This is something where every single person who appreciates public lands should be mad as hell, and letting their elected officials know.
For a more in-depth analysis of the dubious legality of the whole situation, see Matt Stoller's excellent article "Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?" [1]
Also, as someone who runs a private, substantially more aggressive availability monitor than outdoorstatus.com (updates every minute rather than every 30 minutes), the unfortunate reality is that the permit scarcity has created something of an automation arms race.
Looking at my analytics for today for a few examples, I see 1 permit availability for the Enchantments that was snagged in less than 5 minutes after being posted, some availability for Lost Coast that disappeared in under 4 minutes, and finally 5 different availabilities in Yosemite's Upper Pines campground that disappeared in under 60 seconds. A 30 minute update rate is, sadly, not going to do you much good if you want to be competitive at reservations for any popular site near the Bay Area on a weekend.
In a lot of cases, the latency of the Twilio -> SMS process is long enough that by the time I get a notification of availability, it's already been claimed by someone else's bot.
This is depressing because, while I have the knowledge and tools to play in this adversarial sandbox of permit acquisition, the majority of people in this country do not. Your access to public lands should not be contingent upon your network programming skills or how many IP addresses you're able to stripe your requests across to avoid ratelimiting.
While I expect to see many more pay-to-play services like Outdoor Status, Campflare, Campnab, Campsite Monitor, etc. pop up over the next few years, what I'd really like to see is a service that disrupts Booz Allen Hamilton with a business model that eliminates its monopoly and the junk fees that are central to how it profiteers off its role as the Ticketmaster of public lands access.
As a non-hiker, I had no idea access to national parks was gated behind some unholy combination of Ticketmaster and gambling. This is asinine--but a uniquely American flavor of asinine. The fact that a private business consulting company collects most of the money makes it even more American Asinine. I feel like my fingers are turning red, white, and blue just typing that out.
I (naively) always thought you just drove to your destination, parked and went hiking.
Most places in the US are like that - just show up. Some places are too popular and would be way too crowded, and the situation is pretty dire for the most majestic and famous places around SF.
I did the popular half dome trail in yosemite, jeez ... 10 years ago, and despite the limits it was quite a crowded line, at the cable you hold while climbing up the slope of the dome. My family goes hiking in Shenandoah in Virginia almost every year (probably 15 times in my life) and we don't reserve entry or trails or anything, and there's no lines.
Anyway, it's a kinda funny situation - do you want to promote the outdoors to the general populace? Do you want them to be accessible to all? Well you just can't, the popular places will be absolutely crushed and destroyed and quite dangerous too. There's plenty of un-popular places people could go, but they're not popular ...
You can just show up and park. You can buy an annual pass directly from the government for ~$100 that covers campsite/entrance fees in pretty much every national park, or put some cash in an envelope with a form and leave it in a dropbox at the lot.
The problem is peak seasons. If you show up to Yellowstone without a reservation on the 4th of July weekend, you'll be lucky if you can even get into the park, much less stay there or appreciate its natural beauty.
So if you want to visit a park during a holiday, school vacation week, or most of the Summer, you need to deal with the bloated mess of a ticketing system which was created by the cheapest new grads that the lowest-bidding rent-seeking leech of a contractor could come up with.
My advice: get used to cold weather and visit in the off season. Nobody is making reservations to hike in Bryce Canyon in the middle of December.
The post to whom you’re responding definitely overstates it. Most places are mostly just show up, there’s regularly or always ways to simply day hike anywhere — including the Enchantments, which are unrestricted for day hiking and I’ve personally day hiked in a day. Not allowing all comers on all days is prudent because our national parks are a precious resource. I’ve personally seen trails being eroded over years, it stinks, and more people on those trails cause more erosion. But yes you nearly always can simply drive out, park, and hike.
They should just auction the ticket off. Very straight-forward, and all the money can go to the park.
(Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets.)
If you find yourself stressed by the process of reserving campsites online, I’d encourage you to just go to random public land and camp there. It’s legal by default to camp on BLM and Forest Service land and you do not need permission from Booz Allen Hamilton to do it. There are endless adventures to be had and plenty of room for everyone. People competing to fill out online forms so they can be allocated appointments to enjoy specific small segments of the great outdoors is a truly bizarre phenomenon. If you enjoy participating in that system, more power to you, but if you don’t, then just go anywhere in the much larger portion of public land that isn’t administered in that fashion.
The core problem is a tragedy of the commons scenario. Basically, the demand for tourism to natural parks (or, such as in the case of Venice, Amsterdam and others, entire cities) is way too large to allow unfettered access by the public.
