Terms of Service

By creating an account or using Guidepole, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service. You must be at least 13 years old (and old enough to form a binding contract in your state) to use Guidepole.

Guidepole is a family of United States maps and assistants for the outdoors. Guidepole Fish helps you discover where you can find and reach public waters for fishing: water bodies, public land, land ownership, boat launches, and fishing regulations. Guidepole Hike shows trails, terrain, and conditions. Guidepole Fire shows active wildfires, satellite hot spots, smoke, air quality, and fire-weather warnings. Guidepole Bird helps you find birding spots, such as wildlife refuges, public trails, and hotspots, and who owns the ground around them. Guidepole Hunt is an explorer of historical treasure-hunt sites and the legends behind them, showing whether each site is on public or private land. Each lets you ask location questions in plain language. Bird and Hunt are in development; these Terms cover them, and any other Guidepole app, when they launch.

Guidepole also estimates where cell coverage is likely to drop out, using anonymous connectivity notes contributed by users (whether the app’s requests succeed on cellular data), so it can flag fishing, hiking, or birding spots with little or no service and prompt you to download an offline map before you go.

Guidepole is an informational tool, not legal advice. Access rights, property boundaries, and fishing regulations are complex, vary by state, and change often. You are responsible for knowing and following all applicable laws and for confirming access before you fish.

Always verify regulations with the official state fish-and-wildlife authority, and respect private property, posted signs, and local rules. Guidepole is not a navigation or safety device. Do not rely on it for safe travel on or near the water. Water access law involves doctrines (such as public trust and navigability) that differ by state and by individual water; treat everything in the app as a starting point, not a final answer. Guidepole Fire is an awareness tool built on public wildfire, smoke and air-quality data; it is NOT an emergency, evacuation, or life-safety service. Always follow official evacuation orders and the instructions of local authorities. Cell-coverage and no-signal indicators are crowd-sourced estimates that can be wrong or out of date; never rely on them to guarantee that you will, or will not, have a working phone signal in a given spot, and always carry appropriate communication and safety equipment when heading into the backcountry.

Routes, river profiles, distances, flow direction, put-ins and take-outs, and the hazards and landmarks shown along a route (such as dams, rapids, and bridges) are estimates built from public data. A route line follows a mapped channel; it is not a safe, legal, or navigable path, and hazards may be missing, misplaced, or out of date. Scout before you float, check current flows and conditions, and portage or turn back from anything you cannot pass safely. Recorded tracks and the anchor-drift alarm depend on your device’s GPS, battery, and settings and may fail; do not rely on them for your safety.

Treasure-hunt sites and the stories about them in Guidepole Hunt come from historical accounts, legends, and rumor; we do not claim that any treasure exists or that any site is open to searching. Metal detecting and digging are restricted or prohibited on much public land (for example, national parks and many state parks), often require a permit, and on private land require the owner’s permission. Removing archaeological or historic objects from public land can be a crime. Ownership lines and land status in the app are estimates; you are responsible for confirming that detecting and digging are allowed where you hunt.

You assume all risk of your outdoor activities and of any reliance on the app. To the fullest extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Guidepole LLC and its officers, employees, licensors, and data providers from and against any claim, demand, loss, liability, citation, fine, penalty, injury, death, or property damage (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or relating to your fishing, boating, wading, hiking, birding, metal detecting, treasure hunting, travel, or other activity; your access to, entry upon, or presence on any land or water; your reliance on any access, ownership, boundary, regulation, navigation, wildfire, smoke, or air-quality information in the app; or your failure to follow applicable law or the orders of authorities, even where that information proved inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date. This obligation is in addition to the general indemnification in Section 16.

You are responsible for the activity on your account and for keeping your login secure. Provide accurate information, keep it current, and let us know at [email protected] if you suspect unauthorized use. Accounts are for a single person and may not be shared.

Guidepole offers free and paid tiers, including a plan with access to the assistant. Paid subscriptions are billed through the app store (Apple or Google) or Stripe and, unless stated otherwise, renew automatically until you cancel.

• You can cancel any time; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period.
• Manage or cancel App Store subscriptions in your Apple account settings, Google Play subscriptions in the Play Store, and web (Stripe) subscriptions from the Manage Subscriptions page on our site.
• Automatic renewal: your subscription renews for the same period at the then-current price unless you turn off auto-renewal at least 24 hours before the current period ends. App store subscriptions are charged by the store within the 24 hours before each renewal.
• Free trials: if a plan includes a free trial, it converts to a paid subscription when the trial ends unless you cancel at least 24 hours before then. Any unused part of a trial ends when you buy a subscription.
• Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription. Cancel it in your app store or web account settings.
• Except where required by law or the app store’s policies, payments are non-refundable.
• We may change prices or plan features. We will tell you about a price increase at least 30 days before it applies to your subscription, and it will not affect the period you have already paid for. Your app store may ask you to accept the new price before it renews.
• You are responsible for any applicable taxes.

