CAMPGROUNDERThe 3,919 campgrounds I didn't choose
Three weeks ago Campgrounder listed 1,623 campgrounds and I had personally decided on every one of them. Today it lists 5,542, and I picked almost none of the new ones. That is the whole point, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why.
A hand-built catalogue carries the shape of the hand that built it. Mine is a Michigan kid who moved to the Pacific Northwest. So Campgrounder was excellent in Washington, Oregon, California and the Upper Peninsula, and it was thin in a way I kept explaining away. Someone in Fresno opened the app and found 34 campgrounds within a hundred miles. Someone in Reno found 12. They were not looking at a camping app. They were looking at my travel history.
Where the new ones came from
The federal government keeps a public registry of every recreation facility it manages: the Forest Service, the Park Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Land Management. It is the same database behind Recreation.gov. It is public domain, it refreshes daily, it costs nothing, and there is no licence to sign, because your taxes already paid for it.
It is also messy in ways that matter. The registry files picnic shelters, boat ramps, day-use parks and reservation permits under the facility type "Campground". Roughly one record in eleven has no coordinates of its own. So the work was not downloading it. The work was deciding what to throw away.
What I threw away, and why
Anything without its own coordinates. The tempting shortcut is to fall back on the parent recreation area's centre point. I measured it before trusting it: that centre point sits a median of 24 miles from the actual campground, and only 6 percent of the time is it within a mile. A pin in the wrong place is worse than no pin, because a wrong pin sends someone driving.
Anything that is not somewhere you can sleep. A rule that keeps a place only when the data positively fails to disqualify it, checked in order: a name that states the facility kind outright, then whether the registry lists any overnight sites, then whether every listed site is day use, then whether the description ever mentions camping at all. I tested it against the 627 federal camps I had already added by hand, on the theory that if the rule threw those out it was the rule that was wrong. It keeps 96 percent of them.
My own first version of that rule had a bug, and the search tests caught it. Reservation permits sell overnight access, so they have overnight sites, so my "does it have overnight sites" check waved through 365 records like "Voyageurs National Park Camping Permits". A permit is not a place you can drive to, and putting one at the top of the results for every search of that park is exactly the sort of small lie that makes an app feel untrustworthy. The name check runs first now.
Photos nobody credited. A campground photo is only worth showing if it is the campground. New listings carry an image only where the agency credits itself as the source, which is 1,492 of them. The rest show honest placeholder scenery, the same as before, and never someone else's campsite.
Star ratings. None of the new listings has one. A rating on a place nobody has reviewed is a number I made up.
What actually changed for you
Listing count is a vanity number, so I do not measure the app by it. What a camper experiences is opening the app where they live and finding either something worth driving to or nothing. So I test that directly: 136 population centres across the United States and Canada, asking how many campgrounds are genuinely in reach of each one.
| Measured from 136 cities | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Median camps within 100 miles | 13 | 34 |
| Median camps within 50 miles | 4 | 8 |
| Cities with a real choice nearby | 88% | 93% |
| Median distance to the nearest camp | 22 mi | 19 mi |
The individual moves are bigger than the medians. Eugene went from 48 campgrounds within a hundred miles to 302. Bend went from 40 to 277. Reno from 12 to 248, Sacramento from 21 to 247, Redding from 8 to 173, Salt Lake City from 11 to 166, Denver from 22 to 170. Seven cities crossed from "not really a camping app for you" into genuine choice: Houston, Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Twin Falls, Casper, Juneau and Fairbanks.
The part I like most is that this is federal land, which means a lot of it is the cheap, quiet, first-come sort of camping that never shows up in a listicle. Not the marquee park loop that sells out in four minutes. The forest road campground twenty miles past it.
Where it is still thin, plainly
Canada. Toronto has two campgrounds within a hundred miles in this catalogue, Saskatoon has none. There is no Canadian equivalent of the federal registry with an open bulk export, and the provincial systems have no public interface, so Canadian coverage is still hand-built and it is going to stay slower. Hawaii is thin for the same reason, and Honolulu is genuinely a hard problem rather than a neglected one. I would rather tell you that than let you find it.
State parks are the other gap, and it is the big one, because that is where a lot of the country actually camps. Every state runs its own reservation system, none of them publish data, and each one is its own project. That is the next stretch of road.
The part that doesn't change
The app is free to use, with no ads and no account required, and all 5,542 listings are open to everyone. The data underneath the new ones belongs to the public, which is the reason I could add them without charging anyone or selling anything.
If you have opened Campgrounder before and thought "there's nothing near me", I think it is worth another look. There probably is now.
Find your camp →Sources. Campground records from the Recreation Information Database bulk export (public domain), read on August 22, 2026. Agencies represented: USDA Forest Service, National Park Service, US Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management. Coverage figures measured with Campgrounder's own reachability test across 136 United States and Canadian population centres, run against the catalogue before and after the import.