What's your strategy for landing a campsite in the Needles Campground at Canyonlands National Park?/Kurt Repanshek file
Being able to visit a website and reserve a campsite in the National Park System six months before your visit helps take the anxiety away of wondering where you'll stay. Unless you're thinking of camping in Canyonlands and Arches national parks in Utah, and no doubt some other units of the system.
The problem arises in campgrounds with a relatively small number of campsites. While the Watchman Campground at Zion National Park boasts 176 campsites, the Bridge Bay Campground in Yellowstone National Park lists 432 sites, and Tuolumne Meadows Campground in Yosemite National Park shows 304 sites, at Devils Garden Campground in Arches there are just 51, and at Needles Campground in Canyonlands there are just 26, of which only a dozen can be reserved, with the remainder first-come, first-served.
On recreation.gov you can reserve a campsite six months out from your travel...unless, of course, you plan to spend more than one night in that site. While individual campsites don't technically open for reservations until six months ahead of your desired date, if you claim a site six months out, you can extend your stay for a number of days. In the case of Needles Campground, you can book a seven-night stay, and that's where problems of securing a campsite intensify.
Recreation.gov releases sites for reservations at 10 a.m. Eastern, six months out. So if you live in the Pacific Time Zone and wanted to stay in Needles Campground on March 23, 2020, you needed to be ready to reserve your site at 7 a.m. on September 23, 2019. But your initiative wouldn't have been rewarded, unfortunately.
That's because at Needles you can relax in a campsite for seven consecutive days. And so folks who were able to latch onto a site on September 22, 2019, for March 22, 2020, arrival, could, in theory, reserve it through March 29, 2020. And so if you logged onto recreation.gov on September 23, as I did, you would have found each of the 12 sites booked through March 23, 2020, and some beyond that date. While there was one site available for March 24, you'd have to wait until September 24 to reserve that...if it was still available.
"If someone reserved for 3/22, they are allowed to book several days out," the chat room folks at recreation.gov told me when I mentioned all the sites had been reserved for March 23, 2020, before September 23, 2019. "The next available date is for site 27 and only for 03/24/2020. For 03/25/20, sites 18, 24, 25, 26, 27. I do apologize the sites were taken for today."
"But if you can't make a reservation until six months out," I replied, and someone reserves for a block of dates, how does one lock down a reservation?
"It is a relatively small camping area," came the reply. "I can only advice to check on the recreation.gov website to see which dates may come available 6 months out."
Now, there are those 14 first-come, first-served sites at Needles Campground, but the campground is a far drive for most folks, lying about 75 miles from Moab, Utah. From Salt Lake City, it's about a 5-6 hour drive.
Would you gamble on finding one of those 14 sites vacant after a long drive, knowing that if they were all filled you would 1) have to see if the private campground just outside the Needles District had space, 2) you had to drive 49 miles to Monticello, Utah, and hope there was a motel room available, or 3) drive all the way back to Moab with hopes of finding a vacancy?
What's the solution? Is there a solution? Do small national park campgrounds need to move to a lottery system? Do parks with just one small campground need to build more?
The answer, for now at least, concerning Needles Campground is to be flexible and broaden your search, Karen Garthwait at Canyonlands National Park told me. There currently are no discussions to enlarge the campground, she said.
"What I typically encourage people to do is plan ahead for something for their first night when in the area," she said. "Whether a private campground that you can book in advance, or a hotel room, or whatever people feel comfortable with as their lodging option. But having a reservation for that first night then lets you travel here with the security that you have a place to land, you can pop into whichever visitor center of whichever unit who are wanting to go to, find out the lay of the land, and then find out how early you need to be there the next day in order to get one of those first-come, first-served available sites."
Garthwait also noted that, in terms of Needles Campground, there are a number of campgrounds along Utah 211 just outside the Needles District that are managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, "(A)ll of which are first-come, first served, and they have been adding to them practically every other year the last couple of years."
Those BLM campgrounds are the Hamburger Rock Campground (10 sites), Creek Pasture Campground (32 sites), and Super Bowl Campground (37 sites). Those campgrounds are more rustic than the Needles Campground, with no running water and offering vault, not flush, toilets.
If your heart is set on Needles Campground and you are blocked from landing a site during the popular spring and fall seasons, there's always the brutally hot (100°+) days in the heart of summer or the cold (lows of 0°-20° Fahrenheit possible), short days of winter when all sites are first-come, first-served.
