California Beach Camping: Which Sites Sell Out and Which Don’t

We check every bookable coastal campground in California ourselves, several times a day. Here is which ones are effectively impossible to book right now, which ones still have room, and what to do about the first group.

By CampsiteScan. Updated 11 September 2026. Ratings come from our own checks, not from a booking site.

Which coastal campgrounds sell out

Raw site counts are a bad way to answer this. A number like “7 sites open” is true for about ten minutes and tells you nothing about whether the park is worth trying next month. So we rate each park on a different question: across the nights we can see, how often is there simply nothing left?

Weekends count for more in the rating than midweek nights, because that is when people want to go.

Reading the table

Hearst San Simeon SP, MacKerricher SP, Salt Point SP and Silver Strand SB had something open on nearly every night in the window, weekends included. That is not a comment on the campgrounds. None of them absorb the weekend demand that Malibu and Orange County do.

Carpinteria SB, Gaviota SP, Hearst San Simeon SP, MacKerricher SP, Morro Bay SP and Morro Strand SB did not sell out on a single midweek night. Those are the parks where moving your trip to a Monday gets you in today instead of in six months.

At the other end, Andrew Molera SP, Crystal Cove (Moro), El Capitan SB, Emma Wood SB and Gold Bluffs Beach had nothing bookable on any of the 19 nights we looked at. Not one site, not one night. For those, a cancellation alert is the only realistic route in.

What to do about the hard ones

Book the morning the window opens

This is the only method that reliably gets you a named site on a named Saturday. Count back six months from your first night, be signed in and loaded before the release time, and pick your park and loop before the clock starts. Coastal weekends at the Extreme parks go in the first minutes, so anything that costs you thirty seconds costs you the site.

Wait for a cancellation, and be told about it

For any trip inside about three months this is the realistic route. Sites come back onto ReserveCalifornia at all hours as bookings fall apart, and they get taken again quickly. The useful move is not checking more often. It is being told the moment it happens, which is what we built. Pick your park and dates once and we email you when a site frees up. It costs nothing and it covers state beaches and national forest campgrounds.

Move your trip to a Monday

Look at the last column again. If your dates can move by two days, a good part of the coast is bookable outright and you can stop waiting on someone else changing their plans.

Pick a park nobody is fighting over

The Low-risk parks are all more than a two hour drive from a major city. That is the entire reason they are available. If you are flexible about where rather than when, the north coast and the far south are wide open while Malibu and Santa Cruz are not.

The coast, region by region

The table treats every campground the same way, but the coast does not feel the same everywhere. Here is what you are actually choosing between, from the Mexican border to the redwoods. We watch all of these except where noted.

San Diego: bluff camping above town beaches

San Diego’s beach camping runs along the bluffs of North County. San Elijo sits above the surf in Cardiff, close enough to Encinitas that you can walk to a taco shop from your tent. South Carlsbad is the same idea a few miles north: rows of sites on the bluff edge, stairs down to a long sandy beach. Both are booked out on summer weekends months ahead, and both are the parks our own users fight over hardest.

San Onofre, at the county line, is different. The Bluffs campground is a strip of primitive sites above Trestles, one of the best known surf breaks in the state. You hear the freeway at night. Surfers do not care, and neither will you if you came for the waves. The San Mateo campground sits a short walk inland with more shade and quieter nights.

Orange County: small parks, big demand

Doheny in Dana Point has a handful of sites close to the sand and a gentle beach that suits small kids. It is small, it is popular, and weekends go fast. Moro Campground at Crystal Cove, between Laguna and Newport, is the county’s other option: terraced sites on a bluff where most tents get an ocean view. Orange County has far fewer coastal campsites than it has people who want them, which is most of the reason the San Diego and Malibu parks fill so hard: this is where the overflow goes.

Los Angeles and Malibu: the pressure cooker

This is the stretch our data says is hardest. Leo Carrillo puts you in a sycamore canyon on the inland side of the highway, with a walk under the road to the beach and tidepools at the point. Point Mugu gives you a real choice: Sycamore Campground in the canyon, or Thornhill Broome, where the sites are on the sand itself along the highway. Camping directly on the beach is rare in California, and Thornhill Broome is one of the few places you can still do it from a car.

One more option locals know: Dockweiler, the county RV park on the sand near LAX. RVs only, planes overhead all day, and somehow still hard to get. It books through Los Angeles County, not ReserveCalifornia, so it is the one park on this page we do not watch.

Santa Barbara: the family stretch

Carpinteria is the classic California beach trip: campsites a short walk from both the sand and a small town, on a beach calm enough for young swimmers. It sells out accordingly. Up the coast past Santa Barbara, El Capitan sits on a wooded bluff with stairs down to a rocky shore, and Refugio curves around a small cove with palms along the water. Refugio is the prettiest campground on this list. Book it the morning the window opens or plan on an alert, because everyone else has reached the same conclusion. Gaviota, at the west end of the stretch, is smaller and windier, with a rail trestle over the beach.

The Central Coast: room to breathe

North of Point Conception the crowds thin out. Pismo State Beach has camping behind the dunes at North Beach, next to a grove where monarch butterflies winter from about November to February. Morro Bay puts you under eucalyptus by the bay rather than on open surf, with the rock in view. Morro Strand is plainer but right on the beach. Further north, Hearst San Simeon has two simple campgrounds a short walk from the shore, with the elephant seal colony at Piedras Blancas a few minutes up the highway. These parks fill on holiday weekends and sit at Moderate the rest of the time.

Big Sur: cliffs over the ocean

Big Sur’s ocean camping is mostly national forest, not state park. Kirk Creek is the famous one: a bluff top where every site looks straight down the coast. It has no potable water, and it is worth hauling your own. Plaskett Creek, a few minutes south, is a grassy field across the road from Sand Dollar Beach. Limekiln is a small state park where the redwoods run almost to the water. These book through recreation.gov rather than ReserveCalifornia, and we watch those too.

Santa Cruz to the redwoods: the quiet half

New Brighton, on a bluff above a long beach in Capitola, is the most contested campground in the Santa Cruz area, and our alert data backs that up. Manresa and Sunset, a few miles south, absorb some of the demand. Around Half Moon Bay, the Francis Beach campground sits on an open bluff where you should expect fog in any month. The Mendocino coast has a cluster of good parks, and MacKerricher near Fort Bragg is the standout, with harbor seals hauled out at Laguna Point. At the far north end, Gold Bluffs Beach in Prairie Creek Redwoods lets you camp behind the dunes with elk walking past and Fern Canyon a short drive up the beach road. It may be the best campground in the state that most people south of Sacramento have never heard of.

How this changes through the year

The ratings above cover early autumn and nothing else. We do not have enough history yet to publish real numbers for the other seasons, and we would rather leave that blank than estimate it. We started keeping the daily record in August 2026, so a genuine season by season comparison will appear here once there is something honest to put in it.

What we can say from experience is that the shape of the coastal calendar is steep. Demand peaks between Memorial Day and Labor Day, drops sharply through October, and by December many of the Extreme parks above have weekend openings. Cold, wet camping is not everyone’s trip, but if your only goal is to camp on the ocean at a specific park, November is far easier than August.

Common questions