So there's two options - limit access to those who can afford it (e.g. by raising serious tourism taxes), or do it in a lottery. Both have obvious downsides: making it expensive is direct discrimination against the poor, and lotteries risk families not being able to go because not everyone gets a ticket or, as we're seeing here, people gaming the system to bypass the lottery or a black market run by scalpers.
> the demand for tourism to natural parks is way too large to allow unfettered access by the public
I'm not sure this is true. The United States has a huge amount of wilderness and federal land. The problem is that most people want to go to a small number of very popular places.
Allowing as many people as possible to have a nice time in nature, whether by providing facilities, informing potential visitors of their options, managing access to popular or vulnerable sites, etc, is exactly what the Bureau of Land Management are supposed to do. The fact that there is a single agency in control means that it's not really an example of the tragedy of the commons, either.
You've forgotten the effect of advertising. There's enormous induced demand for these things, which could be instantly reduced by a prohibition (or time limitation) of advertising, broadcast rights etc. Right now BAH are enormously incentivised to promote the hell out of these places, as are third parties that help you 'game the system'. Take the money out of the system and you limit it to organic reach - you aikido the pay to speak nature of contemporary social media.
Purchases/lotteries/whatever allow one entry per natural person, using an ID. You have to indicate ownership of that ID to take up the entry ticket. Then you have to show the ID on entry. Typically such places will buy back tickets and you get a refund if they sell.
You can use 'receipt of state assistance' (in the UK this is called 'benefits') as a marker for poverty [definitely not perfect!] and only allow access to, for example, a low cost lottery on entry for such poor people.
Off topic, but I realized that I can initiate a backpacking trip by walking out of my front door near El Camino, over the foothills, and all the way to Half Moon Bay. Maybe secretly camping in a state park up there in between.
This is extremely novel to me, being from Houston, and I definitely want to try it now.
Have a peek at https://doingmiles.com/hike-sf/ for some longer itineraries like this. Lots of options if you're willing to do a little stealth camping (please be ethical/considerate [1])
It’s not a lottery, it’s all 100% reservable on October 1 for the next year. I’ve been 10 times in the past 15 years and every year the permits are harder to get because of the demand and the bots. The irony is that the permits are so popular and the fees so low that I’d estimate 30%+ of the permits that are bought actually don’t get used. On my most recent visit, we saw less than 10 people total on our first day a few weeks back.
Yeah, there are a relative handful of places in the US/North America that, during remotely popular times, access has to be rationed for good reasons. The Enchantments are definitely one of those--I'm resigned to never be organized/lucky enough to go there (and that's not even a national park). And once you're going to ration, it's just a question of how: very high fees, lottery for applications within some window, first-come first-served x days in advance, queue at the ranger office on the morning of and hope you get lucky or have to go somewhere else...
Excessive fees going to a for-profit company is a separate matter but doesn't change the fact that, for any reasonable fee structure, way more people want to camp/stay/hike in certain places than those places can reasonably support.
Different approaches just have different drawbacks. In general, I'd probably disfavor technological sniping approaches for most sites in this day and age in favor of a lottery with a wider window. (And for most public properties just increasing pricing isn't really the right answer.)
Here in Minnesota, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) adjacent to Canada is on a permit system as well. Within 3 minutes of the permits opening in January for this season, all the traditional weekend sites entry points on the Grand Marais side were gone. In the 20-30 years I've been doing it, I've never seen anything like it before.
Our camping group is absolutely coding bots for next year. Going in as a human a couple minutes after the bell does not work. This should not be.
One common solution to this type of problem is a (different kind of!) lottery. You should register for one or more time slots (up to N), and there should be a lottery to decide who goes (just randomly). After winning, your other reservations should reset.
I solved the response-time problem in a different way, but that would be one option you could use to cut down how much a notification pipeline contributes to your time-to-claim-permit latency.
Saying it goes to "recreation.gov" misses the point.
It goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.
Booz are effectively stealing insane amounts of taxpayer dollars to run an extremely simple CRUD website. And no, it's not "actually complex and just looks like CRUD". It's really just CRUD built on AWS services.
IMO? If the grift cannot be killed then Access Fund should team up with the open beta guy and submit an insanely competitive bid when the contract comes up.
The complexity comes in the fact that there are different data formats and rules in play for almost every single management agency's permit/reservation system on Rec.gov - the JSON responses for, say, a trailhead in National Forest in Inyo Country, CA are different from a trailhead in National Forest in Deschutes County, OR. And those are both different for the JSON response format for a trailhead in the King Range National Conservation Area. Which is different from a trailhead in any National Park. And so on.