You agree not to:

• Use ownership information to harass, contact, or intimidate landowners, or for any unlawful, commercial-list, or discriminatory purpose.
• Reverse-engineer, disrupt, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the service.
• Trespass or break any law in reliance on the app; you remain responsible for your own conduct.
• Use the service in a way that infringes others’ rights or violates any applicable law.

Guidepole’s maps, tiles, datasets, regulations, boundaries, and all compiled content are proprietary to Guidepole LLC and are made available solely for your own individual, non-commercial recreational use through the official app and website.

You may not, and may not authorize, enable, or permit any third party or automated agent to:

• Access or interact with the service or its APIs using any bot, crawler, spider, scraper, headless browser, script, or other automated means;
• Systematically extract, harvest, scrape, copy, cache, index, mirror, republish, or bulk-download any data, tiles, or content from the service;
• Use any data or content, in whole or in part, to build, train, fine-tune, benchmark, or evaluate any machine-learning, AI, large-language, or other model or dataset;
• Circumvent, disable, probe, or interfere with any rate limit, authentication, access control, robots directive, or other technical or security measure;
• Resell, sublicense, distribute, or make the data or content available to any third party or product.

Our data is an original, protected compilation, and much of it is licensed to us under terms that forbid redistribution. Unauthorized access, extraction, or use may violate these Terms, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, state computer-crime and misappropriation laws, and the rights of our data licensors. We employ technical measures to detect and prevent automated access; we may block, throttle, or terminate access without notice and pursue all available legal and equitable remedies, including injunctive relief, damages, and recovery of costs and attorneys’ fees.

If you sign in with a phone number, you agree that we may text that number one-time sign-in codes and essential account messages. We do not send marketing texts unless you separately opt in. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to stop texts, or contact [email protected] for help.

Guidepole’s assistant (Gary) generates answers using AI and third-party data. Its responses may be inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date, and are provided for convenience only. Do not rely on the assistant as your sole source for legal access or regulations. Verify with the official authority.

Guidepole, including its software, design, and original content, is owned by us and protected by intellectual-property laws. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the app for your own recreational use, subject to these Terms.

Guidepole also displays government and public-record data (from federal, state, and county sources). That data is provided “as is,” may contain errors or omissions, and its accuracy is not guaranteed by us or the originating agencies.

We respect the rights of copyright owners. If you believe content in Guidepole infringes your copyright, send a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) to our designated agent: Copyright Agent, Guidepole LLC, 2442 NW Market St, Seattle, WA 98107; (206) 200-4720; [email protected]. Include: your signature; identification of the copyrighted work; identification of the material you say infringes it and where it appears in Guidepole; your contact information; a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner.

If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you may send a counter-notice to the same address. We remove infringing content and terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

If you send us ideas, suggestions, or feedback, you agree we may use them without restriction or compensation to you.

Guidepole links to and relies on services we do not control, for example state regulation pages, government data sources, map providers, and app stores. We are not responsible for their content, availability, or practices, and your use of them is governed by their own terms.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that the information in it is accurate, complete, or current.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Guidepole and its providers will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, the service, including any citation, penalty, injury, or property loss resulting from reliance on the information it provides. Our total liability for any claim will not exceed the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

You agree to indemnify and hold Guidepole harmless from claims, damages, and expenses arising out of your use of the service, your violation of these Terms, or your violation of any law or the rights of others.

You may stop using Guidepole and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access if you violate these Terms or if we discontinue the service. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (such as disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and dispute resolution) will continue to apply.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington and applicable United States federal law, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Except for disputes that are arbitrated under Section 19 and small-claims actions, any lawsuit arising out of or relating to these Terms or the service must be brought only in the state or federal courts located in King County, Washington. You and Guidepole consent to the personal jurisdiction of, and venue in, those courts and waive any objection based on an inconvenient forum.

Please read this section carefully. It affects how disputes are resolved and limits your rights, including your right to go to court, to a jury trial, and to join a class action.

