Recreation.gov Campsite Availability Scraper

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Scrape live campsite availability from Recreation.gov's public month-availability API for any federal campground. Supply campground IDs and date ranges to get a per-day open/reserved/closed status for every campsite — ideal for cancellation sniping, trip-planning feeds, and recurring monitoring workflows.

What This Actor Does

Recreation.gov powers reservations for nearly 4,000 federal campgrounds managed by the USFS, NPS, BLM, and Army Corps of Engineers. The site exposes a public, no-authentication endpoint that returns every campsite's daily availability for a given campground and calendar month. This actor queries that endpoint, flattens the response into flat per-(campsite x date) records, and enriches them with the campground's display name.

Each output record answers: "Is site X available on date Y?" — the exact question cancellation-snipers, trip planners, and monitoring tools need.

Input

Finding Campground IDs

Navigate to any campground on recreation.gov and copy the number at the end of the URL:

https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campgrounds/232450
^^^^^^
 campground ID

Popular examples:

• 232450 — Lower Pines, Yosemite
• 232447 — Upper Pines, Yosemite
• 251869 — Wawona, Yosemite
• 271019 — Kalalau, Napali Coast, Kauai

Example Input

{
"campgroundIds":["232450","232447"],
"startDate":"2026-07-01",
"endDate":"2026-08-01",
"filterStatus":["Available"],
"maxItems":1000
}

Output

Each record represents one campsite on one date:

Example Output Record

{
"campground_id":"232450",
"campground_name":"Lower Pines Campground",
"campsite_id":"906",
"site_label":"003",
"loop":"Lower Pines",
"campsite_type":"STANDARD NONELECTRIC",
"reserve_type":"Site-Specific",
"date":"2026-07-04",
"availability_status":"Available",
"max_num_people":6,
"min_num_people":0,
"type_of_use":"Overnight",
"capacity_rating":"Single",
"is_ada":null,
"checked_at":"2026-05-23T03:01:30.000Z"
}

Use Cases

Cancellation sniping — Schedule the actor to run every hour on peak campgrounds. Filter to filterStatus: ["Available"] and alert when a site opens.

Trip planning feeds — Pull a multi-month availability matrix for a set of campgrounds and visualize open windows.

Monitoring dashboards — Track availability patterns over time; detect mass cancellations before others do.

Performance and Cost

• No authentication required. The Recreation.gov availability endpoint is fully public.
• Rate limit: ~1 request per second (built-in). For large sweeps (many campgrounds x many months), budget ~1 second per (campground, month) pair.
• Scale: ~4,000 federal campgrounds are searchable on Recreation.gov. Each campground has 10-200 campsites; each month yields ~30 dates per site. A 10-campground x 3-month sweep produces ~10,000-60,000 records.
• Pricing: Pay-per-event — $0.10/start + $0.001/record.

Notes

• Availability is volatile. Recreation.gov sites open and close within seconds. The checked_at field is included on every record so you know exactly when each status was observed.
• is_ada requires fetchCampsiteDetails: true. ADA flags are not included in the availability API response; enabling this option adds one extra API call per campground (cached for the run).
• Date range expansion: The API returns one full calendar month per request. If you specify startDate: "2026-06-15", the actor fetches the entire June 2026 month.