First off, in case you couldn’t tell, we’re not affiliated with the official team or companies behind the Back to the Future films in any way, and we don’t make any profit from this site in any way. Back to the Future and it’s characters are registered trademarks of NBC/UNIVERSAL and AMBLIN Entertainment. We make reference to them and show screenshots here for educational (albiet entertaining) purposes. If you want the official Back to the Future website, go here.

The best part about finding and collating all the BTTF locations has been, without exception, getting to know the Back to the Future fan community. Before we launched the site at this address and started getting a lot of feedback, we had no idea how BIG the Back to the Future “scene” was, and it’s been amazing and gratifying to have been a part of this big group of psychos.

With that said, none of this information would be available like it is if it weren’t for a lot of people’s dedication and hard work.

This list might be inaccurate because it’s impossible to catalog the innumerable free agents who have looked for or stumbled on these locations, but it’s worth trying to give some credit where credit is due. I’m just doing this off the top of my head, so if you have something to add, contact us and one of us’ll correct it.

First mention has to go to Bruce Gordon, the author of the original “Back to the Future – for real!” published in the Hill Valley Telegraph in 1995. Spanning Doc’s Burbank home to the Ragwing Barn to Marty’s House, he ushered in the era of Back to the Future locations on the internet when the article was spread amongst the forum users of Stephen Clark’s BTTF.com. In fact, coming across this article in a conversation on Yahoo! Chat was what first got me, and then all of my friends, hooked on visiting these locations.

Next came the indomitable Wesley Treat, who posted up the locations on his classic site “The Big Waste of Space” in 2001. I readily admit that when we finally decided to launch our own website (because we couldn’t find anyone updating their location sites, and locations we had found from parts II and III weren’t readily available online) we kind of… uh, “filched” the name “BTTF tour” from him. I can only plead youth and drunken stupidity at the time of choosing a domain name. It wasn’t good netiquette, but we’ve had the name for the better part of a decade now, so we’re gonna stick with it. Sorry Wesley. The original ‘Back to the Future tour‘ is still a great read. In fact, everything that guy touches turns to gold.

Of course, we had been publishing pictures of ourselves at these locations at a few (long gone) random websites we had, and decided to launch this to publish locations that we had found that we couldn’t find anywhere else online, like the Port Hueneme location, Hilldale 2015, Strickland’s House, Jennifer’s House, and The Stairwell from Biff’s Casino.

But it is worth mentioning that plenty of intrepid ultra-fans had found and visited some of these locations on their own before we published the info online. Most of them were BTTF.com and other Back to the Future forum users. I never was one for forums, except for the occasional browse and post, I really don’t use them, so for the most part we were unaware. In our excitement to get out some of these locations we said things like “We’re the first to go here since filming!” which weren’t always strictly accurate. Sorry for the oversight fellas, but in our defense, search engines at the time produced nothing.

Which leads me to another giant in BTTF location hunting, Alessandro and Massimiliano Russi’s website at BTTT.info. These guys are some of the most dedicated and obsessed Back to the Future fanatics. Based in Italy though, their site never came across our radar. From Europe these guys managed to get ahold of all kinds of location information through forum connections and a lot of impressive detective work.

In fact, they were the first ones to finally visit & publish the last great BTTF location mystery, the trestle location from the 1885 Eastwood Ravine scene. Their site (bttt.info) seems to be down right now, but we’ll link it up as soon as it comes back online.

Of course, even for the locations WE found, we’ve got to give it up to Michael J Burmeister, one of the location scouts for parts II and III, for giving us a list of information leading to the discovery of many of the missing plot locations. We never would have found the location for Oak Park Cemetery, for example, without his help. It’s been a wild ride visiting and publishing these locations, and we’re proud to have been a part of the small community of fans who helped to track them all down.

-J