CAMPANAC, for the record.
CAMPANAC is a free almanac of every federal campground in America, built by More Than Just Parks. Every fact on it is sourced to the agency that said it, and it takes nothing from anyone’s booking. Quote anything on the site with a link. For anything else, write to us.
What it is
One page for every federal campground and every campsite in the country, read nightly from Recreation.gov, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management: what’s open, what it costs, who runs it, whether you can still get a site this weekend, and what the agency itself said when it closed something. The CAMPANAC Map is the whole country on one screen, coloured by what’s left this weekend. The walk-up campgrounds, the ones that still work the way they did when we were kids, come first.
The numbers tonight
- 7,628 federal campgrounds, each with its own page.
- 1,622 of them still take walk-ups.
- 2,202 aren’t on recreation.gov at all.
- 125,677 campsites the agencies file for overnight use, one page each.
Counted from the agencies’ own records, refreshed nightly. How we know.
Who made it
Will and Jim Pattiz, the Pattiz brothers, co-founders of More Than Just Parks. They’ve spent a decade filming these places for the agencies that manage them. CAMPANAC exists to save camping: to end what everyone loathes about getting a site now, and to keep what we’re losing.
What we’re for
Every campground should hold some of its sites for whoever drives up. A public campground closed for want of money or people should have to say so. Booking six months ahead isn’t something everyone can do. We say all three on every page where they apply, and we give readers a way to tell the people who decide.
Reach us
ask@morethanjustparks.com. We answer. For photographs of these places, More Than Just Parks holds the archive; ask and say what it’s for.
Read the full statement at The promise, and our reporting on public lands at More Than Just Parks on Substack.