Cancellations post the second they happen. No queue. No 8 a.m. ritual to memorize. CampWatch watches. You book fast.
Get Alerts FreeReserveCalifornia parks cancelled sites and releases them at 8 a.m. the next morning. You can plan your whole sprint around that bell.
Recreation.gov has no bell. When someone cancels, the site goes back on the market right then, at 2:47 on a Tuesday or 11 at night. There's no pending hold to wait out and no queue to camp on.
That makes it harder to game by hand and easier to win with an alert. You can't out-stubborn a release time that doesn't exist. You can be the first one notified.
Point CampWatch at a Recreation.gov campground and your dates. We poll it around the clock and email you the moment a site opens on those nights.
Because cancellations here are real time, the alert is the whole edge. There's no schedule to beat. There's only "who heard first."
No refreshing at midnight. No checking 14 campgrounds on your lunch break.
An alert is not a reservation. When your email lands, so might someone else's, so the next 60 seconds matter.
Stay logged in to Recreation.gov on your phone. Keep the campground page bookmarked. The instant the alert hits, open it, pick the site, and get it into your cart, because once it's there you have about 15 minutes to finish at human speed.
Cart first, details later. Typing your card number is the easy part. Being first to the open site is the part you prepared for.
Recreation.gov also runs wilderness permits, and those don't all behave like campsites. Some are lottery-allocated. Some are first-come, first-served and recover by cancellation.
CampWatch alerts on the openings that actually surface, like Eastern Sierra trailhead permits. We wrote a separate, honest breakdown of which is which.
CampWatch watches Recreation.gov around the clock and emails you the instant a site opens on your dates. No bell to beat. Just be first.