And all of these different permit systems trigger different forms, agreements, vehicle information collection, etc. once you move to the checkout stage. It truly is a massively complex system - if not technically, then logistically, by the sheer quantity of requirements-gathering and accommodation of hundreds of different individual land management agencies' unique systems for managing user access. I've read some of the source code for the web client (last I checked, they were still publishing source maps to prod) and it's a pretty impressive feat that it works and holds together as well as it does.
As you can tell from my comment above, I'm just as incensed about the business model as you are. It is highway robbery. Taxpayers subsidized the creation of the site, and now we're being doubly ripped off as a huge portion of the profits collected are being funneled straight back into the pockets of Booz Allen (and, no doubt, also being channeled into lobbying efforts designed to maintain this monopoly through the renewal process for the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act this October).
However, I don't think that unfairly diminishing the technical and organizational achievement the site represents is going to help with trying to find a solution to the economic grift that it also represents.
> the JSON responses for, say, a trailhead in National Forest in Inyo Country, CA are different from a trailhead in National Forest in Deschutes County, OR. And those are both different for the JSON response format for a trailhead in the King Range National Conservation Area. Which is different from a trailhead in any National Park.
Are you guessing here? I don't really know what you mean by the JSON response (from who to who?).
I tried to look into whether recreation.gov has per-agency or even more granular schemas. I found a manual to the Recreation.gov agency portal that suggests the answer. Note that even though it's hosted on the usfs site it has no usfs-specific branding. The section "Adding New Inventory to Recreation.gov" doesn't describe any agency-specific options explicitly, though it does have vague manual processes that could in theory involve custom development.
The board is a list of titles. Titles should capture the main point. The title stands as the money going to a gov agency rather than the park which isn't nearly as infuriating as calling out Booz Allen Hamilton / a co.
I wish the government was capable of building an extremely simple CRUD website, but all the evidence points to them not being able to. If they can't build it in house they have to pay someone to build it for them, this website required no upfront payment, the pay structure seems reasonable imo.
Dude, what? First off, OpenBeta kinda sucks. It's slow, and honestly, has some pretty bizarre UX/UI decisions. MP is vastly more comprehensive and looking at my local areas it's clear he/she just scraped MP (or straight up copied payloads from their API) to populate the db. There's no clear connection between operating a meager route database and implementing a timed reservation and permit system for national parks and campgrounds. There's literally nothing about OpenBeta that would make one think: "Yes, this (potentially singular) person has the skills, knowledge, and resources to run a nationally available service with all the SLAs that accompany gov't projects in a domain that's only veeeeeeerry tangentially related to OpenBeta."
The article suggests the 100% lottery fee goes to BAH, but I found out part of it goes to the BLM.
"Of the $9 [lottery fee], $5 ultimately goes to Booz Allen and $4 goes to the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the site, a BLM spokesman said."
Am I understanding this correctly: you need to pay for a permit for hiking in some places in the USA, and it's a lottery so you might not even be able to go once you've paid the money?
Just to be clear, this applies to only the most popular parts of National Parks. Most National Parks don't require permits or they are easy to get. There are also tons of ways to hike that aren't National Parks. If you have the skills and gear, I recommend wilderness areas in National Forests.
This is like when that new gelato place opens up and has a 45 minute line for $15 ice cream, and the regular ice cream place is basically as good and has normal prices and no line.
I can understand that reasoning, and it does make sense to me too, but only if all the money goes to the park. Ideally then even only for successful applications.
I had no idea about this either. For me this screams of a dystopian future civilization (which is apparently now) where even access to the outdoors has been limited due to overpopulation and is now regulated through a lottery.
I mean, I get it, I understand that they need to limit the amount of people visiting certain sensitive ecosystems, but still... something about this just seems fundamentally wrong to me. Access to the great outdoors, to nature, seems like such a fundamental human right to me.
While I understand the need to protect sensitive ecosystems, restricting access to nature altogether is extremely problematic. There must be better solutions that don't infringe on what should be a basic human right. If overpopulation is truly an issue, we need to find ways to distribute people more evenly and improve infrastructure to handle more visitors in a sustainable way. A lottery system should really be an absolute last resort.
Protected spaces would be over-run without permits and enforcement of said permits. These are fragile places. The dystopia would be a graffiti-laden, human excrement covered Wave with garbage laying everywhere and tourists piling on top of each other.
Allowing the best spots to be completely overrun seems far more dystopian to me. To be clear, you do not need a permit to have an incredible experience at a national park.
For some places would be over run given ease of access and historical features draw huge crowds.
Everyone wants ultimate freedom then complains when they show up and everyone else with ultimate freedom has trashed the place.
The general public has a huge credibility problem of its own to grapple with, but somehow it’s always someone else’s job to sit and reflect, find the solution.
