Dataset brief
A continuously collected record of when sold-out North American campsites become bookable again — and how long they stay that way.
Every transition is timestamped to the pass that observed it and carries the campground identifier, operator, state, coordinates, the affected date windows and the number of nights. Because openings and fillings are both recorded, spells can be paired — which is what makes duration measurable rather than inferred.
A record is an event; a spell is one date window at one campground. The 124,270 opening and 112,685 filling events carry 307,215 window-openings, of which 205,491 (67%) have been observed filling again. Every duration figure here comes from those pairs. The remaining 99,658 were still bookable when the window closed, so this rate is a floor on how many openings eventually fill, not a measure of how many are ever taken.
5,401 campgrounds are catalogued; 3,197 produced at least one transition in the window. The rest were either continuously full or continuously available.
| Reservation system | Scope | Campgrounds |
|---|---|---|
| Recreation.gov | US federal — NPS, USFS, BLM, USACE | 4,258 |
| ReserveAmerica | OR, MT, IN, TX and others | 175 |
| GoingToCamp | Multi-province Canada | 166 |
| BC Parks | British Columbia | 136 |
| Ontario Parks | Ontario | 105 |
| Alberta Parks | Alberta | 98 |
| Parks Canada | National parks | 83 |
| ReserveCalifornia | California state parks | 72 |
| ReserveOhio | Ohio | 67 |
| UseDirect — Minnesota | Minnesota | 65 |
| Florida State Parks | Florida | 50 |
| UseDirect — Missouri | Missouri | 48 |
| Gone within | Share of 205,491 spells |
|---|---|
| 5 hours | 6% |
| 24 hours | 45% |
| 48 hours | 69% |
The median is 24 hours. Read the five-hour row with the sampling caveat below: it is a floor, and the true short-spell rate is higher than 6%.
The corpus is not uniformly sampled in time, and that changes what a duration means. Three cadences run: campgrounds a paying subscriber is watching are polled every five minutes (53 of them at present), a larger watched set every ten, and everything else four times a day at 06:00, 11:00, 15:00 and 19:00 Pacific.
The effect is measurable, not theoretical. Splitting the same spells by which lane observed them:
| Sampled | Spells | Gone within 5h |
|---|---|---|
| Every 5 minutes | 7,723 | 13% |
| Four times a day | 197,768 | 5% |
Watch a campground closely and roughly 13% of its openings turn out to last under five hours. Watch it four times a day and you record 5%, because the rest opened and refilled between two passes and were never seen. Two things drive that gap and this data cannot separate them: coarse polling is blind to short spells, and the closely-watched parks are the sought-after ones, which plausibly refill faster on their own. Either way the headline short-tail is an undercount.
Turnover concentrates in campgrounds nobody is refreshing. Over this window William Kent Campground recorded 48 openings covering 86 site-nights and Staircase Campground 32, while celebrated destinations produced almost none. Availability advice keyed to famous parks is advice about the rarest events in the dataset. Ranked cuts of this live at the cancellation report and hardest to book.
Across 205,491 paired spells the median site stayed bookable 24 hours, 45% were gone within a day and 69% within two. The tail is what matters operationally: 6% lasted under five hours.
Restricted to 206 campgrounds within 150 miles of Portland, a 27.8-day cut taken on 2026-08-07 found 2,438 openings — roughly 88 a day — with Thursday the peak at 18.6% against Saturday's 11.7%. That weekday pattern survived its own falsification test: excluding the overnight detection bucket that could have manufactured it, Thursday rose rather than fell. (Figures from that dated cut, not recomputed here.)
The portable layer is the derived one: per-campground turnover rates, duration distributions, day-of-week and seasonal patterns, regional cuts. If you are researching camping supply, writing about why campgrounds are hard to book, or want a cut for a particular state or province, write to support@campsage.app.
Availability for US federal sites originates with Recreation.gov. CampSage is independent and not affiliated with any booking provider or land manager.