‘Outside’ Magazine: How to Find a Last-Minute Campsite

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt of an article by Jen Murphy published by Outside magazine. Click here to read the article in full.

Any number of concerns are on our radar as we plan our next trip, from serious issues like how destinations are working to mitigate tourists’ environmental impact to inconveniences like months-long passport wait times. In this column, our travel expert addresses your questions about how to navigate the world. 

All the good campsites are already taken! I want to go camping in one of the big national parks or seashores this summer, but I guess I should have booked a site long ago. (I’m not a planner.) Do I have to write off this idea entirely? — Spontaneous Sally

I, too, grew up thinking camping was meant to be spontaneous. As a kid, my parents would decide on a whim to stuff me and my two siblings in the station wagon with a tent, some fishing rods, and a cooler filled with beer, juice boxes, and everything to make burgers and hot dogs, and drive from our home on the Jersey Shore to a state park in the Poconos or upstate New York. There was never any worry (even from my type A mother) that we wouldn’t find a campsite.

When I moved to Colorado as an adult, however, my friends laughed when I suggested a last-minute camping trip over Fourth of July weekend in Rocky Mountain National Park. “You need to plan months out for that,” they told me.

If you’re hoping to head to the holy grails of national parks (read: Yosemite, in California, or Yellowstone, in Wyoming), you should know that reservations open four to six months in advance and sites get snatched up quicker than tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Also, the pandemic-fueled surge of new campers has created a campsite shortage, making it more difficult than ever to score a spot, even if you do plan ahead.

According to a recent camping report from The Dyrt, a campsite-finding app, 2022 was the hardest year yet to land an available campsite—perhaps not that surprising when you look at the numbers: there are an estimated 80 million Americans who consider themselves campers, 15.5 million of whom only began camping over the past two years. As a result, those surveyed reported it was five times more difficult to find openings compared with 2019, and that sites were twice as scarce as they were in 2021.

Click here to read the article in full.

Source: https://rvbusiness.com/outside-magazine-how-to-find-a-last-minute-campsite/