The last-minute hack campers needed
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Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios
Forget about pitching the tent. The hardest part of camping in Washington can be getting a campsite — which can require reservations months in advance.
The big picture: Now, there's an app to make last-minute camping feel possible again.
Driving the news: West Coast software engineer Daniel Maynard built Camp Sage — a free campsite finder — that skips the booked sites and shows only campgrounds with reservations actually available.
- A quick search Wednesday morning found dozens of bookable campsites across Western Washington in August, many within two hours of Seattle.
How it works: The web-based tool searches public reservation data from state parks, Recreation.gov and other public campground systems, then displays available sites on an interactive map.
- It lists only sites with at least two consecutive available nights and lets users filter for weekend trips, group campsites and Wi-Fi availability.
Thought bubble: After nearly giving up on finding a campsite this year, I took the app for a spin and snagged a riverside site at Dosewallips State Park — one of my favorites!
Zoom in: The idea came after Maynard and his wife struggled to book a family camping trip to Big Sur.
- He realized campsites open up all the time when people cancel — they're just difficult to find because reservation websites require users to search campground by campground and date.
- "If you've got a free weekend, you can just look at the map and decide where to go," Maynard told Axios.
What they're saying: "Damn that's awesome. I get a headache using the WA site," a user known as Bitter Basket wrote after Maynard posted about the app in a Washington state forum on Reddit.
- "Agreed — just used the WA site to book a campsite and it was exhausting," responded Nikkifat.
The bottom line: Camping isn't supposed to require military-level planning.