What's your strategy for landing a campsite in the Needles Campground at Canyonlands National Park?/Kurt Repanshek file

Being able to visit a website and reserve a campsite in the National Park System six months before your visit helps take the anxiety away of wondering where you'll stay. Unless you're thinking of camping in Canyonlands and Arches national parks in Utah, and no doubt some other units of the system.

The problem arises in campgrounds with a relatively small number of campsites. While the Watchman Campground at Zion National Park boasts 176 campsites, the Bridge Bay Campground in Yellowstone National Park lists 432 sites, and Tuolumne Meadows Campground in Yosemite National Park shows 304 sites, at Devils Garden Campground in Arches there are just 51, and at Needles Campground in Canyonlands there are just 26, of which only a dozen can be reserved, with the remainder first-come, first-served.

On recreation.gov you can reserve a campsite six months out from your travel...unless, of course, you plan to spend more than one night in that site. While individual campsites don't technically open for reservations until six months ahead of your desired date, if you claim a site six months out, you can extend your stay for a number of days. In the case of Needles Campground, you can book a seven-night stay, and that's where problems of securing a campsite intensify.

Recreation.gov releases sites for reservations at 10 a.m. Eastern, six months out. So if you live in the Pacific Time Zone and wanted to stay in Needles Campground on March 23, 2020, you needed to be ready to reserve your site at 7 a.m. on September 23, 2019. But your initiative wouldn't have been rewarded, unfortunately.

That's because at Needles you can relax in a campsite for seven consecutive days. And so folks who were able to latch onto a site on September 22, 2019, for March 22, 2020, arrival, could, in theory, reserve it through March 29, 2020. And so if you logged onto recreation.gov on September 23, as I did, you would have found each of the 12 sites booked through March 23, 2020, and some beyond that date. While there was one site available for March 24, you'd have to wait until September 24 to reserve that...if it was still available.

"If someone reserved for 3/22, they are allowed to book several days out," the chat room folks at recreation.gov told me when I mentioned all the sites had been reserved for March 23, 2020, before September 23, 2019. "The next available date is for site 27 and only for 03/24/2020. For 03/25/20, sites 18, 24, 25, 26, 27. I do apologize the sites were taken for today."

"But if you can't make a reservation until six months out," I replied, and someone reserves for a block of dates, how does one lock down a reservation?

"It is a relatively small camping area," came the reply. "I can only advice to check on the recreation.gov website to see which dates may come available 6 months out." 

Now, there are those 14 first-come, first-served sites at Needles Campground, but the campground is a far drive for most folks, lying about 75 miles from Moab, Utah. From Salt Lake City, it's about a 5-6 hour drive.

Would you gamble on finding one of those 14 sites vacant after a long drive, knowing that if they were all filled you would 1) have to see if the private campground just outside the Needles District had space, 2) you had to drive 49 miles to Monticello, Utah, and hope there was a motel room available, or 3) drive all the way back to Moab with hopes of finding a vacancy?

What's the solution? Is there a solution? Do small national park campgrounds need to move to a lottery system? Do parks with just one small campground need to build more? 

The answer, for now at least, concerning Needles Campground is to be flexible and broaden your search, Karen Garthwait at Canyonlands National Park told me. There currently are no discussions to enlarge the campground, she said.

"What I typically encourage people to do is plan ahead for something for their first night when in the area," she said. "Whether a private campground that you can book in advance, or a hotel room, or whatever people feel comfortable with as their lodging option. But having a reservation for that first night then lets you travel here with the security that you have a place to land, you can pop into whichever visitor center of whichever unit who are wanting to go to, find out the lay of the land, and then find out how early you need to be there the next day in order to get one of those first-come, first-served available sites."

Garthwait also noted that, in terms of Needles Campground, there are a number of campgrounds along Utah 211 just outside the Needles District that are managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, "(A)ll of which are first-come, first served, and they have been adding to them practically every other year the last couple of years."

Those BLM campgrounds are the Hamburger Rock Campground (10 sites), Creek Pasture Campground (32 sites), and Super Bowl Campground (37 sites). Those campgrounds are more rustic than the Needles Campground, with no running water and offering vault, not flush, toilets.

If your heart is set on Needles Campground and you are blocked from landing a site during the popular spring and fall seasons, there's always the brutally hot (100°+) days in the heart of summer or the cold (lows of 0°-20° Fahrenheit possible), short days of winter when all sites are first-come, first-served.