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Man, I may be in the minority here, but I find recreation.gov to be one of the very few excellent government websites. We use it every summer for whitewater ra

Man, I may be in the minority here, but I find recreation.gov to be one of the very few excellent government websites. We use it every summer for whitewater rafting and camping reservations. You can disagree with how permits/reservations are offered (e.g., lottery, first-come, etc.), but none of those decisions are made by BAH. They were given a task and, unlike so many government contractors, did it very well and relatively rapidly. The fee structure can be changed, but whatever the magic was, I wish it were repeated throughout government at every level. I think the biggest issue with recreation.gov is that so very many people are desperate to use public lands. Population levels in the western US have exploded in the last twenty years and we've developed almost no additional recreation opportunities. For so long as that's true, the scarcity and price problems are only going to increase. But at least we have a well-functioning website with which to tackle the problem.

Aunche 4y ago
> Population levels in the western US have exploded in the last twenty years and we've developed almost no additional recreation opportunities. There are a lot of great places for hiking and camping. The problem is that everyone wants to go to "the best" places, so you end up with a lot of people competing for a permit for Mt. Whitney rather than go for a similar alternative like Mt. Langley.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Around Berlin it's the same. There are places where everyone is, but 1km away same nice place, totally empty.
  - jan_Inkepa 4y ago
    What would your favourite places on the outskirts be, out of interest?
- babyshake 4y ago
  I would love to hear about some good natural park arbitrage opportunities. But as with all arbitrage the opportunity decreases once it is well known.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    the best part of national parks: exploring them. Pick one, go. If it's a national park it's good. I checked a list for the best to worst. The worst is the gateway arch. That's still worth a trip, great museum, beautiful grounds, and a crazy building.
- pengaru 4y ago
  Keep telling enough people about Mt. Langley and you'll find the same problem. Social media has in my opinion turned this into a shit show. I've done a lot of hiking and camping over the years, and all it takes is enough reviews and "influencers" to talk about some beautiful natural place and seemingly overnight you'll have hoards of people rushing to the view to get their selfie then immediately leave. It's maddening because these kinds of visitors just generate a lot of traffic to fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie. They largely don't care about what's become of the experience of actually spending time there, because they don't value the experience. It's just getting a photo/video for their $fb_insta_tiktok_whatevers_hot then get back on the road for the next place on the list. At most they're annoyed by delays. It was better when these people stuck to the theme parks.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    This is true for a lot of things like restaurants, but hiking is one of the few areas where I don't think this is the case. People don't just casually decide to summit the tallest mountain in the contiguous US. Everyone there has likely trained on lesser known trails. The thing is, there is only one Whitney, but there are a couple dozen Langley's, and hundreds of even lesser known hikes of similar rigor. If all these become saturated, that's also good because that means Americans wouldn't be so fat!
    - dmix 4y ago
      It's only really a downside for the casuals who will go on Google and hit up one of the top 5 results on Tripadvisor. As long as it's not not top-ranking or there's a barrier to entry then it will be limited. Ultimately this is just the new hyper-culture we live in where leisure is now available to tons of people thanks to economics, combined with population growth. The hobbyists who are dedicated will always find new high quality options... just like restaurants/bars/fashion/etc. Which is probably why having a more liberal system to develop recreational places for the more...casual/friendly audience could be a good thing. At least for getting people to enjoy the outdoors in peace and get out of traffic.
      - 4y ago
a5seo 4y ago
It’s a nightmare for booking timed entry reservations. Rocky Mountain National Park opens reservations on the 1st of each summer month for the upcoming month and the site is just slammed. You click a reservation time, spin spin spin, then error. It’s honestly infuriating when you really need to get 2 or 3 days of reservations before 8am for long hikes so you know, you don’t get killed by lightning, and the website just screws you over. I’d love to FOIA their analytics data and find out how many times users get errored out after selecting a time slot. The head of Colorado’s energy agency literally almost died this summer because he couldn’t get an early enough reservation. This stuff actually is life and death.
- tjr225 4y ago
- zmj 4y ago
