Camping Reservations

[Merlin]

My wife and I are plotting and scheming camping for 2018. Michigan state parks have a rolling 6 month window for reservations and if you want a lake-front site at the more popular campgrounds, you have to make reservations very early. That means for the in-state camping we are planning in May, we will be making reservations this week and next. They also have a new policy this year that discourages folks from making lots of reservations and then cancelling those they don't use. Penalties of close to 1/2 the total reservation cost kick in for cancelled reservations if you reserve way ahead and then cancel.

I know other park systems have different reservation windows, some as short as 3 months and some as long as a year. We are beginning to talk about going to Alaska in 2018 and we are wondering about making reservations for at least part of a trip in the more popular campgrounds or popular times. Even if we don't go that far north, we will be making some major expeditions in '18.

It would good to hear from others about experiences in making longer trips without any reservations. For those that make trips without reservations, does that cause any problems and how do you find a campsite each night?

[DavidM]

Merlin:

As you probably know, living here in Connecticut we camp in NPs, SPs, USFS campgrounds, some city campgrounds and once in a great while a Walmart but never in a commercial campground. All of these are in the northeast and almost always during midweek. We haven't reserved much but now that we have gotten to know a few favorite campgrounds we have started reserving to get exactly the site we want.

With no exceptions we have always been able to find a site mid week and often very nice ones with water views, etc all with no reservations. Only twice did it come close: once in early fly fishing season at a Ct SP that fronted a nice trout river and another in New Hampshire on the Kancamagus Highway midweek on the way to last year's Acadia meetup. In both cases, there were good alternatives close by.

So, midweek you should be ok with no reservations if you camp in these kind of places and you have an alternative available.

Weekends (Friday and Saturday night) and holidays of course it is a different story and I wouldn't go anywhere without a reservation unless you are going to a really remote campground off the beaten path.

David

[Capt J-rod]

The sad reality is that we are flooding more campers in but not building new campgrounds. During the week you can pretty much go anywhere but for Friday or Saturday you better have reservations. I had some trouble up by Niagara Falls this year but Walmart made it all better. As the OP stated a lot of people book the sites then cancel when they feel like it.

[ADR]

I've found some popular National Parks you are likely not getting a site even mid week during the summer.  Examples are Rocky Mountain, Yosemite, Redwoods and Yellowstone.   Been there and tried- isn't happening.

I've noticed often sites are reserved and but no one shows up.  According to the rules they usually have to hold a reserved site until check out time the next day when no one shows.   
Been in campgrounds where there may be 4 or 5 sites this happens to...people turned away with empty sites that never get used, especially for one night reservations.    They can't release the site because the renter may show up at 2AM. 

Even worse- a couple of years ago we were in a USFS campground, Cascade near Salida CO,  we had a site reserved for 5 nights.  We arrived a day early and grabbed a non reservable site for the night.  We actually liked that site better than the one we had reserved so we elected to just spend the 5 nights in it instead.
We ok'd this with the host-  who should have taken down the reserved posting at our previously reserved site.
He never did.
Every evening we'd see people riding through looking for a site and our relinquished reserved site sat there empty.   We'd sometimes stop them, point out our old "reserved" site and tell them them could take it and tell the host and pay him.   They usually couldn't even find the host to pay him so they'd stay free I guess, unless they dropped it in the self serve vault.

That was the worst hosting I've ever seen- the guy apparently had a day job elsewhere, would show up at 7 or 8 in the evening, retire to his camper and never even ride through the camp, then leave early the next morning.
IOW didn't do anything for his free site with hookups.

[DavidM]

You may be right about many reserved sites going empty, but I discovered something at Joshua Tree NP years ago that might be standard practice across the country:

I had no reservation as I travelled through the park on a Thursday looking for an empty site. 99% had tags on the post in front of the site and I assumed that meant it was reserved. This was about 2:00 in the afternoon. I finally found an untagged site and stayed there for the night. The next morning I looked around and the vast majority of those tagged sites were empty.

I went over to one site, than another and another and discovered that the tags reserved the site for Friday night not Thursday.

So, particularly mid week, look at the tag and see if the site is reserved for the midweek night. Often it isn't.

Obviously this is poor practice on the part of campground personnel. They should only put a tag on a site on the day it is reserved.

David

[ADR]

I'm familiar with that "pre-tagging".
The reason they do it is so someone doesn't camp in a site on an open night then plan to stay past the first reserved night claiming they didn't know.  Which they wouldn't if the tag for a later date wasn't already up.
Conflicts arise when the site is then tagged for say Friday night after they stayed in it Thursday night then decided to stay on another night  assuming they could.   Maybe they even left for the day early in the morning before it is tagged for that next night, then come back to find someone angrily waiting in their site for them to get their stuff out. Some people have the mistaken idea "they can't make me leave, I'm already in it"

One of our favorite USFS campgrounds in the NC mountains is run by a concessionaire.  Over the years they've converted more and more sites to reservation only.   But the issue is the reservations have to be made 4 days in advance minimum.*
We are retired so if we suddenly decide to go camping tomorrow we can't because we aren't in the reservation 4 day window.  We might find an unreserved site, we might not.
There is no reason they couldn't drop that to one day- they have an office right there with internet, telephones etc.   I can see the 4 day window in the middle of nowhere in which the staff has no way of knowing what reservations have been made until someone drives out there from the office and tells them.
We stayed in a campground in the Poudre River Canyon in CO like that- the hosts had no outside communications whatsoever, no cell service, didn't even have a USFS 2 way which surprised me.  Someone from the office had to drive out each day to tell them what was reserved.

*We don't like making them 4 days ahead because the weather in the mountains can change drastically in hours sometimes.   Then you decide not to go and even if canceled you still forfeit part of the fee and a service charge.