Navigating Recreation.gov

[Mina Loomis]

Not looking to discuss whether Recreation.gov ought or ought not to be in charge of our backcountry access.  That’s what we’ve got at this time.

I put in for the Early Access Lottery for Yellowstone, ended up with an appointment in the middle of the pack, 4/11.  Already many of the suitable routes are gone, with 2 more days until I can choose a route.  All of Bechler is reserved already, for example.  I have some alternate ideas, wanting 4 nights, group of 4, max daily distance about 10 miles.  End of August/1st week September.

There are commercial trips, for example Wildland Trekking or REI Adventures, that post trip dates up to over a year in advance.  How do they do that?  Do they have umpteen staff members all putting in separately for the lottery and using the ones that draw the earliest appointments?  Do commercial trips go into a different pool and get first dibs?  I am just trying to wrap my mind around how this works.  I am hoping I can put together an itinerary on Tuesday.  Someday I’d love to be able to hike the Bechler with my friends without having to pay big bucks to be herded around and waited on hand and foot.

So, what gives?  (As noted above, not trying to rant or invite others to rant, just really wanting to get a better understanding of how the system works, beyond what the NPS & R.gov disclose on their sites.)

[Mina Loomis]

Well I guess no one else in the BPL public knows the inner workings either.  But something interesting happened when I logged in at my appointed time in April.  The general advice to applicants is to keep checking the page in the days leading up to the appointment, to see what sites are still available as you get closer to your time.  This should allow the applicant to be ready to input available sites without having to “go back to the drawing board” when under time pressure.  One can also build an itinerary on the page itself ahead of time, saved under your login, and unless parts of it have been claimed by the time your assigned time window opens, you can hit “submit” right away, or only need to enter maybe one or two substitutions rather than building an itinerary from scratch.  So.  When I brought up my screen at the appointed time, the grid had changed.  A number of Bechler sites that had been “taken” in the days leading up to my appointment, were suddenly open again.  And I was able to adjust my pre-entered itinerary to get a workable four nights.  Not equally spaced, and with a long uphill the first day, but still, something we could do.  Good news there!  But it was nerve-wracking.  And, how is it that those unavailable campsites opened up again right then?  Probably still no one knows, at least no one that I can ask.  Support for a system is more likely if the users feel like they understand how it works, and that it isn’t arbitrary and/or capricious.

And, even though y’all didn’t have any insight or anything to add, I appreciate the listening.

[Matthew / BPL]

I’m only speculating here but I’m wondering if one person changed their reservation which opened a spot for someone else who moved their reservation and then… The conga line would change a lot over the coming days.

I deal with obtaining permits in the Sierras each summer and that’s a trainwreck but we don’t even have to deal with anything other than entry trailheads* so I can only imagine what it’s like where you have to choose campsite locations months ahead of time.

*Whitney exits and Half Dome permits are exceptions to my statement.

[DWR D]

I think, but not sure, that commercial operators are is a different pool of permits and we are not competing against them… at least not directly. I agree with Matthew… someone and or someones made changes and/or cancellations that opened up dates/camps for you. Yes, it is complicated and stressful.

[Mina Loomis]

I think you are partly right in that I must have been just lucky that someone canceled a permit reservation at the right moment for me.  But there wouldn’t be a cascade of changes to pre-existing reservations per se, because the lottery appointment only gives access to create one permit reservation.  If the reservation holder wants to make a change after the itinerary is submitted and the reservation issued (ie the process that makes sites unavailable on the matrix), the instructions say they can cancel the reservation, but they can’t substitute a new itinerary during the lottery period, but rather they need to wait for the first come first serve period that begins after the lottery appointment dates are over with, which is near the end of April.

I find it hard to imagine how the commercial operators could be receiving a separately designated portion of the reservable site-dates, without the NPS/rec.gov saying so, though.

Definitely a learning experience for me!

[Mina Loomis]

But why make a reservation just to cancel it within a day or two?  Of course there always might be unforeseen personal circumstances but I am guessing maybe some folks have all the members of their party sign up for lottery slots, and then they decide which of the itineraries received they actually want to do, and cancel the others.  At least, if that’s what happened, whatever group it was bothered to do the cancelations in a timely manner!

[Matthew / BPL]

Maybe the person wanted a Saturday entry but didn’t think they’d get it so they grabbed an open Thursday entry and then got the Saturday they wanted a couple days later? I have done this (and released the first reservation) on many occasions.

[Mina Loomis]

Only if they had an appointment under a different name/identity.  You only get one appointment per applicant.

[David Thomas]

Commercial tours must be in a different pool or they’d be unable to plan their season, employees, etc.  They certainly are for the Grand Canyon rafting trips.

Some of the lotteries on recreation.gov are somewhat of a bother to game.  You’d need to have additional email addresses to submit under.  Other lottery-type systems (the New Zealand Great Walks when we applied some years ago) aren’t as well controlled – you need to be online at 8 am NZ time and you need to type fast.  Even with all our info in front of us and typing fast, we saw prospects disappearing in the first minute and met others later on the trail who’d had their 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices slip away.  In such cases, the reservations will go to the person who can write some script to automatically populate the forms faster than any human could type.

For a Half Dome trip last month, our group applied through Recreation.gov in the early lottery and only got one permit for 6.  We picked up some more on the 48-hour-advance lottery.  But for lodging, someone wrote some code to scrape the lodging reservation website for how many empty rooms each minute, notice when available rooms increased (due to a cancellation, reduction in a large group, or another block of rooms being released) on our desired dates, and send a text to those of us still looking for rooms in the Valley.  When you’re competing against code that checks every minute of the day for availability, a meat-brained visitor doesn’t stand a chance.

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