Yep, getting harder to find places to camp

[booster]

Originally Posted by Rocinante

Our main challenge has been when we are trying to get campsites in the most popular campgrounds in the most popular national parks. However, we've been successful getting sites at Watchman in Zion NP and at the North Rim Campground in Grand Canyon NP. We just camp (with our internet browser) on those campgrounds via recreation.gov and keep hitting refresh a time or two every day to see what shows up. We managed to get two sequential nights in June at Watchman, and three nights (two different campsites, I'll admit) in June at North Rim. Challenging and annoying, but not impossible.

That works sometimes but as you say it is a PITA to do. We did that on fluke try a number of years ago and got into our favorite campground in Custer for a couple of days, as we passed through the area headed west.


If you want a longer stay, it usually doesn't happen, though, and making 5+ reservations to get closer to two weeks, even if you can pull it off, can get pretty expensive if the fees are in the $7-10 range that seems to be getting to be the norm these days.

[Rocinante]

Great point, as every new reservation when you have to split amongst multiple campsites generates additional fees for recreation.gov. I will also say that there is pretty close to zero incentive to cancel reservations that aren't going to work out, because recreation.gov keeps almost all of any refund as a "cancellation fee." So, nobody cancels.