Where you can still get a site.
Every morning this atlas asks recreation.gov what is open at every federal campground it will answer for, and writes the answer down. On Sep 18–19, 1,924 campgrounds have a site open on both nights and 28% of the 2,945 taking bookings are full. Here is the whole country, coloured by how much of it is left, with the 2,833 campgrounds nobody publishes availability for named rather than quietly left off.
“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 cannot promise the same site twice — that is 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.
Where the room is the weekend of Sep 18–19
by open site-nights, not by campground count77.9% of the 8,192 site-nights Oklahoma’s 92 bookable federal campgrounds are offering the weekend of Sep 18–19 are still free.
65.7% of the 9,366 site-nights Arkansas’s 108 bookable federal campgrounds are offering the weekend of Sep 18–19 are still free.
29.3% of the 19,531 site-nights California’s 368 bookable federal campgrounds are offering the weekend of Sep 18–19 are still free.
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. A state missing from this list has fewer open site-nights, not fewer campgrounds.
The country the weekend of Sep 18–19
3,884 campgrounds with a reading2,833 located federal campgrounds are not 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 are closed, and nobody has measured them. Most of them are first-come, and 1,632 first-come campgrounds never sell out — they cannot, because there is nothing to book. That is the answer when this map is red where you were going.
Pin colour is the share of the site-nights the agency was offering on those two nights that still read Available at 18:30 UTC today. Hover a pin for the campground’s own count, click it for the page. The denominator is 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%. The map opens on the lower 48 because that is where all but a handful of these readings are; Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico are drawn and one pan away.
The ten with the most open ground
the weekend of Sep 18–19, by open site-nightsWhat this is, and what it is not
read this before you trust a colourIt is 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 is not a live booking feed and it is not 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 is actually there.
Open means one thing: the status “Available”. That is exactly what The Watch emails on, so an alert and this map cannot disagree in front of the same reader. “Reserved” is booked. Everything else — Not Reservable, Closed, NYR — is the agency saying the site was not on offer that night, and those nights are the grey, not the red.
A closed weekend is not a sold-out weekend. 939 campgrounds described the weekend of Sep 18–19 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 18:30 UTC today, and 4,942 of the 4,984 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 has not been released yet, and an unreleased weekend is grey here, not open. The release calendar is where that question is answered properly.