Sad as government should be building this out. Heck I’d argue this is perfect for a public university to partner on, providing students a real-life (but low risk) way to build production services in prep for joining the workforce.
This website was envisioned soon after the obamacare fiasco which proved that the government is incapable of building websites. They felt they had no choice but using an outside contractor.
And, at the local (say town) level that's probably true. So what happens is they farm it out to an existing service for "free" and the service tacks on a fee. As a result, I either write a physical check or have my bank do so for town fees because if I paid directly online I'd pay a surcharge.
I don't really understand (I mean, I do understand on some level) why we don't have a decent US government agency that specializes in consulting work like this. Why didn't the BLM get the USDS to work on this website and then train them to maintain it?
I guess I don't understand why Booz Allen Hamilton is able to employ contractors for this work but the USDS is not. Is this truly the cost of building and running such a website (i.e. 2-3mm/yr according to this website)?
Readit News
For a more in-depth analysis of the dubious legality of the whole situation, see Matt Stoller's excellent article "Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?" [1]
Also, as someone who runs a private, substantially more aggressive availability monitor than outdoorstatus.com (updates every minute rather than every 30 minutes), the unfortunate reality is that the permit scarcity has created something of an automation arms race.
Looking at my analytics for today for a few examples, I see 1 permit availability for the Enchantments that was snagged in less than 5 minutes after being posted, some availability for Lost Coast that disappeared in under 4 minutes, and finally 5 different availabilities in Yosemite's Upper Pines campground that disappeared in under 60 seconds. A 30 minute update rate is, sadly, not going to do you much good if you want to be competitive at reservations for any popular site near the Bay Area on a weekend.
In a lot of cases, the latency of the Twilio -> SMS process is long enough that by the time I get a notification of availability, it's already been claimed by someone else's bot.
This is depressing because, while I have the knowledge and tools to play in this adversarial sandbox of permit acquisition, the majority of people in this country do not. Your access to public lands should not be contingent upon your network programming skills or how many IP addresses you're able to stripe your requests across to avoid ratelimiting.
While I expect to see many more pay-to-play services like Outdoor Status, Campflare, Campnab, Campsite Monitor, etc. pop up over the next few years, what I'd really like to see is a service that disrupts Booz Allen Hamilton with a business model that eliminates its monopoly and the junk fees that are central to how it profiteers off its role as the Ticketmaster of public lands access.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
I (naively) always thought you just drove to your destination, parked and went hiking.
I did the popular half dome trail in yosemite, jeez ... 10 years ago, and despite the limits it was quite a crowded line, at the cable you hold while climbing up the slope of the dome. My family goes hiking in Shenandoah in Virginia almost every year (probably 15 times in my life) and we don't reserve entry or trails or anything, and there's no lines.
Anyway, it's a kinda funny situation - do you want to promote the outdoors to the general populace? Do you want them to be accessible to all? Well you just can't, the popular places will be absolutely crushed and destroyed and quite dangerous too. There's plenty of un-popular places people could go, but they're not popular ...
The problem is peak seasons. If you show up to Yellowstone without a reservation on the 4th of July weekend, you'll be lucky if you can even get into the park, much less stay there or appreciate its natural beauty.
So if you want to visit a park during a holiday, school vacation week, or most of the Summer, you need to deal with the bloated mess of a ticketing system which was created by the cheapest new grads that the lowest-bidding rent-seeking leech of a contractor could come up with.
My advice: get used to cold weather and visit in the off season. Nobody is making reservations to hike in Bryce Canyon in the middle of December.
BAH is a scourge and absolutely a problem though.
(Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets.)
https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/
https://www.nps.gov/articles/leave-no-trace-seven-principles...
Deleted Comment
So there's two options - limit access to those who can afford it (e.g. by raising serious tourism taxes), or do it in a lottery. Both have obvious downsides: making it expensive is direct discrimination against the poor, and lotteries risk families not being able to go because not everyone gets a ticket or, as we're seeing here, people gaming the system to bypass the lottery or a black market run by scalpers.
There is no good solution.
I'm not sure this is true. The United States has a huge amount of wilderness and federal land. The problem is that most people want to go to a small number of very popular places.
Allowing as many people as possible to have a nice time in nature, whether by providing facilities, informing potential visitors of their options, managing access to popular or vulnerable sites, etc, is exactly what the Bureau of Land Management are supposed to do. The fact that there is a single agency in control means that it's not really an example of the tragedy of the commons, either.
Purchases/lotteries/whatever allow one entry per natural person, using an ID. You have to indicate ownership of that ID to take up the entry ticket. Then you have to show the ID on entry. Typically such places will buy back tickets and you get a refund if they sell.
