-based information.

Weather, air quality, and place search use Open-Meteo, with OpenStreetMap Nominatim as a fallback. Open-Meteo’s free service is for non-commercial use only. Commercial websites need a paid Open-Meteo plan; paste the subscription key into the plugin settings and it switches to Open-Meteo’s commercial servers. Free NPS and AirNow keys are optional, and a built-in connection test confirms your server can reach every data source.

Privacy by design

The plugin does not set cookies or track visitors. It stores only the visitor’s unit preference in their browser. Your server sends visitor searches, so the data providers never receive your visitor’s IP address. You can also turn off visitor search and location in settings.

Requirements

WordPress 5.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. Your host must allow outgoing HTTP requests. Licensed GPLv2 or later. Includes the plugin zip for installation through Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. You can also browse our other WordPress plugins.

Try the trail conditions plugin live demo

This is the real trail conditions plugin running on this site. Search for any town, park, or trailhead, use your current location, or switch units to see what your visitors would see. Fire, avalanche, and snowpack data cover the United States; weather, air quality, sun, and moon work worldwide.