  I booked the 5-7am slot at RMNP every week this summer and had no problems, including July 4. If you're doing anything that's life and death, you arrive before 5am anyway. The accident you reference mentioned that he knew it was a lazy choice: > This summer the park continued a timed-entry system it launched in 2021. The program requires visitors to schedule and reserve windows of time to enter the park. Toor said he wanted to start earlier but was only able to secure an 8 a.m. entry reservation. Feduschak and Gaines, who ascended a much more technical route, entered the park before the timed entry system starts at 5 a.m. > “Eight was a late start, but we didn’t quite have the oomph to get in before the 5 a.m. cutoff,” Toor said. “Maybe we just need to suck it up and get there before 5 a.m.”
  - a5seo 4y ago
    I’m glad you didn’t have any problems getting reservations. That wasn’t my experience. Fwiw, I mainly fly fish. I need to be in by 8am so I can hike to a high lake and get 3-4 hrs of fishing before the storm clouds roll in. It’s a different use case because it’s not helpful to me to be there crazy early, unlike climbers and through hikers who, sure, can start as early as they want. I kind of do need timed entry to work. And it just doesn’t. But good for you and your good fortune. I guess I should just be luckier or drop fly fishing. Sucks to be me, amiright? The issue is that the site falls over under load. Or seems to, hence my point about getting their analytics data via a FOIA request. They probably need to use Cloudflare’s queue. But what incentive do they have? They’re selling out every reservation and getting every $2 fee they can. It doesn’t matter if the user experience is unpredictable and capricious.
giantg2 4y ago
Considering there is more federal land out west, it seems like there's no real issue. The east has the same or higher population with significantly smaller federal land.
carom 4y ago
Agree here. I LOVE recreation.gov, it is so great. I just booked a site for August next year. That isn't too say the fees shouldn't be better directed to public agencies. Still though, absolutely amazing site, great app, I'm happy to pay a little fee to BAH for it.
- pempem 4y ago
  And BAH is happy to accept it in perpetuity! The site is great. This is still another example of sending taxpayer dollars to private organizations because public offices aren't well funded enough to execute these things on their own.
  - mst 4y ago
    I suspect it's part that and part that after healthcare.gov all the public employees are scared shitless of being held responsible for another incident like that, and believe (probably correctly) that outsourcing it means they can get at least most of the blame for failed projects to land with the external company.
    - pempem 4y ago
      Ah yes totally. The best reason to hire consultants. Shit umbrella ^_^
zmj 4y ago
Yep. I use recreation.gov for entry permits into Rocky Mountain National Park every week in the summer, and I’ve never had a technical issue with it.
cheriot 4y ago
Turn it into an API and we'll have better ones. There's no justification for the ridiculous fees they're charging. Pure regulatory capture.
StillBored 4y ago
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.
- colingoodman 4y ago
  The fully booked with empty campsites thing drives me crazy; I see it quite often as well. Finding dispersed camping areas seems to be the way to go.
- annoyingnoob 4y ago
  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.
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  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.
  - briffle 4y ago
nappy-doo 4y ago
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  I work for a lumber company in the PNW.
LarsDu88 4y ago
prescriptivist 4y ago
I'm glad it works for you but man I am peeved that they instituted it in the katahdin woods and waters national monument area of the east branch of the penobscot in maine. People have been just heading down that waterway on trips since time immemorial and it's generally not a problem finding a site, but if it's particularly busy you would pull up and ask someone if they don't mind sharing. I've never turned a person down and I never will, but also I've never paid for a campsite on a river. I feel like paying to book a site just changes the dynamic of a shared waterway so much.
- screye 4y ago
  Don't Maine residents have free access to all of Katahdin ? I thought the reservation system was only needed for out of state people.
  - prescriptivist 4y ago
    ahepp is correct, there is Baxter State Park which -- is actually not quite a state park and is instead administered as a quasi-independent concern that adheres to the goals of the original land grant to the state, which is to provide an accessible wilderness area to the people of Maine -- and there is katahdin woods and waters national monument which falls under the purview of the national park service. The katahdin woods and waters national monument is the result of the founder of Burts Bees buying up swaths of privately owned land over the years via a corporation and then ultimately donating that land to the national park service. While this seems like a good thing in general it's complicated by Mainers somewhat unique relationship to recreation on private land and the concept up here of "traditional use" versus a kind of chain reaction of regulated formal use practices that were triggered by the national monument designation. The two parks border each other in areas and share some waterways.
    - prescriptivist 4y ago
      Also to clarify Mainers have to reserve and pay for camping spots in Baxter, it just costs less for us. Day use is free. It's a very popular and beautiful place. In my opinion Baxter is the crown jewel of Maine and I'm happy for all of the tourists to fight it out over Acadia.

