How CampFinder works

CampFinder is a free tool that watches sold-out campgrounds for you. You tell it which campground you want and which dates, and it polls the reservation system on a schedule. When a night inside your window becomes bookable, usually because someone cancelled, the next check picks it up and sends you an email with the exact sites and dates that opened, plus a direct booking link. You book it yourself on the official site; CampFinder never touches your account or your payment details.

What it covers

CampFinder watches three families of reservation systems:

• Recreation.gov, which handles nearly all federal campgrounds: national parks, national forests, BLM land, and Army Corps of Engineers sites.
• US state and county systems on the UseDirect platform: ReserveCalifornia, Arizona, Alabama (limited), Florida, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Virginia state parks, plus Fairfax County, Maricopa County (limited), and Oregon Metro. Nevada is wired up too, but ReserveNevada currently blocks requests coming from servers, so Nevada watches do not work yet. The home page marks it "soon" until that is fixed.
• Camis GoingToCamp systems, which is where most of Canada books: Parks Canada, BC Parks, Ontario Parks, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, plus regional systems such as Gatineau Park, Thunder Bay, Long Point, Maitland Valley, St. Clair Region, and Algonquin Highlands. The same platform runs Washington, Michigan, and Wisconsin state parks and Tacoma Power parks on the US side.

Not covered: states on ReserveAmerica, Quebec's Sépaq, Yellowstone's five Xanterra-run campgrounds, private campgrounds such as KOA or Hipcamp, and first-come-first-served campgrounds, which have no online inventory to watch in the first place. The full, current list is the "Campgrounds we cover" section at the bottom of the home page.

Setting up a watch

The home page has two ways in.

Explore an area. Type a city or place name, or just click the map to drop a pin, pick your dates and a radius, and hit "Find open sites". CampFinder finds every campground in the circle and checks its live availability for your dates. Campgrounds with open sites show in green with a per-night calendar; full ones are dimmed. Every result has a one-click Watch button, and that is the point: the campgrounds showing "nothing open" are exactly the ones worth watching.

Watches. Each watch is one campground, an arrival date, a checkout date, and a minimum stay. Two details matter:

• The end date is your checkout day, so it is not itself a night you camp. Watching Friday to Sunday means two nights: Friday and Saturday.
• Min nights controls what counts as an alert. With min nights set to 2, a single stray open Tuesday stays silent; you only hear about runs of at least two consecutive open nights on the same site.

You can pause, edit, or delete a watch at any time, and expand any watch with "Sites" to see the current availability calendar for its window.

What happens behind the scenes

A sweep runs on a schedule, every 30 minutes. For each active watch it fetches the availability grid for every month your window touches, then applies two filters: the night must be exactly bookable online (on Recreation.gov that means the status string Available, and nothing else — see the post on what the statuses mean), and it must sit inside a consecutive run at least as long as your minimum stay.

Newly open nights are compared against a ledger of what you have already been told about, so you get one email per opening, not a repeat every half hour. If a night you were alerted about gets booked and later cancelled again, the ledger entry is cleared and you are alerted again. Watches deactivate themselves once their whole window is in the past.

The polling is deliberately polite: requests are spaced out with a delay between each month fetched, results are cached within a sweep so overlapping watches on the same campground cost one request, and the interval is well inside what these systems comfortably tolerate. This keeps the service reliable for everyone; hammering a reservation system every few seconds is how tools get blocked.

What a 30-minute check can and cannot do

Be clear-eyed about what that cadence buys you. It is built for the wide field of campgrounds where a cancellation sits open for hours: that is most of the campgrounds in every system above, most of the year. A half-hourly check catches those openings, and an email you can act on beats a browser tab you keep forgetting to refresh.

It is not built to win a race against bots that hit a reservation site every few seconds. At the handful of campgrounds where that race exists, think Upper Pines in Yosemite on a July weekend, an opening can be booked before our next check runs, and a CampFinder email may arrive after the site is gone. For that specific target, a dedicated fast-polling tool is the better fit. For everywhere else, half-hourly and free gets you the site.

When you get the email

The alert lists each site that opened, its loop, and the exact date ranges that are free, with a link straight to the campground's booking page. Speed still matters: a cancelled weekend at a popular campground can be re-booked within minutes. Open the link, confirm the site and dates, and check out. If someone beats you to it, keep the watch running; cancellations at popular campgrounds come in waves, and the next one may be yours.

The short version

1. Find your campground on the map, or search for it by name.
2. Set your date window and minimum nights, and click Watch.
3. Wait. CampFinder checks every half hour, around the clock.
4. When the email arrives, book quickly on the official site.

That is the whole product. A free account (just your email, no password), no fees, no browser tab you have to keep open.