Labor Day is sold out. Go camping anyway.

Labor Day runs Friday, September 4 through Monday the 7th this year, and if you are reading this without a reservation, you already know how the famous loops look online: gray squares to the horizon. The reservable sites at the marquee parks went when the six-month booking window opened in March. More than half of campers told The Dyrt's annual survey they had trouble booking a site last year because campgrounds were full, and the holiday weekends are where that crunch lives.

None of that means you are staying home. It means the reservation system is done handing out sites, and the other doors are the ones left open. Here are the four we would use this week, in order, and further down, the fire closures that moved in the last few days, because this year the where matters as much as the how.

Four ways in, this late

01Watch a sold-out camp instead of refreshing it

Plans change in the last week before a holiday, and when they do, a site somebody booked in March goes back on the shelf. You can spend the week refreshing Recreation.gov by hand, or you can open the sold-out campground in Campgrounder, tap Watch this camp, pick your dates, and we email you when a site opens. It checks against live Recreation.gov data and one watch is free. Campgrounder+ members watch as many camps as they want, which is the right tool for a weekend like this one: put a watch on every campground you would say yes to, then go pack.

02Go first-come, and go early

A big share of Forest Service and BLM campgrounds never took reservations in the first place. Nobody beat you to those in March, because there was nothing to book. The trade is that you win them with a steering wheel: show up Thursday evening or early Friday morning, have a second and third choice down the same road, and pay at the iron ranger. A camp's listing tells you how it books; when the button hands you to a first-come campground's own page instead of a reservation calendar, that is your signal.

03Skip the names everyone knows

The crunch is not evenly spread. It piles up at the national parks and the famous lakes, while the Army Corps campground on the reservoir two exits earlier, the county park with the swim beach, and the state park nobody drives past on the way to somewhere prettier all hold sites later. Campgrounder lists 604 Army Corps camps and a growing shelf of city and county parks precisely because they are the best value in American camping on the weekends that matter. Browse the Army Corps camps or open the map and look at what is within two hours of your door that you have never once considered.

04Book the weekend after, tonight

The quiet secret of Labor Day is the weekend that follows it. September 11 to 13 has the same warm lakes, the same long evenings, and a fraction of the people, because the calendar told everyone summer ended. If this weekend does not come together, take ninety seconds tonight and book the next one while it is still wide open. It is the best swap in camping.

The fire map moved this week. Check it before you drive.

Late August put several new closure orders on the ground, and some of them cover exactly the places people point a Labor Day trip at. Every affected listing in Campgrounder now carries the notice with a link to the official order, and Wildfire Watch has the live picture. The short version, as of August 31:

• Big Sur is closed. The Timber and Plaskett fires are burning the south coast, and Highway 1 is shut for roughly 54 miles from south of Salmon Creek to the Little Sur River. Kirk Creek, Plaskett Creek, Limekiln, Ponderosa and Memorial are inside the closure. There is no version of a Big Sur coast trip this weekend.
• Mt. Hood's Clackamas River corridor is closed. The Austin Fire is burning uncontained near Ripplebrook with Level 3 evacuations, and a Forest Service order closes Lake Harriet, Ripplebrook, Riverside, Raab, Rainbow, Kingfisher and all six Timothy Lake campgrounds. The east side of the forest also remains closed by the Grasshopper Fire order.
• Washington's Cle Elum River valley is closed. The Three Queens Fire near Snoqualmie Pass closed Kachess, Owhi, Salmon La Sac, Wish Poosh and their neighbors through October, along with a rerouted stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail.
• The Okanogan highlands and Lake Chelan country stay closed. The Sinlahekin Fire, about 166,000 acres, has Oriole, Salmon Meadows, Kerr and Sugarloaf under a closure order, and the Little Giant Fire, now about 163,000 acres, keeps its 33-campground closure across the Chiwawa, Entiat and Chelan drainages.
• All of Washington is under a statewide burn ban through September 30. Camping is open where the orders above do not reach, but plan on a stove, not a campfire, and check the rule on your listing before you strike a match.
• Reno can breathe. The Hawk Fire is 98 percent contained, evacuations are lifted and US 395 is open again. The burned country on Peavine and the Dog Valley staging areas stay closed, and the listings nearby say so.
• Boundary Waters and Quetico paddlers still have closed pockets and entry points from this summer's fires. Confirm your entry against the official map before a holiday crossing.

One habit covers all of it: open your campground in the app the day before you leave. The fire chip, the closure notice and the air quality reading on the listing are all pulled from official sources, and when a campground publishes no fire rule we can verify, the listing says that too, instead of guessing.