Reserving Federal Camp Sites - It's Easy!

– – I’ve visited a number of State parks and frankly they have too many rules regarding music and fire pits—enough already! My tent is pitched on Federal parks: Recreation.gov, is part of the Recreation One-Stop E-Gov initiative, and provides a single point of access to information about Federal recreational activities and reservations. Sure, you can rough it in the wild without the State or Federal sites, but the one caveat to the Federal sites: usually, as a minimum, a vault toilet, sometimes running water, and an on-site manager that ensures the sites are clean and that there is a reservation sign indicating that you reserved a particular camp ground. The manager’s are friendly and rarely interfere with your festivities and sometimes have firewood available for purchase. As a rule of thumb, if you are picking up one of those little packs of firewood that are about 1x1.5” in size, and about $6 each, this can last one hour (unless you are attempting Burning Man or are a pyromaniac ;-)

Reserving a Federal campsite is easy, you will need to create a membership/account—this data is not shared with other reservation websites. It saves all your past reservations, so…if you want to reserve that favorite site it’s only a click away!

– – One nice feature on this website is the “Looking for:” here you can look for RV sites, Cabins or lookouts (in the Wenatchee forest there are some very cool ones), Tent, Trailer, Group sites, Boat sites, etc. You can also search near a town or zip code—easy.

– – I’ll be writing up some of our favorite campsites in the Mt. Baker, Wenatchee forest and Mt. Rainer locations of Washington State; I’ll include the campsite number(s) and why we chose these particular sites (yes…we turn the iPod up to 11). See you May through September in the forest beneath the trees!