The weekend is full. The campground isn’t.
Federal campgrounds don’t fill up. Their Fridays and Saturdays do. Across every campground recreation.gov publishes availability for, 37.2% of the site-nights the agencies were offering on a Friday or Saturday were booked, against 21.8% Monday through Thursday, over the next 28 nights. Read 15:57 UTC yesterday.
Every reservable campground, in its place: the ones whose weekends fill.
How much of the night is gone
the 28 nights from tonight, by day of week read 15:57 UTCThe share of the site-nights the agencies were offering that had been booked when the snapshot was read. The denominator is what was on offer, never the campground’s size: a 240-site campground running 40 sites in October is 100% booked when those 40 are gone, not 17%. Every night in this window sits inside the same four weeks, so the days are compared against the same weather and the same open inventory.
Busiest night Saturday at 37.8%, quietest Wednesday at 20.5%. Derived: booked site-nights divided by offered site-nights (Available plus Reserved), summed over every campground with a snapshot no older than 36 hours.
Sold out this Saturday, room midweek
the same campgrounds, three days apart read 15:57 UTC352 campgrounds have every site they’re offering taken on Sat, Oct 31, and 210 of them have a site free on one of the four nights from Mon, Nov 2 to Thu, Nov 5. Counting only the campgrounds offering more than one site that night (a lookout or a single cabin can’t be half full), it’s 66 sold out and 50 of those with room midweek.
That’s the whole argument, and it’s the reason this site exists in the shape it does. The campground isn’t full. The weekend is.
The twelve with the most sites on offer that Saturday, of 210. A midweek count larger than the Saturday one isn’t an error: the agencies put a different number of sites on offer on different nights, and each figure counts what was on offer that night. Every campground here links to its own thirty-night strip.
What this is, and what it isn’t
read this before you quote a number off itWe don’t know whether anybody slept there. recreation.gov publishes what’s booked. It doesn’t publish whether the party arrived, and no reading in this record can tell a full campground from a campground full of reservations nobody used. So this page never says no-show, never says abandoned and never says ghost camping. It says what was offered and what was taken, which is all the record carries.
The agencies do price the no-show, and that’s quotable. 510 campgrounds carry no-show terms in the cancellation policy on their own recreation.gov record, and 148 of them carry this sentence word for word: “No-shows are assessed $20.00 service fee and forfeit the first night's rate.” The government charging for a no-show is evidence that a no-show happens. It isn’t a count of how often.
It’s one reading a day, not a live feed. The recorder asks recreation.gov’s own availability endpoint what’s open at every campground with a facility id and a booking link, once each morning at 11:10 UTC, and writes it down. Between that reading and this page, sites have been booked and cancelled. Nothing older than 36 hours is rendered anywhere on this site, so if the daily pass stops these numbers disappear rather than quietly ageing.
Open means one thing: the status “Available”. “Reserved” is booked. Everything else the API can say (Not Reservable, Closed, NYR) means the site wasn’t on offer that night, and those nights are in neither number here. A campground shut for the season and a campground booked solid both read zero available, and treating them as the same thing is the single easiest way to publish a lie about camping.
Some campgrounds can’t sell out at all. The ones that take walk-ups have nothing to book and no availability API, so they appear nowhere on this page. They’re the answer to it, and this weekend’s map is where you find the room that’s left.