CampsiteScan

CampsiteScan checks availability at more than 600 California campgrounds, around 25,000 individual campsites, every few minutes around the clock. This page explains what we measure, how we measure it, and what the numbers in our guides actually mean.

What we check

We watch the two reservation systems that cover nearly all bookable public camping in California: ReserveCalifornia for state parks and recreation.gov for national parks and forests. For every campground we track which sites are open for which nights, the same information you would see by searching the booking site yourself, collected on a repeating cycle.

What we record

Once a day we save a snapshot for each campground: how full it is on weekends, how full it is midweek, and a sellout score that combines the two. Separately, every time a booked site opens back up, that cancellation is logged with a timestamp. These two records power our guides, including the hardest campgrounds to book ranking.

What the numbers mean

A campground showing no open sites is sold out for the window we measured, not forever. Cancellations reopen sites constantly, which is the whole reason our alerts exist. And a campground showing nothing at all may simply be closed for the season: from outside the booking systems, closed and sold out can look identical, so we publish no data rather than guessing.

Using this data

The dataset grows every day and we are happy to share it. If you are a journalist or researcher and want a custom cut, regional numbers, or more detail on the method, contact us at campsitescan.com and we will pull it for you.