Frequently asked questions

A free tool that watches national- and state-park reservation systems and surfaces openings — especially last-minute cancellations at campgrounds that looked sold out.

No — and that’s on purpose. When we find an open site, we send you straight to the official park portal (Recreation.gov or the state’s own system) to reserve it yourself. No markup, no booking fees, no middleman holding your reservation. You book directly with the park, exactly as if you’d found it on your own.

Searching is free and needs no account. To get email alerts, the only thing we ask for is an email address (and a one-tap confirmation). That’s it — no password, no sign-up, no payment.

Search for a park and your dates, then tap “Alert me.” We save that exact search and keep an eye on it for you, so you don’t have to sit there refreshing the page.

The setup takes three steps:

1. Run your search and tap Alert me.
2. Enter your email and pick how many days we should watch (1–7).
3. Click Confirm in the quick verification email — that’s a one-time tap to prove the address is yours. Then we start watching.

Only when something changes. Once a day we re-run your search. If a site has opened up since the last time we looked, you get an email. If nothing’s changed — or nothing’s available — we stay quiet. No daily noise, just the heads-up that matters.

The campgrounds and specific sites that just opened, grouped by campground, each as a direct link to book on the official portal. Cancelled sites get snapped up fast, so treat the email as your cue to tap through and reserve right away — ideally with your Recreation.gov (or state) account already logged in and payment saved.

You choose when you set the alert: anywhere from 1 to 7 days (3 is the default). We cap it at a week, for two honest reasons:

• It keeps Camp Finder free. Every active watch means we hit the reservation system on your behalf every single day. An open-ended watch for everyone isn’t sustainable on a free tool — a 7-day cap is what lets us not charge you.
• It matches how cancellations behave. The biggest wave of openings hits 10–14 days before arrival, and again 2–4 days before. A focused week-long watch timed around your trip catches the openings that actually matter. A watch running for months mostly burns through quiet days where nothing was going to change anyway.

The practical tip: don’t set your alert months ahead. Start a fresh 7-day watch in the week or two before your arrival date — that’s when sites free up, and that’s when you want us looking.

Yes — just set the alert again. When your window runs out we stop watching and the alert clears itself automatically (we don’t keep your email sitting on a list). Re-subscribing takes a few seconds.

The best move is to start a fresh 7-day watch as your trip gets close. If your first window was a week too early and came up empty, that’s expected — re-arm it so the watch overlaps the real cancellation window (that 10-days-out and 2-days-out stretch). Timing beats patience here.

Every email has a one-tap unsubscribe link. And you don’t have to do anything when your watch window ends — it stops on its own, with nothing left to cancel.

There are 63 places that carry the official “National Park” title — Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and so on. The National Park Service actually manages more than 400 sites in total once you add national monuments, seashores, historic sites, preserves and recreation areas. When most people say “national park,” they mean one of the 63.

Not every national park has a campsite you can reserve online. Some have no campgrounds at all, some are first-come-first-served only, and a handful book through a private concessioner or by phone — so there’s simply nothing on the internet for us to watch.

We list the parks whose campgrounds release through the official federal system (Recreation.gov), because that’s where cancellations show up in real time. A few famous ones sit just outside that system:

• Denali books through its own concessioner site, not the federal system.
• Everglades (Flamingo & Long Pine Key) takes reservations by phone and email only.
• Hawaiʻi Volcanoes (Nāmakanipaio) is phone-only through the park lodge.

We keep adding parks as their campgrounds become searchable. If a park you want isn’t here, it usually means there isn’t a live reservation feed to monitor yet.

Almost all national-park camping runs through Recreation.gov. You make a free account, search the campground and dates, and book. Most campsites open on a rolling 6-month window — for a July 4 trip, the date becomes bookable around January 4. New days unlock every morning, typically around 10 AM Eastern (check each campground’s page, some differ).

A few big parks run their own schedules:

• Yosemite Valley releases one month at a time, on the 15th at 7 AM Pacific, five months ahead. Sites can vanish in under two minutes.
• Yellowstone opens its whole summer in a single release in early spring.
• Group sites are usually bookable a full year out.

Camping and park entry are separate. Several parks (Rocky Mountain, Arches in past years, Glacier, Zion’s Angels Landing, Haleakalā sunrise) also require a timed-entry or permit reservation just to get in — having a campsite doesn’t cover that.

“Sold out” rarely stays that way — roughly 6 in 10 reservations are eventually cancelled. The trick is knowing when the openings appear:

• 10–14 days before arrival is the biggest cancellation wave — people firm up plans and drop sites they were holding.
• 2–4 days before there’s a second wave, as people cancel right before the late-cancellation penalty kicks in.
• Every morning a fresh day enters the 6-month window — watch the 10 AM ET drop for your target date.

This is exactly the window a Camp Finder alert is built to catch for you.

Book midweek (Sunday–Thursday have far more room), arrive early on weekdays for first-come sites, and have a Recreation.gov account ready with payment saved so you can grab an opening the moment it appears. Once you add a site to your cart it’s held for 15 minutes to finish checkout — enough time if you’re ready, not if you’re still hunting for your card.

On Recreation.gov, cancelling two or more days out usually refunds your site fee minus a small service fee. Cancel the day before or day of and you typically forfeit the first night, and a no-show costs more. That penalty structure is why cancellations cluster a couple of days before arrival — which is good news if you’re the one hunting for the opening.

Depending on how you count, there are roughly 2,400 “state parks”, and around 6,800 total units once you include state recreation areas, beaches, forests and historic sites. Every state runs its own system — there’s no single national website for them.

Here’s the honest answer. Camp Finder is free, and we keep it free by running it on a tight budget. Every state uses a different reservation platform, so we build and maintain a separate connector for each one — we cover most states today and add more over time.

A few state systems block automated checks unless you reach them through a paid “residential” connection. We pay for a limited monthly amount of that, because the alternative is charging you. When that monthly allowance runs out, the states that depend on it show “temporarily out of order” instead of pretending to work — and they come back automatically when the allowance resets at the start of the next cycle.

And a handful of states simply don’t have a reliable online system yet, or are first-come-first-served, so there’s nothing for us to watch. We’d rather tell you that plainly than show you a broken search.

Each state sets its own rules. Booking windows range from about 90 days to 13 months ahead — California opens 6 months out daily at 8 AM Pacific, while many eastern states open 11–12 months ahead. Release times and minimum-stay rules vary too (weekends often need two nights, holidays three).

The pattern is the same everywhere: most states charge a penalty if you cancel within a few days of arrival, so openings tend to surface about a week out and again a day or two before. Cancelled sites usually reappear the next morning — that’s the window a Camp Finder alert helps you catch.