There’s a problem with Enchantments permit scans

The Enchantment Permit Area is in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness of Washington State’s Cascade Mountains. The area is home to glaciated peaks and lakes. At lower elevations, you’ll find forested areas, whereas the upper areas are alpine.

Day users can fill out a free day-use permit at any of the Enchantment Permit Area’s three trailheads. Those who intend to stay overnight between mid-May and the end of October must reserve a permit online. (You don’t need a permit for other times of the year.) As this area is popular, permits sell out fast.

If the Enchantment permits you want are sold out, Campnab can help. You can create a scan for Enchantment permit cancelations—just scroll down the Campground list and select “Enchantment Permit Area”. You can get alerts for the Colchuck Zone, Core Enchantment Zone, Eightmile/Caroline Zone, Snow Zone, and Stuart Zone.

As with any scan on Campnab, you can receive a text and/or email alert each time a permit opens up. However, there’s a catch with Enchantment permit scans, and it’s rather bothersome.

Recreation.gov sometimes flickers a permit’s availability from Reserved to Available and then back to Reserved. Our system (rightly) sees this change and produces an alert. However, this is a false alert as the permit wasn’t actually available. This happens more often with Enchantments permits than with any other permits/campgrounds we monitor.

The good news is that Campnab will still report actual openings as they become available. That said, we haven’t yet found a way to prevent it entirely from spotting these phantom alerts. So, if you create a scan to get alerts for Enchantments permit availabilities, be aware that some will be duds—and it might take a little patience.

I’m sorry we can’t entirely rectify this problem. We’ve put a lot of effort in, behind the scenes, to make these alerts as accurate as possible. That said, we don’t have any influence over the systems we monitor. As such, permit cancelation scanning is challenging, and the results are imperfect.

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