Eric Karjaluoto
I’m one of the two people working on Campnab. I like to run, ski, bike, and camp with my family and friends. (I love saunas.)
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We charge for Campnab. These fees help cover operating costs and allow us (even this guy) to work on Campnab every day. When you pay for Campnab, you support independent software development. You also empower us to deliver an accurate, efficient, and intuitive campsite checker—that gets better over time.
You aren’t obliged to use Campnab, though. You can manually refresh the park’s booking system to look for campsite status changes. Some booking systems offer availability notifications free of charge. Additionally, several developers have built tools to both monitor campsite availability and send you free campsite alerts.
Here’s a list of some of the free campsite checkers we’ve spotted over the years. We are in no way affiliated with these products and have never tested them. As such, we make no guarantees as to their effectiveness.
Recreation gov Campsite Checker
Daniel Porteous’ script scrapes recreation.gov for campsite availabilities. It was updated in February 2022 to work with the new recreation.gov site and API. This tool can also notify users of campsite availabilities via Twitter.
Download Recreation gov Campsite Checker
Camp Helper
GitHub user gaeunl created an application for those who wish to save their BC Parks campground search and check real-time availability whenever they want. His app shows all requested campgrounds in a table noting availability.
recgov-daemon
recgov-daemon is a Python app by rmjacobson that checks recreation.gov’s Recreation Information Database for campsites and notifies the user of campsite availability changes by email. He built the tool during the pandemic when he realized that every weekend at the Sierra Nevada mountain range was booked 6 months out.
Campsite Finder
Hyungwu Pae’s app checks a chosen park every few minutes and sends notifications of new availability by email or SMS. This tool’s public-facing website is no longer active but the GitHub repo is online. This one hasn’t seen an update in a number of years.
Yosemite Camping Scraper
Brian Hansen built this script to scrape the availability of campgrounds at Yosemite. He notes that his tool is hard-coded for Yosemite, but can be reconfigured to monitor other national parks.
Download Yosemite Camping Scraper
Campsite Availability Scraping
Isley M. Gao forked Brian Hansen’s (above) Yosemite Camping Scraper to create Campsite Availability Scraping. Her Python-based tool programmatically controls the browser and automates location and date inputs. It then returns available campsite URLs for the dates and campgrounds specified in the config file.
Download Campsite Availability Scraping
Camply
camply is a Python-based tool by Justin Flannery to search for campsite availabilities. camply can monitor booking services like Recreation.gov and send notifications when a campsite becomes available. camply is hosted on PyPI. You can download it directly using tools like pip and pipx.
Campsite Finder 1.0
Joe Vanderlip’s Campsite Finder scrapes campground data for national parks. With his program, the user sets a search window and campgrounds. They also can search on repeat for several days. If a campsite becomes available, his utility sends the user an email containing the URL for making the reservation. This information is also displayed in the terminal.
Find Campsite
Austin Whittier built a script that can check both Recreation.gov and Reserve California for available sites at a campground. Duration and starting date can also be set.
Reserve America Scraper
Chris Streeter’s Reserve America Scraper can be set up to send SMS alerts via Twilio. This script was last updated some years ago. He notes that it likely doesn’t work any longer and recommends using his new Recreation.gov Campsite Checker (linked below) instead.
Download Reserve America Scraper
Recreation-gov Campsite Checker
The aforementioned Chris Streeter wrote his Recreation.gov Campsite Checker in Python 3.7. It can send notifications via Twitter and MacOS. Chris notes that his checker works with the new recreation.gov site, as of late 2018.
Download Recreation.gov Campsite Checker
RecreationGovAvailability
David Cunningham’s tool doesn’t appear to send alerts so much as it allows you to view available dates of all campsites for a given campground. His tool also visualizes available dates per campsite in tables. RecreationGovAvailability must be run in Chrome Developer Tools after navigating to Recreation.gov.
Download RecreationGovAvailability
A few closing notes
None of the linked tools/scripts auto-book campsites. As I’ve emphatically stated in the past, auto-booking campsites is an unethical and monumentally dumb idea. Many parks prohibit the resale of campsite reservations. An increasing number of parks do not permit the transfer of campsite reservations.
I also remain convinced that the use of bots to hoard campsite reservations is a myth. This conspiracy theory of sorts is perpetuated by those who simply don’t understand just how many campers are ready and waiting to book on opening morning.
The above list of campsite scanning tools isn’t complete. Many have tried to build such tools, and it’s sometimes hard to keep up with them. As I collected this list I noticed that some of these repos haven’t been updated in a good while. For this reason, some probably won’t work, given how often booking systems change. Even those that do might take some tinkering on your behalf.
Obviously, I’d love for you to try Campnab. We put loads of effort into keeping it up to date with booking system changes. We believe Campnab is the easiest way to create a campsite scan—and manage multiple scans—completely stress-free. (We also offer one-on-one support, which can be pretty useful.) That said, you certainly have options. We hope that whichever approach you take results in you finding a lovely campsite!
P.S., I also wrote an article detailing other ways to find campsites. You might find it useful.
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