Campsite availability notifications in recreation.gov

After having hiked the CDT through Yellowstone I’m convinced recreation.gov is a contractor scam. Nobody stays in the campsites. I had a ranger set up my itinerary and he carefully combed his software for available sites, including among sites that they specifically set aside for CDT hikers to group up, and then I got out there and there was nobody, not a single solitary other person, in any of the campsites. No other CDT hikers, no other general backpackers at all. And I saw that everything was full on his screen. It’s all a big scam.

I recently stayed at Riley creek campground in Denali National Park. I had tried two weeks earlier to get a different Denali campground, Savage, but it showed as completely full. When I looked shortly before we were to go to Riley to see if I could switch, everything in both campgrounds showed as full. We got there about 1/2 of the sites at Riley were empty, and probably 1/3 of the sites at Savage were also empty. I would have liked to switch to the Savage CG. There were lots of sites available. Even the next morning, many empty sites in both campgrounds. And no way for folks without online reservations to stay in the empty sites. I’ve never seen this before and we’ve stayed there every Labor Day weekend. While I enjoyed the peace and quiet, it isn’t a very rational way to run a national park campground.

This is becoming a huge problem.  I’ve even seen it at USFS campgrounds run through Recreation.gov in Michigan’s UP.  Looks totally booked online but when I got there, a lot of spots were vacant.

I’m not sure it’s a “scam” so much as people grab reservations but don’t cancel when their plans change.  Why should they?  campsite reservations are relatively cheap with no penalty for being a no-show.

And I’m not sure what the solution is.  Implement a “we’re gonna freeze your rec.gov account for a year after we detect N number of no-shows”?  They’d probably have a huge increase in customer supp0rt calls as a result, which would increase their costs.

Not sure what the solution is, but I think the current system sucks and is only getting worse.

Isle Royale National Park has a new management plan proposal that’s currently open for comments.  They have 3 proposed options for dealing with the increased visitation numbers, which is increasing conflicts for back-country campsites, as currently, ISRO doesn’t implement a permit quota for any of the b-c campgrounds.  Everything is first-come, first-served, with people allowed to overflow into the group sites or even into empty meadows if things get bad.  At least one of ISRO’s proposed options is to adopt rec.gov and use their reservation system.   As bad as things are with increased visitation on the island, I hope they don’t pick that option.  I hate working within the rec.gov reservation system, especially in light of stuff like this, where reservations get snatched up 6 months in advance and then go unused.

Last time I tried to cancel a car camp reservation on Rec.gov, their web page would not allow me to do that. I spent about an hour trying everything I could think of and no go… I was not even trying to get a refund as I was within the time period where not refunds would be given. Crazy.

At some point, Rec.gov’s contract will come up for renewal. Hopefully, it will be put out for bid so there could be some competition. As well, hopefully, the various government agencies will have learned something and will revise the specifications to address these issues.

I don’t blame the government.

It’s a nationwide phenomenon.  There’s no campers, yet the trash cans are spilling over.

In my area, there’s a user’s group for reservations that won’t be used.  My wife follows it, I’m not sure if it’s a FB page or what.  Anyway, someone says “I have Barber Cabin this Friday and Saturday night but I can’t make it.” and someone else says “I’ll take it.” and uses Venmo to send the 2 x $35 rental fee.  Twice we’ve done that to grab a high-demand cabin at the last minute.  One that normally, you’re getting online 183 days in advance when it first becomes available.

All on the honor system, but it seems to work, and in a small town, if you see you have 6 or 32 “friends” in common, you’re convinced they’re 1) real and 2) wouldn’t risk scamming people.

For the issue of un-used campsites, three imperfect solutions come to my mind:

– overbook like hotels and airlines do.  They overbook at 103 to 108% based on historic rates of no-shows.  I used to be able to get bumped (voluntarily) from multiple flights in a day (to score the free round trips given as compensation) by predicting when their generic 106% overbooking would fail – Sunday nights when people have to get back to go to work, etc.  Airlines have gotten better at predicting more accurate over-booking rates based on day-of-week, holidays, etc.  It sounds like rec.gov could overbook some campsites at 200% (but maybe not on 3-day weekends).