Aunche 4y ago

> Population levels in the western US have exploded in the last twenty years and we've developed almost no additional recreation opportunities. There are a lot of great places for hiking and camping. The problem is that everyone wants to go to "the best" places, so you end up with a lot of people competing for a permit for Mt. Whitney rather than go for a similar alternative like Mt. Langley.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Around Berlin it's the same. There are places where everyone is, but 1km away same nice place, totally empty.
- jan_Inkepa 4y ago
  What would your favourite places on the outskirts be, out of interest?
babyshake 4y ago
I would love to hear about some good natural park arbitrage opportunities. But as with all arbitrage the opportunity decreases once it is well known.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  the best part of national parks: exploring them. Pick one, go. If it's a national park it's good. I checked a list for the best to worst. The worst is the gateway arch. That's still worth a trip, great museum, beautiful grounds, and a crazy building.
pengaru 4y ago
Keep telling enough people about Mt. Langley and you'll find the same problem. Social media has in my opinion turned this into a shit show. I've done a lot of hiking and camping over the years, and all it takes is enough reviews and "influencers" to talk about some beautiful natural place and seemingly overnight you'll have hoards of people rushing to the view to get their selfie then immediately leave. It's maddening because these kinds of visitors just generate a lot of traffic to fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie. They largely don't care about what's become of the experience of actually spending time there, because they don't value the experience. It's just getting a photo/video for their $fb_insta_tiktok_whatevers_hot then get back on the road for the next place on the list. At most they're annoyed by delays. It was better when these people stuck to the theme parks.
- Aunche 4y ago
  This is true for a lot of things like restaurants, but hiking is one of the few areas where I don't think this is the case. People don't just casually decide to summit the tallest mountain in the contiguous US. Everyone there has likely trained on lesser known trails. The thing is, there is only one Whitney, but there are a couple dozen Langley's, and hundreds of even lesser known hikes of similar rigor. If all these become saturated, that's also good because that means Americans wouldn't be so fat!
  - dmix 4y ago
    It's only really a downside for the casuals who will go on Google and hit up one of the top 5 results on Tripadvisor. As long as it's not not top-ranking or there's a barrier to entry then it will be limited. Ultimately this is just the new hyper-culture we live in where leisure is now available to tons of people thanks to economics, combined with population growth. The hobbyists who are dedicated will always find new high quality options... just like restaurants/bars/fashion/etc. Which is probably why having a more liberal system to develop recreational places for the more...casual/friendly audience could be a good thing. At least for getting people to enjoy the outdoors in peace and get out of traffic.
    - 4y ago

a5seo 4y ago

It’s a nightmare for booking timed entry reservations. Rocky Mountain National Park opens reservations on the 1st of each summer month for the upcoming month and the site is just slammed. You click a reservation time, spin spin spin, then error. It’s honestly infuriating when you really need to get 2 or 3 days of reservations before 8am for long hikes so you know, you don’t get killed by lightning, and the website just screws you over. I’d love to FOIA their analytics data and find out how many times users get errored out after selecting a time slot. The head of Colorado’s energy agency literally almost died this summer because he couldn’t get an early enough reservation. This stuff actually is life and death.

