Every camper has a favorite “impossible to book” campground story. We wanted actual numbers, so we ranked the campgrounds we monitor by a real difficulty score — built from historical availability rates and recent cancellation activity — rather than reputation alone.
How we ranked them
Camping Alert computes a difficulty score for every tracked date at every campground, based on how often that campground has historically been available for that time of year and day of week, adjusted for recent cancellation activity. We averaged that score across the year for each campground, then filtered to campgrounds with real size (15+ sites) and real monitored cancellation activity, to keep the list to genuine, actively-booked campgrounds rather than statistical noise from tiny or inactive listings.
The toughest bookings we track
| # | Campground | State |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wawona Campground (Yosemite) | California |
| 2 | Devils Garden Campground (Arches) | Utah |
| 3 | Goodell Creek Campground (North Cascades) | Washington |
| 4 | Virgin River Canyon Recreation Area | Utah |
| 5 | Panther Flat Campground | California |
| 6 | Upper Pines Campground (Yosemite) | California |
| 7 | The Bank Campground | Colorado |
| 8 | Moraine Park Campground (Rocky Mountain NP) | Colorado |
| 9 | Kirk Creek Campground | California |
| 10 | Sand Gulch Campground | Colorado |
Two things jump out. First, two of the ten hardest bookings in the entire country belong to a single park — Yosemite, with Wawona and Upper Pines both making the list, which tracks with what we’ve written about Yosemite’s booking pressure before. Second, a lot of these names aren’t the famous ones — Goodell Creek and Panther Flat don’t have Yosemite’s name recognition, but the numbers say they’re just as hard to actually book.
What “hardest” doesn’t mean
A high difficulty score doesn’t mean a campground never has openings — it means it’s rarely available at any given moment, and when a site does open, it tends to get taken fast. Moraine Park alone saw over 4,000 detected cancellations in a single 30-day window in our data. The openings are real. They just don’t last.
Stop refreshing. Start getting notified.
Camping Alert scans Recreation.gov every 5 minutes on paid plans (60 on the free tier) and texts or emails you the moment a site opens up.
If your target campground is on this list, don’t rely on manually checking. See our playbook for booking a sold-out campground, or just set an alert and let it watch for you.
