so this happened last week and im still kind of annoyed about it honestly. i knew beforehand that the south rim is a no fly zone and i wasnt planning to fly there at all, i drove like 40 minutes out to an area that was clearly outside the park boundary according to both google maps and the b4ufly app showed clear. set up, flew maybe 10 minutes of footage, and a ranger in a truck pulls up

turns out the boundary is way less obvious on the ground than on a map and apparently the area i was at is considered park adjacent or something and they have some kind of agreement with the surrounding land? i honestly still dont fully understand the explanation i got. they didnt fine me or confiscate anything, just told me to pack up and leave. but i drove 6 hours for that shot and yeah

anyway just wanted to warn people that b4ufly isnt always the whole story especially near national parks. do your research beyond just the app

ugh yeah national parks are a nightmare for this. the NPS rules apply in ways that arent always obvious and some parks have agreements with surrounding BLM land or tribal land that complicate things further. i always call the actual park visitor center before any trip like that, takes 5 minutes and theyve always been pretty helpful about telling me exactly where the boundaries are

sorry that happened though, 6 hour drive for nothing is brutal

b4ufly has been wrong or at least incomplete for me a couple times too. its good for the obvious stuff like class D airspace but for ground-based restrictions like national park rules its pretty hit or miss. airmap used to be better for that kind of thing but honestly calling ahead like the other guy said is probably the only real answer