The accessible badge nobody actually checks.

Open almost any camping app and you'll find a little wheelchair icon on some percentage of listings. Nobody checks it. It gets added once, during data entry, usually because a park's brochure used the word "accessible" somewhere on the page, and then it sits there for years, true or not, verified or not, until someone with a real reason to trust it shows up and finds out the hard way.

We know, because we had them too. Bare "Accessible" tags on 120 of our own listings, added long before anyone checked whether they meant anything. So we checked. Every one, plus a few hundred more camps that never had a tag to begin with, against the one kind of source we'd actually trust with this: the park's own accessibility page, the state parks department, the National Park Service, Parks Canada. If we couldn't find a named site number, a named cabin, a specific confirmed feature, we didn't add a badge. If our own badge turned out to be wrong, we took it off.

Why we didn't just leave it as a checkbox

If you use a wheelchair and you're planning a camping trip, "accessible" isn't a nice-to-have filter. It's the difference between a trip that works and a long drive to find out it doesn't. A generic badge that just means "the park has an ADA policy somewhere" is worse than no badge at all, because it creates confidence where there shouldn't be any yet.

So we built two tiers instead of one. Confirmed Accessible means we found a specific site, cabin, or unit that's genuinely built and documented for wheelchair use, not just a policy statement. Partially Accessible means something real is accessible, a restroom, a fishing pier, a single cabin, but the general campsites themselves aren't confirmed, and we say so plainly rather than rounding up. A park with an accessible vault toilet and nothing else doesn't get to look the same as a park with seven numbered, wheelchair-ready sites. That distinction is the whole point.

What "checking" actually looked like

Not a database query. A state-by-state, park-by-park read of official accessibility pages, cross-referenced against camping reservation systems where those exist. At Yosemite Valley, that meant finding that Lower Pines sites 7 and 14 have power outlets built in, specifically for medical equipment, something a blanket badge would never surface. At Ridgway State Park in Colorado, it meant learning you need a handicap placard on file to book the accessible yurts, a real-world detail that matters more than the word "accessible" ever could on its own.

At Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas, the general campground had nothing published, but the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism runs a dedicated accessible-rental program, and Camper Cabin 3 there is part of it, named, confirmed, bookable. At Congaree National Park in South Carolina, it's one specific site, Site 1, reached by packed dirt and fine gravel from the parking lot. At Kejimkujik in Nova Scotia, it's four numbered electrical sites in Meadow Loop plus three named accessible oTENTiks with ramps. None of that shows up if you stop at a checkbox.

We got our own listing wrong, and fixed it

Early on, we found that our own Jenny Lake listing in Grand Teton carried a plain "Accessible" tag going back to whenever the camp was first added. When we actually checked the Park Service's own accessibility notes for Jenny Lake, the truth was more complicated: the restrooms there are only partially accessible, and the campground is tents-only with no vehicle sites at all. We took the badge off and replaced it with an honest note. That's not a one-time correction, it's the standard now applied to every camp we touch, including the ones we already thought we had right.

What's still ahead

This isn't a finished project, and we're not going to pretend it is. There are still unverified tags in our own data we haven't gotten to yet, and dozens more states where we haven't made the calls. We're working through them the same way, one park at a time, official source only, no guessing. If you know a campground with real accessible sites that we haven't listed correctly, or haven't listed at all, tell us, we'd genuinely like to know.

Campgrounder was never going to win by having the most listings. Every other camping app can add more pins to a map faster than we can verify one. What we can do is make sure that when we tell you something about a campground, it's actually true, whether that's a booking link that goes to the real reservation page, or a wheelchair symbol that means something. This is that same standard, applied to the people who've had the least reason to trust it.