It started with a road trip and a question that wouldn't go away. Alex was a tech industry veteran with a camera and a growing obsession with wildlife photography. Melissa was his partner in every sense: sharp, steady, and always up for the next adventure. In 2015 they drove to the Grand Canyon on a whim and came home different people.
Over the next few years they worked their way through the parks: Glacier, Acadia, the Smokies, Grand Teton, Yellowstone. Each trip was planned the same way: a pile of browser tabs, a few half-useful blog posts, and a lot of standing in parking lots wondering which direction to go. The parks deserved better than that. So did the people visiting them.
It was actually their cat Luca that sealed the deal on Montana. A detour to find medicated cat food in Bozeman turned into the moment they both knew they'd found home.
In 2019 they packed up the whole family, their dog Darth and Luca the cat in tow, and drove west with little more than a direction and a shared certainty. Montana was home now. Yellowstone was the backyard. And the idea for a real trip planner, one built by people who actually spend time in the park, finally had a place to take root.
Yellowstone Itinerary is the natural extension of that life. Every decision we make (what to include, what to leave out, how the app should work offline at 6am in Lamar Valley) comes from years of actually being there. We're not optimizing for engagement metrics. We're building the tool we always wished existed the night before we drove in.