Comments
As of March 2021 it is no better. The programmers have no decent management. In cases like this of dysfunctional websites it is typically because the programming staff is under some unrelated department, e.g., Human Resources. Such managers have no interest or accountability for programming quality or accuracy. They are also the ones that mandate the requirement to hide behind layers to avoid having to answer to their real customers, the general public. Instead they serve their incompetent management for fear of losing job security. Sad but true and no end in sight. Stinks like the days of monopoly only this time it is the government itself. Sigh.
It has nothing to do with a political party - BAH simply isn't the best contractor, and sadly they do a lot of government work. You get what you pay for, and it's unfortunately our tax dollars paying BAH for a subpar solution.
It should not require a forensic review to sort this out. Should be simple to figure out the who's of who has gotten those reservations just a second before other people who are trying. My best guess is that someone, SOMEONE, may well have a flame-red face when the results are posted.
Camping is a great way to unwind and get away from all the "modern" problems, at least for that duration
https://campinggears.ph/outdoor-excursions-the-five-best-campsites-near-...
Getting a campsite in Arches is a joke. I am convinced that a computer buys them up. The show available at 9:59am EST and at 10, I add to my cart and they are already gone. The has happened with several different days. It might be helpful if you can book any site, rather than a specific one. At least you might have a chance getting somethin.
So...if scalpers are buying up spots, where do they resell them? Craigslist?
I recently went to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and was told that I would be fined $500 if I tried to stay in an empty camp that was reserved, even if it was late and the people did not show up. We tried to reserve a campsite on Recreation.gov before heading out but everything was already reserved. We made the decision to go anyway and hoped we could find a way to camp when we got there. There were only about 4 sites occupied when we arrived and it was apparent that many people were just not going to show up. There must have been at least 8 to 10 campsites that sat empty all night while we were forced to leave and drive several hours to find a place to stay. We had money and there were many, many empty campsites, but there was no way for us to take over a vacant site. I went through this same scenario 3 years ago at Chaco and there were even more empty camps that stayed that way all night. We slept in the car and someone finally gave us their reserved spot the next day that had another night or two on the reservation, so we were able to stay. Perhaps we broke the "law" back then? Outlaw campers? That is what it felt like this time. I was being threatened with criminal consequences for wanting to sleep in one of many empty camps as night was falling.
Recreation.gov has changed the way we connect with the land and not necessarily for the better. We should want local people to feel like they have access to their local lands, This is how we increase the likelihood that people will support preserving these special places instead of despising such efforts. We should recognize that this system has great potential to prevent access to these opportunities for people of lower socioeconomic status who may not have a computer and good internet service. This is becoming even more of an elitist system of access. One's ability to successfully reserve river permits and campsites is often a matter of having really good internet service as things frequently get taken very fast when open or unclaimed reservations are released.
On average, I apply for about 5 river permits through the lottery every year and have done so for the last 11 years. To be fair, most were before Recreation.gov came online. However, I have never been successful in winning even one permit through the lottery in those 11 years and it seems like things are getting worse and worse each year. Most people I know are also not successful most years. This year, no one I know was successful in securing a permit through the lottery and I was the only person who was successful in securing a late-season cancellation or unclaimed permit on a short river section.
Recreation.gov has taken what was generally a simple process and made it a chaotic and stressful process. The system works well for people who have their life planned 4+ months in advance. Many of my friends are medical and mental health providers and I largely work with at-risk youth. Some friends have been on the front line working in emergency rooms through this pandemic and need places to decompress without more stress. That has not been the case. Recreation.gov has made access to wilderness experiences a commodity where the only thing that seems to matter is profit, even at the expense of the experience. It's like selling tickets to get a seat in your local church or packaging nature like a bottle of water.
Recreation.gov has the potential to expand access without degrading local access or the experience. There should always be some first come first serve sites available in campgrounds. There should always be a way to access permits at the site. There should be significant consequences for people who do not show up for their reservation, which means you need a system of accountability. This means a significant financial loss if you do not cancel within a week or two before your reservation and consequences (like being banned from making reservations for a period of time). The river permit system needs to be weighted so the same people are not the only ones running a particular river each year. The Grand Canyon was able to improve its reservation system when it implemented a weighted system. It is inevitable and will become more and more obvious each year.
Like most things, we are not going to see Recreation.gov going away anytime soon. However, we need to make adjustments so we do not destroy the very essence of the experience we are trying to protect.
Quit having kids..you really think the problem is everyome else???? ITS YOU! Where are all these people gonna go..just disappear so we can pretend like were so special? Did your book of procreation idiocy tell you that???