tjr225 4y ago
zmj 4y ago
I booked the 5-7am slot at RMNP every week this summer and had no problems, including July 4. If you're doing anything that's life and death, you arrive before 5am anyway. The accident you reference mentioned that he knew it was a lazy choice: > This summer the park continued a timed-entry system it launched in 2021. The program requires visitors to schedule and reserve windows of time to enter the park. Toor said he wanted to start earlier but was only able to secure an 8 a.m. entry reservation. Feduschak and Gaines, who ascended a much more technical route, entered the park before the timed entry system starts at 5 a.m. > “Eight was a late start, but we didn’t quite have the oomph to get in before the 5 a.m. cutoff,” Toor said. “Maybe we just need to suck it up and get there before 5 a.m.”
- a5seo 4y ago
  I’m glad you didn’t have any problems getting reservations. That wasn’t my experience. Fwiw, I mainly fly fish. I need to be in by 8am so I can hike to a high lake and get 3-4 hrs of fishing before the storm clouds roll in. It’s a different use case because it’s not helpful to me to be there crazy early, unlike climbers and through hikers who, sure, can start as early as they want. I kind of do need timed entry to work. And it just doesn’t. But good for you and your good fortune. I guess I should just be luckier or drop fly fishing. Sucks to be me, amiright? The issue is that the site falls over under load. Or seems to, hence my point about getting their analytics data via a FOIA request. They probably need to use Cloudflare’s queue. But what incentive do they have? They’re selling out every reservation and getting every $2 fee they can. It doesn’t matter if the user experience is unpredictable and capricious.

giantg2 4y ago

Considering there is more federal land out west, it seems like there's no real issue. The east has the same or higher population with significantly smaller federal land.

carom 4y ago

Agree here. I LOVE recreation.gov, it is so great. I just booked a site for August next year. That isn't too say the fees shouldn't be better directed to public agencies. Still though, absolutely amazing site, great app, I'm happy to pay a little fee to BAH for it.

pempem 4y ago
And BAH is happy to accept it in perpetuity! The site is great. This is still another example of sending taxpayer dollars to private organizations because public offices aren't well funded enough to execute these things on their own.
- mst 4y ago
  I suspect it's part that and part that after healthcare.gov all the public employees are scared shitless of being held responsible for another incident like that, and believe (probably correctly) that outsourcing it means they can get at least most of the blame for failed projects to land with the external company.
  - pempem 4y ago
    Ah yes totally. The best reason to hire consultants. Shit umbrella ^_^

zmj 4y ago

Yep. I use recreation.gov for entry permits into Rocky Mountain National Park every week in the summer, and I’ve never had a technical issue with it.

cheriot 4y ago

Turn it into an API and we'll have better ones. There's no justification for the ridiculous fees they're charging. Pure regulatory capture.

StillBored 4y ago

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.

colingoodman 4y ago
The fully booked with empty campsites thing drives me crazy; I see it quite often as well. Finding dispersed camping areas seems to be the way to go.
annoyingnoob 4y ago
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.
hcurtiss 4y ago
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.
- briffle 4y ago

nappy-doo 4y ago

hcurtiss 4y ago
I work for a lumber company in the PNW.

LarsDu88 4y ago

prescriptivist 4y ago

I'm glad it works for you but man I am peeved that they instituted it in the katahdin woods and waters national monument area of the east branch of the penobscot in maine. People have been just heading down that waterway on trips since time immemorial and it's generally not a problem finding a site, but if it's particularly busy you would pull up and ask someone if they don't mind sharing. I've never turned a person down and I never will, but also I've never paid for a campsite on a river. I feel like paying to book a site just changes the dynamic of a shared waterway so much.

screye 4y ago
Don't Maine residents have free access to all of Katahdin ? I thought the reservation system was only needed for out of state people.
- prescriptivist 4y ago
  ahepp is correct, there is Baxter State Park which -- is actually not quite a state park and is instead administered as a quasi-independent concern that adheres to the goals of the original land grant to the state, which is to provide an accessible wilderness area to the people of Maine -- and there is katahdin woods and waters national monument which falls under the purview of the national park service. The katahdin woods and waters national monument is the result of the founder of Burts Bees buying up swaths of privately owned land over the years via a corporation and then ultimately donating that land to the national park service. While this seems like a good thing in general it's complicated by Mainers somewhat unique relationship to recreation on private land and the concept up here of "traditional use" versus a kind of chain reaction of regulated formal use practices that were triggered by the national monument designation. The two parks border each other in areas and share some waterways.
  - prescriptivist 4y ago
    Also to clarify Mainers have to reserve and pay for camping spots in Baxter, it just costs less for us. Day use is free. It's a very popular and beautiful place. In my opinion Baxter is the crown jewel of Maine and I'm happy for all of the tourists to fight it out over Acadia.