• Informal resolution first. Before starting arbitration or a lawsuit, email [email protected] with a written description of the dispute, and give us at least 30 days to resolve it.
• Binding arbitration. If we cannot resolve it informally, you and Guidepole LLC agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the service will be resolved by final and binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, not in court, except as stated below. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. Arbitration will take place in King County, Washington, or, at your election, by phone, video, or written submission.
• Class-action waiver. Claims may be brought only in an individual capacity, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any class proceeding.
• Coordinated or mass filings. If 25 or more arbitration demands raising similar claims are filed by or with coordinated counsel, they will be treated as a mass filing and administered under the AAA’s Mass Arbitration Supplementary Rules: the demands are resolved in sequential batches of up to 50, with a single arbitrator per batch and the administrator’s fees assessed per batch, and the limitations period is tolled for demands awaiting their batch. If this paragraph is held unenforceable, it is severable and the rest of this section still applies.
• Jury-trial waiver. You and Guidepole LLC waive any right to a jury trial.
• Exceptions. Either party may still (i) bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and (ii) seek injunctive or other equitable relief in court to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorized use of the service, including the scraping and automated access prohibited in Section 7.
• Arbitration fees. Payment of arbitration fees is governed by the AAA’s applicable rules; where those rules require, Guidepole LLC will pay or advance filing and arbitrator fees for consumer claims.
• 30-day opt-out. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing [email protected], with your name and the email address on your account, within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out does not affect the rest of these Terms.
• Severability. If the class-action waiver is found unenforceable for a claim, that claim proceeds in court under Section 18 and the rest of this section still applies. If this entire section is found unenforceable, disputes will be resolved in the courts identified in Section 18.

We may update these Terms as Guidepole evolves. We will update the “Last updated” date above and, for material changes, provide additional notice. Continuing to use the service after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms.

Guidepole has ZERO TOLERANCE for objectionable content and abusive users. Content that is illegal, harassing, hateful, threatening, sexually explicit, violent, defamatory, invasive of privacy, or otherwise objectionable is prohibited, and anyone who posts it or who abuses others may be removed from the service without notice.

Some features let you contribute content, for example photos, comments, condition or trip reports, ratings, and catch logs (“User Content”). You are solely responsible for the User Content you submit. You must own or have the rights to it, and by submitting it you grant Guidepole a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, display, and distribute it within the service. User Content reflects the views of the person who posted it, not Guidepole.

You agree not to submit User Content that is unlawful, infringing, misleading, harassing, hateful, threatening, sexually explicit, violent, defamatory, that discloses another person’s private information, or that otherwise violates these Terms or the rights of others.

We screen submissions and may remove any User Content and suspend or terminate any account, at our discretion and without notice, to enforce these rules. In the app you can report objectionable content and block abusive users; we review reports and act on objectionable content and abusive users, typically within 24 hours. To report content or a user, use the in-app report and block tools or email [email protected].

If you downloaded Guidepole from Apple’s App Store or Google Play, these additional terms apply:

• These Terms are between you and Guidepole LLC only, not Apple or Google. We, not Apple or Google, are solely responsible for the app and its content.
• Your license to use the app is limited to Apple- or Google-branded devices that you own or control, as permitted by the store’s usage rules.
• Apple and Google have no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the app.
• If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price (if any) for the app. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation for the app.
• We, not Apple or Google, are responsible for addressing any claims relating to the app or your use of it, including product-liability claims, claims that the app fails to meet a legal or regulatory requirement, and consumer-protection or privacy claims, and for investigating and defending any claim that the app infringes a third party’s intellectual property.
• You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a U.S. Government embargo or designated as a “terrorist supporting” country, and that you are not on any U.S. Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• You must comply with any third-party terms that apply when you use the app, such as your wireless data plan.
• Apple and its subsidiaries, and Google, are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you as they relate to your license of the app.

• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and Guidepole about the service and replace any earlier agreements on the subject.
• Severability. If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, it will be enforced to the maximum extent permitted and the rest of these Terms will remain in effect.
• No waiver. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not transfer these Terms without our consent. We may transfer them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, or to an affiliate.
• Events beyond our control. We are not liable for delays or failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, such as outages of networks, data sources, or hosting providers, natural disasters, or government action.
• Notices. We may give you notices by email, in the app, or on our website. You can reach us at the addresses below.
• Export. You may not use or export the app in violation of U.S. export or sanctions laws.

Guidepole LLC, 2442 NW Market St, Seattle, WA 98107. Questions about these Terms or legal notices: [email protected]. Copyright notices: [email protected].