Yosemite runs exactly one camping lottery, and it is for Camp 4. Everything else in the Valley (Upper Pines, Lower Pines, North Pines) is first-click at 7am on the 15th of the month, five months ahead. If you searched “yosemite camping lottery” hoping a random draw exists for a Pines site, it doesn’t. You either beat the clock on release day or you catch a cancellation.

Searches for “yosemite camping lottery” are up 200% over five years, so a lot of people are hunting for the thing that doesn’t exist. Here’s the one that does.

## What Camp 4 is

Camp 4 is the walk-in tent campground at the west end of Yosemite Valley, below the Yosemite Falls trail. It’s the historic climbers’ camp. No cars at the sites, shared sites with strangers, tents only. It’s cheap, it’s loud, and it’s about a mile from the Valley’s busiest stretch. People love it or hate it.

In peak season it doesn’t take advance reservations. It takes a daily lottery on recreation.gov, entered the day before you want to arrive [VERIFY: 2027 lottery season dates]. Outside peak season it works differently [VERIFY: whether Camp 4 takes standard reservations or first-come in the off-season].

## How the lottery works

You apply on recreation.gov the day before your arrival date, during a set window [VERIFY: entry window hours]. You pay a small application fee whether you win or not [VERIFY: current application fee]. Results come by email later that day [VERIFY: when results are sent]. If you win, you pay for the site and show up. If you lose, you try again the next day, or you go somewhere else.

One entry covers your group up to a limit [VERIFY: group size limit and how many people share a site]. Sites at Camp 4 are shared, so a party of two will be placed with strangers. That’s part of the deal.

The lottery is one day at a time. There’s no way to lock in a week. If you want five nights at Camp 4, you’re entering five lotteries, and you’re only guaranteed to be on the losing side of at least one on a summer weekend.

## The odds

We don’t know them, and we haven’t seen the park publish them. Anyone quoting a percentage is guessing. What we can say is that Camp 4 is small, the Valley’s three drive-in campgrounds scored 98 out of 100 on our sellout scale in late September 2026 (100 means nothing bookable on any night), and demand for the Valley doesn’t drop just because you moved from a car site to a tent site. Treat the Camp 4 lottery as a chance, not a plan.

## The other lottery people mean

Some “yosemite lottery” searches are for Half Dome, which has its own permit lottery for the cables [VERIFY: 2027 Half Dome lottery dates]. That’s a hiking permit, not a campsite. Winning it gets you up the mountain; you still need somewhere to sleep. The difference between all of Yosemite’s permits and reservations is laid out in [entry reservations vs camping reservations](https://campsitescan.com/articles/yosemite-entry-vs-camping-reservations).

## What to do when you lose

Camp 4 is the fallback for people who missed the Pines release. When Camp 4 falls through too, there are three real options.

The first is a Pines cancellation. Upper Pines has 235 sites, North Pines 81, Lower Pines 74. That’s 390 bookings, and some fraction of them gets cancelled every week. Across everything we watch, three quarters of the cancellations we caught came back within a week of the arrival date, half of them three to six days out. Cancellations cluster on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. A midweek arrival helps: on recreation.gov campgrounds in California, 66% of weekend nights were sold out against 45% of midweek nights. The live page for [Lower Pines](https://campsitescan.com/campgrounds/lower-pines) shows what’s open now.

The second is Tuolumne Meadows. It has 277 sites, more than the three Pines campgrounds put together, and it rated only Moderate on our scale in summer (High in autumn, as the season closes). It produced 10 alerts in our last 28 days, which means sites come back there at a rate you can actually use. It’s a long drive from the Valley over Tioga Road, and it’s cold at night, but it’s Yosemite and you can book it.

The third is Hodgdon Meadow or Wawona. Both are drive-in campgrounds inside the park, both on the same 15th-of-the-month release as the Valley [VERIFY: 2027 release rules for Hodgdon Meadow and Wawona], and both are less fought over because they’re 45 minutes to an hour from the Valley floor. If the trip is about seeing Yosemite rather than sleeping under Half Dome, either one works.

## Timing the release, if you’d rather not gamble

The Pines campgrounds, plus Wawona, Hodgdon Meadow and Tuolumne, release on recreation.gov at 7:00am Pacific on the 15th of each month, five months ahead, in one-month blocks. Arrivals from July 15 to August 14 open on March 15 [VERIFY: 2027 schedule]. Be logged in, have the campground page open, and have a second and third choice ready. “Yosemite camping reservations 2026” was a breakout search term this year, which is another way of saying the crowd at 6:59am is bigger than it used to be.

Set a free alert on Upper, Lower or North Pines at [campsitescan.com](https://campsitescan.com/) and we email you the moment a site comes back.