National Park Service Rant

[Captcolour]

Planning our June 2023 trip started last year to get reservations at popular parks like Grizzly RV in West Yellowstone and the KOA in West Glacier. Pieces of the month long trip fall into place. Wanted to stay in Colter Bay RV Park which is controlled by the National Park Service. So those reservations open up 6 months in advance at 10am. Was on the computer 15 minutes prior and locked and loaded. Nothing! Sites sold out in less than a minute. OK, so I could move things slightly for one day, so tried again the next day, and again sold out in seconds! No other days would work so found a RV park south of Jackson.

The next thing was to secure the timed-entry vehicle pass for Glacier. Those opened up for May and June yesterday at 10am. Yep, all gone for the entire month of June in minutes. Looked at Red Bus tours, sold out for the entire month of June. This is BS that you have to make RV reservations up to a year in advance, but can't make entry pass reservations until several months in advance. This is backwards. If I can't get into the park, why bother going to West Glacier? If I had waited to get an entry pass first, there would be no chance of getting a RV reservation. Total BS!

Yes I know that there are entry passes that open at 8am for the next day, and already have that on my calendar each day to try for. The other thing I did was book horseback riding in the park through Swan Mountain. I knew that the horseback riding reservation would get you in the park without the time-entry vehicle pass. So we are at least guaranteed to get in the park that one day. Did the same thing for Rocky Mountain NP a few years back.

How it should work is similar to the horseback riding in the park. If you book a hotel or campsite within say 10 miles of the park entrance, you ought to be able to get a timed-entry pass at the same time as the accommodation booking. If no entry passes available, then you can decide whether to still go, change dates, etc. Of course this makes too much sense. /Rant off

[Riverbug]

That doesn't bode well for our planned 7 weeks in CO this year. I have all my reservations made for where we'll stay but it was too early to reserve entries to Pike's Peak, Rocky Mountain, and other drives we want to take. I had seen a YouTube video where people said if you go before a certain time in the morning you do not need a reservation; I think that was for Rocky Mountain Nat'l Park, but I'll have to try to confirm that in case we don't have any luck either.

[ajg617]

That is very frustrating - we were planning Glacier, YNP, Tetons for July/Aug. I had heard a rumor that folks on site can book a year in advance. Was told that by a State Park employee at the park we finally got a 3 night stay in when I also could not book the minute it opened up but lucked out by continually checking. The amount of time I spent online trying to book was painful. We also found that a lot of sites that showed booked solid for the entire stay on-line were actually empty. There was not a single opening for a 3 month period yet many of the sites were empty.