How it works

BigDirtyHikes does three things: it explains permits and campgrounds properly, it watches Recreation.gov so you don't have to, and it helps you build the pack once your date is locked. Here's each, plainly.

1. The guides

One reference per marquee permit or campground: how the lottery or reservation system works, the actual dates, the real odds, and the paths in after you lose. Every fact is verified against Recreation.gov and the managing agency, and re-verified each season when new dates are announced. If a date on a guide is ever wrong, tell us and we fix it fast. The guides are free and always will be.

2. Permit and campground alerts with BDH Pro

On permits with fixed quotas, spots flow back to Recreation.gov all season: groups shrink, winners miss claim deadlines, plans fall apart. Sold-out campgrounds work the same way: people cancel, and the campsite goes back on the calendar. Those returned spots are invisible unless you happen to be looking at the exact minute one appears. Refreshing the page forty times a day isn't a strategy.

That's the tedious job we automate: you tell us the permit or campground and your dates, we watch Recreation.gov, and the moment a spot opens we ping you. You book it yourself on Recreation.gov, like always. We just make sure you're first to know. Monitoring is BDH Pro.

What we won't do

• We never book for you. No bots grabbing permits, no holding inventory, no scalping. We watch and we alert; the booking is yours, on Recreation.gov, under your account.
• We only monitor permits where monitoring works. Reservation and quota permits with returning inventory: Whitney, Boundary Waters, the Enchantments. Reservable campgrounds too, like Point Reyes backcountry and Scorpion Canyon on Santa Cruz Island. A pure lottery like The Wave has nothing to watch between draws, and we'll say so instead of selling you an alert that can't fire.
• We don't invent numbers. Odds in the guides come from published application data. Gear weights in the pack builder come from manufacturer pages. If we don't know, we don't make it up.

3. The pack builder

Permit in hand, the trip becomes a packing problem. The BigDirtyHikes pack builder is a personal gear closet plus packs organized by category with a running weight total. Gear lookup is grounded in a curated catalog of manufacturer-verified weights, per-variant, so the Long fill and the Regular fill don't get blurred into one number. It's free, and it stays out of your way. Share a pack with a link; the recipient needs no account.