It was even better when you just picked up the free permit on the way into the park. Its not like your saving any time, because that site is basically just a reservation system, you should still (and usually have to) stop at the ranger station and get the actual permit, check-in and sign various things, and hear various lectures and assure that the area is safe/etc due to weather/etc.
Plus, I'm not even sure it is helping with the reservation problem, as more than once i've found myself in a camping/etc area that is 100% booked and 50% empty.
I strongly disagree. Prior to reservation systems, it was not uncommon to drive out to Glacier, say, only to find every camp site filled. Now you can be assured that you will have a site prior to taking the week off and hauling your family hours from home. Likewise, several popular western rivers became absolutely crushed with traffic. One year I floated 30 miles before I found a site (which was more than two regular days on that river). They needed a way to lottery or offer permits, and recreation.gov has performed better than what they used previously (though they're often gone within seconds of opening availability -- which converts first-come to a sort of lottery).
I think the solution to the empty camp sites problem is a stiff penalty for failing to release the site to others prior the reserved date. For instance, last year on the John Day they said if you didn't put in on the designated day, you'd lose your ability to pull a John Day permit the following year.
Ahh yes, the "I really want the fourth of july, but I can only book X months in advance. So I'll book a week early, and book the 27th of June through the 4th of july weekend. Then i'll wait months, and then pay the $7 fee to change my reservation, and drop the first week from my reservation."
Its very sad how common this is, and makes it very difficult to find spots out west in popular areas. It really doesn't help that my state (Oregon) has almost doubled in population the last 30 years, but added almost no new camping areas since the 70's.
What can one do? Popular, increase in population, only $7 to change … efficiency of market and public facilities … obviously increase supply. But given the growth and the price, demand follows …
May I suggest enjoy whatever you got and fight to increase more. Not a paradise USA but much better than other places in the world. Best wish and season greetings.
> Ahh yes, the "I really want the fourth of july, but I can only book X months in advance. So I'll book a week early, and book the 27th of June through the 4th of july weekend. Then i'll wait months, and then pay the $7 fee to change my reservation, and drop the first week from my reservation."
Seems like a reasonable solution to that would be allowing booking X days in advance where "days in advance" is measured by the last day of your reservation instead of your first. This would also advantage people who are okay with staying a shorter time, meaning that more people get to enjoy the park in total.
Obviously none of this solves the problem of there not being enough opportunities for everyone, but this would make things more equitable as a stopgap measure.
This still leaves an opening for scalpers who have no intention of actually going to the park, just charging people to use their reservation.
A different alternative would be to make those spaces an auction, and somebody can pay more to take over your reservation. At least then the park gets the money
No, it’s illegal to resell a reservation. I posted a joke scalper ad on Craigslist (forgot to take it down) for a national park reservation (this was right after they were introduced and I was salty about it) and they got a grand jury subpoena for my account info and investigated me for reselling government property. They didn’t charge me once they realized I didn’t do anything more than post and ad (and in protest at that), but scalping permits is highly illegal.
They actually check ID at many campgrounds and make sure it's the same person as the one reservation is made for. Generally they accept photo of reservation holder ID if (for example) you say that the person that reserved the campground will arrive later or got sick. Still pretty hard to impossible to scalp at scale - you can't change name in reservation, only cancel it (for fee).
They do not want to do auction because it will defeat purpose of camping be accessible to regular people. Outside of small number of highly popular campgrounds in prime season, you can book most campground in advance - very few campgrounds sells out in seconds.
This is the fallacious thinking that somehow market forces can be defeated at will. If they wanted camping to be accessible to regular (poor) people then they need to dole out those subsidies to them directly. If they sell permits below market rate then they are just randomly handing out subsidies.
I think there are better anti-scalper methods. It probably won’t be 100% effective, but making it hard to transfer permits can help prevent a secondary marketplace from forming.
How did it work if you show up at the park and the whole campsite is full?
As parks get busier, it seems like permits are pretty much the only fair and realistic path forward. I loved being able to drive off and show up, but it’s also nice to be able to plan with confidence that I will have a spot.
I think there are solutions to the fully booked / empty sites problem. Charge a substantial fee if you no show. Give away infilled sites using your preferred method, after 5 pm. Etc.
I'm fairly certain that the reservations system results in the parks being more overrun. There are other variables as well, but being able to be assured that your going to get your camp site before you arrive has everyone and their brother booking the popular places.
The fact that you might arrive and not get that perfect spot serves to discourage some number of people. And many of them aren't prepared to find alternatives, or sleep in the dirt lot next to the ranger station. Which is the kind of thing that used to happen on those popular weekends at the popular sites. It frankly was never a problem for most people because they had already acknowledged to themselves that they might not get a spot, and had a backup plan. So for the first ~30 years or so of my life camping, I never made a reservation. Simply showed up and took what was available. Usually early if I thought it was going to be busy.
I can't ever remember not getting a spot, even as recently as ~6-7 years ago when I took the kids to yellowstone (with a plan for camping down the road if I couldn't get a spot in the park directly). And you know what, outside of the first day when we actually went to the alternate campground because it was late when we arrived, I didn't have a problem showing up the next day at the reservations desk and getting spots for the next 4 nights. And this was still in the summer when school was out.
The volume climbed first and then reservation systems were adopted. National parks expend considerable effort to track visits (it’s like their KPI) and it has been climbing for years, reaching unmanageable levels at many parks earlier in this century. Zion closed the canyon to cars in 2000, Acadia before that. The rangers were telling me it was probably only a few years away for the main road in Glacier.
It is still possible to drive up for camping at parks though. People cancel reservations all the time, creating “hidden” capacity that can only be accessed if you are there that day. But yeah, you better have a backup plan. Quite a few national parks have national forest campgrounds nearby, which are less busy, less developed, and often do not even take reservations.
There isn't any doubt that visitation rates have been up. I'm sure instituting formal reservation systems "helped" at the places that actually needed them, but this is a case that you can no longer get reservations at the parks which are also the least visited in the year following the reservation system being implemented, which seems suspect.
So, maybe its just social media/etc driving the problem, but it could also be that people can search the entire inventory and are like "hey I can't get a reservation at X, but we could go to Y instead since they have a site free" Vs actually having to pick up the phone and call a half dozen reservation desks adding friction to the system.
I guess my objection to characterizing this as a problem, is that it's the public's land held in trust for them. It would destroy the integrity of the system to not make it as discoverable and accessible as possible, within the bounds of maintaining the natural character of the land.
I have some sympathy for people who knew places off-the-beaten-path that now have more competition for a spot, but if the land really is public land, I don't see how it's ethical to keep it hard to find and hard to use. Fundamentally, doesn't a trustee have a duty to beneficiaries?
If you want a spot that's less accessible to others (and thus less crowded), there are still a lot of options. Finding such a spot might involve hiking a bit farther, visiting during the week, or dealing with harsher weather. But I really do think fairness, and thus the long term future of the system depend on the government doing its best to make it easy to find and access these places.
The 50% empty problem is due to being required to reserve months in advance. I cannot tell you how a given date will be impacted 6 months into my future, I can plan but shit happens.
Plus, I'm not even sure it is helping with the reservation problem, as more than once i've found myself in a camping/etc area that is 100% booked and 50% empty.