The promise.
Camping used to be the most democratic thing you could do in America. A free weekend, a tank of gas, and somewhere out there a place would be waiting. We built CAMPANAC because that’s getting harder every year, and because nobody was keeping a list of the places you can still just show up.
We’ve made America’s public lands our life’s work.
More Than Just Parks is an independent public lands publication and intelligence operation. We came to it as filmmakers, documenting the country’s parks and forests for the agencies that manage them, and spent years in the field learning these places and the people who run them from the inside. The National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Interior Department have hired us to film the lands in their care, our photographs have run in National Geographic, our films have screened inside the U.S. Capitol and The New York Times has featured the work.
Today we publish original reporting on what’s happening to public lands and who’s responsible, almost every day, read by more than 27,000 people including the staff of the largest conservation organizations and the offices on Capitol Hill making the decisions we cover. We’re funded entirely by our readers and take no money from the industries we cover. That’s the same reason CAMPANAC has no ads and takes no cut of your booking.
It started with a trip. We loaded our grandmother’s Prius with barely enough gear and even less of a plan, pointed it west out of Georgia, and fell in love with public lands somewhere around mile 1,600. Somewhere in the years since, that trip stopped being possible for most people. Show up without a reservation now and you’re not spontaneous, you’re a problem. You roll into camp, count a dozen empty sites, and get turned away anyway, because someone with better Wi-Fi booked it six months ago and bailed.
So we wrote about it, and then we built this. CAMPANAC is the list we wanted that afternoon: every campground on America’s public lands, the 1,623 you can still take without a reservation, and the thousands recreation.gov never shows you.
The reporting behind it: Reservation Gods: Who Stole Our Campsites and Sold Them Back to Us, More Than Just Parks, April 2025. More about us at morethanjustparks.com.
What we believe.
Six positions, not six data points. They’re ours, we argue them at length in the reporting, and we’re fighting to make them real.
Every federal campground should keep a share of its sites first-come, first-served.
Not as a courtesy a district ranger can withdraw in a bad budget year. As a rule, with a number attached. Walk-up camping is the only kind that works for people whose lives don’t run six months ahead, and once a campground flips to reservation-only it almost never flips back.
Ghost camping is a scourge.
A site booked months ago by someone who never came isn’t full. It’s empty. Rangers should be able to release a no-show after a set hour and give it to the person standing in the loop, the way every hotel in America has done for a century. A laminated tag shouldn’t beat a family with a tent.
No junk fees.
What a night on public land costs should be the number on the sign. Not the number on the sign plus a service fee, a processing fee, a change fee, and a cancellation fee you forfeit when your kid gets sick.
No private company should take a cut of your booking.
Recreation.gov is run under contract by Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor, and the fee structure pays out per transaction. Pay a platform per transaction and you have paid it to make the system busier, not simpler. Whoever runs the front door to public land belongs on a flat fee with real oversight.
Show the receipts.
How much money moves through the federal booking system, where it lands, and how many reserved nights nobody slept in. It’s our land and our money. None of that should take a records request to see.
Fund people, not portals.
Reservation-only is what a staffing shortage looks like from inside a campground. Agencies were told to do more with less, so they automated the gate instead of hiring the ranger. The fix is rangers, seasonal crews, and clean bathrooms, not another app.
What this site will always be.
- Free forever.
Every campground, every page, every alert. No paywall, no premium tier, no trial that ends.
- No ads.
Nothing on this site is placed here because someone paid for the space.
- No booking kickbacks.
When we link you to recreation.gov or an operator, we don’t get a cut. We link to the place you actually book.
- We never sell your email.
Give us an email for a campsite watch and it joins the More Than Just Parks list, so you hear from us when public lands are on the line. We don’t sell it, rent it, or hand it to anyone else, and one click gets you off it for good.
- No dark patterns.
No fake urgency, no countdown that isn’t a real release date, no button that pretends to be something else.
- A source on every fact.
Every data block on this site says where it came from and when. If we can’t source it, we show the gap instead of guessing.
- Corrections, in the open.
If a fact is wrong, tell us at ask@morethanjustparks.com. We fix it and the nightly audit keeps it fixed.
- Public lands only.
We cover campgrounds on land that belongs to everyone. We won’t become a directory of private RV parks and parking lots.
Will and Jim Pattiz, More Than Just Parks · morethanjustparks.com