Where you can still get a site.
Every morning this atlas asks recreation.gov what’s open at every federal campground it will answer for. Here’s California the weekend of Nov 13–14, coloured by how much of it’s left.
Every federal campground in California, in its place.
66 campgrounds in California have a site open both nights.
read 15:57 UTCWhat these five numbers mean
“Open both nights” means at least one site read Available on Friday and at least one read Available on Saturday. The record counts sites per night, not which site, so it can’t promise the same site twice. That’s a question only the booking page can answer, and every campground below links to it.
A site-night is one site for one night: two nights at a 40-site campground is 80 site-nights. The denominator is always what the agency was OFFERING, never the campground’s size. A 240-site campground running 40 sites in October is 100% booked when those 40 are gone, not 17%.
California the weekend of Nov 13–14
179 campgrounds with a reading read 15:57 UTCReading the weekend’s pins…
543 located federal campgrounds in California aren’t on this map at all, because recreation.gov publishes no availability for them: they take no bookings, or they book somewhere else entirely. Drawing them grey would say they’re closed, and nobody has measured them. Most of them are first-come, and a first-come campground can’t sell out, because there’s nothing to book.
327 first-come campgrounds in California →How to read this map
Pin colour is the share of the site-nights the agency was offering on those two nights that still read Available at 15:57 UTC yesterday. Hover a pin for the campground’s own count, click it for the page.
- Wide open · half the offered site-nights or more still free
- Room left · a fifth to a half still free
- Nearly full · under a fifth still free
- Fully booked · every site-night the agency offered is taken
- None offered · the agency described it and offered no site at all: not on the booking system, or not yet released. It’s a different kind of fact from a share, so it isn’t a fifth step on the ramp.
- Closed · the agency’s own closure notice or closed status, or recreation.gov listing every site closed that weekend. A closure wins over a booked reading everywhere on this site, so a closed campground is never in the fully booked count, whatever leftover reservations its record still carries.
The map opens on California, and the whole country is one click back.
The ten with the most open ground in California
the weekend of Nov 13–14, by open site-nights read 15:57 UTC
Why these ten, and why in this order
Ranked by open site-nights rather than by how many campgrounds have a site free, because one large reservoir campground with 300 sites free is a better answer to “can I go camping” than thirty small ones with one each. It’s a national ranking by size of opening, so it favours big campgrounds; the map above and your own state are how you find a small one near you.
Where California stands the weekend of Nov 13–14
against the country, by open site-nights read 15:57 UTC50.6% of the 5,496 site-nights California’s 100 bookable federal campgrounds are offering the weekend of Nov 13–14 are still free.
Arkansas leads with 2,976 open site-nights.
28,701 of the 42,938 site-nights on offer across the country are still free. California is below that at 50.6%.
Pick a state
on the map’s own ramp: pine where the room is, ember where it’s gone read 15:57 UTCEvery state with a reading · 42 of 51
The figure is open site-nights of the site-nights on offer in that state the weekend of Nov 13–14. A state missing from this list has no campground on recreation.gov’s booking system with a reading for the weekend of Nov 13–14. That isn’t the same as having nowhere to camp: first-come campgrounds never appear here at all.
What this is, and what it isn’t
Read this before you trust a colour
It’s provider data, once a day. Every number on this page comes from recreation.gov’s own availability API, read once each morning at 11:10 UTC and written down. It isn’t a live booking feed and it isn’t a forecast. Between that reading and the moment you look at this page, sites have been booked and cancelled. The colour tells you where to look; the booking page tells you what’s actually there.
Open means one thing: the status “Available”. That’s exactly what The Watch emails on, so an alert and this map can’t disagree in front of the same reader. “Reserved” is booked. Everything else (Not Reservable, Closed, NYR) is the agency saying the site wasn’t on offer that night, and those nights are the grey, not the red.
A closed weekend isn’t a sold-out weekend. 41 campgrounds in California described the weekend of Nov 13–14 and offered no site at all. Half the federal inventory shuts for the winter and “0 open” is the same number for a campground under three feet of snow as for one booked solid, which is why the recorder stores what was RESERVED as well as what was available and why those two facts are never the same colour here.
Nothing here is older than 36 hours. If the daily pass stops, this map empties rather than quietly ageing: a stale availability number is worse than none, because a reader would drive on it. The newest reading held right now is 15:57 UTC yesterday, and 636 of the 657 California campgrounds with an availability API were reached on that pass.
The picker goes 4 weekends out, which is as far as the agency describes in the two months this recorder reads. A weekend outside a campground’s booking window hasn’t been released yet, and an unreleased weekend is grey here, not open. The release calendar is where that question is answered properly.
The weekend fills; the campground doesn’t. The same snapshots this map is drawn from say that Friday and Saturday nights run about twice as booked as Monday through Thursday, and that most of the campgrounds sold out on a given Saturday have a site free midweek. Booked solid is that reading, with the numbers and the campgrounds behind it.