You can use 'receipt of state assistance' (in the UK this is called 'benefits') as a marker for poverty [definitely not perfect!] and only allow access to, for example, a low cost lottery on entry for such poor people.
It's not perfect, but is that not at least good?
This is extremely novel to me, being from Houston, and I definitely want to try it now.
[1] good writeup from the same authors https://doingmiles.com/techniques-stealth/
Excessive fees going to a for-profit company is a separate matter but doesn't change the fact that, for any reasonable fee structure, way more people want to camp/stay/hike in certain places than those places can reasonably support.
Different approaches just have different drawbacks. In general, I'd probably disfavor technological sniping approaches for most sites in this day and age in favor of a lottery with a wider window. (And for most public properties just increasing pricing isn't really the right answer.)
It's actually the entire subject of TFA.
Our camping group is absolutely coding bots for next year. Going in as a human a couple minutes after the bell does not work. This should not be.
Dead Comment
It goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.
Booz are effectively stealing insane amounts of taxpayer dollars to run an extremely simple CRUD website. And no, it's not "actually complex and just looks like CRUD". It's really just CRUD built on AWS services.
IMO? If the grift cannot be killed then Access Fund should team up with the open beta guy and submit an insanely competitive bid when the contract comes up.
And all of these different permit systems trigger different forms, agreements, vehicle information collection, etc. once you move to the checkout stage. It truly is a massively complex system - if not technically, then logistically, by the sheer quantity of requirements-gathering and accommodation of hundreds of different individual land management agencies' unique systems for managing user access. I've read some of the source code for the web client (last I checked, they were still publishing source maps to prod) and it's a pretty impressive feat that it works and holds together as well as it does.
As you can tell from my comment above, I'm just as incensed about the business model as you are. It is highway robbery. Taxpayers subsidized the creation of the site, and now we're being doubly ripped off as a huge portion of the profits collected are being funneled straight back into the pockets of Booz Allen (and, no doubt, also being channeled into lobbying efforts designed to maintain this monopoly through the renewal process for the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act this October).
However, I don't think that unfairly diminishing the technical and organizational achievement the site represents is going to help with trying to find a solution to the economic grift that it also represents.
Are you guessing here? I don't really know what you mean by the JSON response (from who to who?).
I tried to look into whether recreation.gov has per-agency or even more granular schemas. I found a manual to the Recreation.gov agency portal that suggests the answer. Note that even though it's hosted on the usfs site it has no usfs-specific branding. The section "Adding New Inventory to Recreation.gov" doesn't describe any agency-specific options explicitly, though it does have vague manual processes that could in theory involve custom development.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprd380615...
Fair enough. But this complexity doesn't scale with the number of applications submitted.
But there, as well as here, the actually difficult problems involve all the dumb, complicated business logic.
> It goes to Booz Allen Hamilton.
Article says this in the 4th sentence.
"Of the $9 [lottery fee], $5 ultimately goes to Booz Allen and $4 goes to the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the site, a BLM spokesman said."
https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/recreation-gov-mak...
More context on public vs privately run web service: https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/recreation-gov-mak...
This is like when that new gelato place opens up and has a 45 minute line for $15 ice cream, and the regular ice cream place is basically as good and has normal prices and no line.
First you pay to participate in the lottery. This is money you've lost no matter what.
Then if you win you pay a second amount for the permit itself.
It made sense to me, as I was under the impression that the money went directly to the park. But the fact that it goes to a middleman changes things.
I mean, I get it, I understand that they need to limit the amount of people visiting certain sensitive ecosystems, but still... something about this just seems fundamentally wrong to me. Access to the great outdoors, to nature, seems like such a fundamental human right to me.
Imagine MrBeast’s “I bought the entire national park for the next century” video. You want people to always have a chance to go, no matter the demand.
Everyone wants ultimate freedom then complains when they show up and everyone else with ultimate freedom has trashed the place.
The general public has a huge credibility problem of its own to grapple with, but somehow it’s always someone else’s job to sit and reflect, find the solution.
And, at the local (say town) level that's probably true. So what happens is they farm it out to an existing service for "free" and the service tacks on a fee. As a result, I either write a physical check or have my bank do so for town fees because if I paid directly online I'd pay a surcharge.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I guess I don't understand why Booz Allen Hamilton is able to employ contractors for this work but the USDS is not. Is this truly the cost of building and running such a website (i.e. 2-3mm/yr according to this website)?
Also, it is very difficult to lay-off public employees if their role becomes unnecessary in the future.
Hiring indirectly via a contracted intermediary largely solves both of these problems.