The hardest Colorado campgrounds to book

Name: How fast Colorado campsite cancellations get re-booked
Creator: CampSage

The best Colorado campsites are “sold out” months out — but people cancel constantly. The real question isn’t whether a spot opens, it’s how long it lasts before someone else grabs it. We scan every Colorado campground on recreation.gov several times a day and log the check at which each site frees up — and the check at which it is gone again. Here’s what that reveals.

At Graham Creek Campground, half the cancellations we logged were already gone by the time we looked again — within 23.8 hrs. You have hours, not days.

⏱️ Fastest-vanishing cancellations

For half the openings we logged, the site was already re-booked by our next check — this is how long that took. Lower means you have to move faster.

#	Campground	Gone within	Openings measured
1	Graham Creek Campground	23.8 hrs	20
2	Lawn Lake	24.0 hrs	68
3	Redfeather Ranger Station	24.0 hrs	29
4	Rocky Mountain National Park Aspenglen Campground	24.0 hrs	39
5	Palisades Horse Camp	24.0 hrs	20
6	Haynach	24.0 hrs	25
7	Ouzel Lake	24.0 hrs	39
8	Odessa Lake	24.0 hrs	41
9	Sandbeach Lake	24.0 hrs	72
10	Rocky Mountain National Park Timber Creek Campground	24.0 hrs	54
11	Buckhorn Ranger Station	24.0 hrs	39
12	Tonahutu Meadows	24.0 hrs	35

🔄 Where cancellations happen most (best odds if you watch)

These Colorado parks turn over the most — set an alert and your chances are highest here.

#	Campground	Openings/week
1	Dowdy Lake	8.7
2	Grouseberry	7.3
3	Ditch Camp Group/Stock	7.1
4	North Inlet Group/Stock	7.1
5	La Poudre Pass	7.1
6	Boulderfield 3 (Three 2-person tents)	7.1
7	Chapin Creek Group	7.1
8	Bighorn Mt Group/Stock	7.1
9	Silvanmere	7.1
10	Sunset Group	7.0

Methodology. CampSage scans every Colorado campground on recreation.gov continuously and appends an event each time a site opens or fills. This ranking covers 62.0 days of continuous tracking since August 23, 2026 (9,415 matched open→re-booked events); it updates daily and gets more robust as the record grows. Parks shown have at least 20 measured openings, because a park with a handful ranks on noise rather than on demand. These figures are upper bounds, not stopwatch readings: we observe checks, not moments, and our checks are hours apart, so a site retaken ten minutes after it opened and one that lasted four hours can land in the same bucket. Read “gone within 4 hrs” as “already taken by the time we looked again.” The median is the middle value, so one unusually long-lived opening cannot skew it. Journalists / researchers: happy to share the underlying data or a longer window — about CampSage.

Want to catch one of these? Set a free alert on the live map → and we’ll email you the second a site opens.

Other regions. California · Ontario · Washington · British Columbia · Oregon

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