Every spot here was chosen and checked by a person, not scraped from a database. The Paddle Score is a single number from 1 to 5, built from wind speed and gusts, air temperature, UV index, cloud cover, rain and visibility at the lake — then constrained by fixed safety rules the model is not allowed to override. There is no score after dark at the lake, on lakes that freeze (October 1 to May 15), or on water that is closed.

The model behind it is a gradient-boosted tree ensemble trained on paddler ratings — human judgements of real days, never a rule’s own output — and constrained so more wind and more rain can only lower a score. The failures are published next to the results: read the full methodology, including what the score cannot see.