CampWatch responsible-use policy

Last updated: April 24, 2026

CampWatch is a personal-use campsite availability watcher. We monitor public reservation systems on behalf of users to notify them when sites become available.

What we hit

• Recreation.gov via the RIDB documented API for campground metadata, and the public recreation.gov availability endpoint for per-day grids.
• ReserveCalifornia via the public reservecalifornia.com booking endpoints.

How we behave

• Rate-limited: <40 req/min to Recreation.gov, <30 req/min to ReserveCalifornia.
• Adaptive: we only poll a campground if a user is actively watching it. Poll frequency ranges from every 10 minutes (close start dates) to every 2 hours (distant ones).
• Coalescing: when multiple users watch the same campground, we make one upstream request and share the result.
• Backoff: exponential delay on errors; we honor Retry-After.
• Identifying: every outbound request carries a User-Agent identifying CampWatch with contact info.

Contact

• For provider concerns about our access: [email protected]
• For Recreation.gov data questions: recreation.gov/use-our-data
• For ReserveCalifornia questions: [email protected]

Camping data from Recreation.gov and ReserveCalifornia. CampWatch is not affiliated with Recreation.gov, the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, California State Parks, ReserveCalifornia, or Tyler Technologies.

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