– The other approach would be that you have to check-in by, say, 7 pm to be assured use of your reservation.  After that time, others could poach your site.  Some people would come to rely on the no-shows, and arrive after the witching hour, but if they miscalculated, they’d be sleeping in the car that night.

– an economist would say, “Just raise the prices”. For sites to be snatched up so quickly, it’s clearly below market value.  If you’re worried about accessibility by college students and poor families, maybe each household gets large discounts on their first four reservations a year, but the people who are booking lots and lots of sites pay a market rate.

One solution is to make it all by phone or in person. It’s the belief you can solve everything with a web app that is the problem. You need actual humans. I say this as someone who recently retired from web development.

I make reservations and cancelled with rec.gov occasionally.  No problems.

Booz Allen makes $6 per transaction which seems excessive, but I can think of other world problems that bother me worse.

Over-booking at trailhead isn’t a problem.  There aren’t an exact maximum number of parking spaces.  If it’s too crowded then people start parking on the side of the road all over and it becomes a problem.  If that happens, then decrease the number of allowed permits.

Over booking at campground – release a no show the next day.  Sometimes people arrive late at night.  I have seen campgrounds where their attitude is if someone paid for a site for multiple days, they’re fine with that.  If there are fewer people its less work cleaning the bathrooms and so forth.  I think that attitude sucks – we have limited funds to make campgrounds, so they should be used.  People camping is a great activity, better than sitting on the computer all the time for example.

Diane,

You have to remember that up until a few years ago, Yosemite’s permit system worked by Faxing in your permit requests.  Sierra NF required that you send your permit by postal mail, and so too did Glacier National Park.

With the dramatic rise in visitation numbers, those method became completely unsustainable.

I don’t think the NPS, USFS, BLM, and US ACE could afford to employ an army of customer service reps manning telephones to field everyone’s permit requests.

If you look at it from their perspective:  paying customer service reps to man phones comes out of their budgets.  With Booze & Allen running Rec.gov the way that they are, the cost to run the service is coming out of YOUR pocket rather than the land manager’s budget.  It’s probably significantly cheaper for them to hand over the permit management to them than to manage it in-house on a per-park basis.  And on Booze & Allen’s side:  once they had the infrastructure to handle permits for a small handful of parks and campgrounds, it’s probably been easy (and cheap) to scale it out to additional public lands that want to switch.

I’m not saying I’m happy about it.  As a Michigan resident, Isle Royale is my “home” park even though it takes me 11 hours by car,  plus either 4 hours by Ferry or 30 minutes by float plan to reach the park. They currently have a land management proposal that includes switching to the same rec.gov based system, and I’m strongly opposed to it because of the no-show issue and how it leads to everyone furiously trying to acquire permits THE SECOND they’re released onto the website.

If there’s much more demand than availability, they should do lottery so there’s no instance in time where everyone has to go at the same time.

They could do that for Taylor Swift concerts too : )

North Cascades already does a lottery.  And it’s complicated.

You apply to the lottery and only some people win.  When you win, you’re assigned a time slot when you can login to rec.gov and acquire permits.   If, by the time YOUR time slots is here and you’ve logged in, your discover that campsites along your desired itinerary are already booked, you’re SOL.

So, there are effectively two ways in which you can lose out on acquiring your BC itinerary permits:
1)  You don’t win the initial lotto.
2)  You win the lotto, but you have a later time slot and someone else grabs the sites you wanted, on the dates you wanted.

My wife and 2 of her friends did a hike in NCNP this summer.  All three of them applied for the lottery.  Only one of them got in.  They had a Plan A, B, and C  ready for when they logged in during their time slot to acquire their permits.  Fortunately, they got their Plan A.   (Which was really their Plan B.   The Copper Ridge Trail loop was 90% closed due to fire activity last year).

I think Glacier NP does a lottery as well but I haven’t tried getting permits there so I can’t verify.  Even when they were doing permits by mail they were doing a lottery there.

Recently I went backpacking on a trail thats still not on rec.gov in Washington. state. Having dealt with the pain of permits for so long it was such a pure experience to just head out without knowing if I’ll even get a spot to camp. Luckily I did find a campsite and it was amazing. It reminded me a bit of back in the days before the internet, GPS, mobile phones etc. We’ve unfortunately lost an essential part of the outdoors experience with all this crowding. I guess we’ll be hiking into more and remote locations in future.