National Park Reservations: Channel Islands, Saguaro, and Big Bend
The challenge with traveling to National Parks instead of just traveling around aimlessly like a typical #vanlifer is that National Parks tend to be pretty well known places. Because people tend to go to these places, especially during the summer months, accommodations in and around the parks tend to fill up. This can even include backcountry permits at a select few parks with prominent and well known backcountry options. Annoyingly enough, each park seems to have their own weird system for dealing with these reservations instead of having a comprehensive system for all parks. Mostly for my own future reference, I have decided to info dump about each each National Park that I have made reservations for in 2022 so far in order of when I am going to be visiting them. This post has information for Channel Islands, Saguaro, and Big Bend National Parks.
Channel Islands National Park
As of March 2022, the closest island to the harbor in Ventura, CA, Anacapa Island, is closed for some maintenance activity until Fall 2022. There is normally camping here. There is also camping on the other islands. However, you need to make sure you can get there first (since we don’t have jetpacks yet, Elon should get on that).
When booking a trip to one of these islands, make sure you cross reference with the ferry schedule first. Unless you got $mOnAAAy$ and can charter a private boat. Then you can ignore me (you are probably used to ignoring people if you have private-boat-charter money).
You are going to want to keep in mind that the ferry ride time to the islands vary based on their proximity to the harbor. Some of the farther islands are so far that they are not worth it for a day trip in my opinion.
Anacapa (closest) requires a 1.5 hours boat ride, Santa Cruz Island requires a 1 to 2 hour boat ride depending on what side of the island you are going to, Santa Rosa requires a 3 hour boat ride, and San Miguel requires a 4.5 hour boat ride and potentially a wet landing. This is EACH way. Which is why I don’t think a day trip to Santa Rosa Island (or even a one night trip) would be worth it for 6 hours on a boat. On San Miguel, overnight is required. I have heard that the boat trips out to these farther islands can get a bit choppy so beware if you are a landlubber (don’t know why I just became a pirate all of a sudden).
Costs, departure time, departure dates all vary based on the week, the island you want to go to, ect. The Island Packers (ferry company) website has a fairly easy to use calendar with all their outbound trip offerings here: https://reserve.islandpackers.com/trips.php?m=202203
So, camping. As I said, Anacapa is closed. Santa Cruz Island has a campground (with water) available to book all year round in the the Scorpion Cove area where the boat drops you off and a backcountry campground about 3-4 miles away from the Prisoners Harbor boat drop off area (no water in this area so you have to bring it all if you hike out from here). I had no problem booking this site a month and a half in advanced for an midweek trip in April. But if you want to book a prime time or are particular on dates. All camping in Channel Islands can be reserved 6 months in advanced to the day. Right now it is 3/4/2022 and they are accepting reservations for trips BEGINING on 9/4/2022.
Santa Rosa Island has a campground available (with water) all year round as well. They have weird little half barn shelters at them. There is quite a lot of availability there in March and April, might be worth a visit. The coolest thing on Santa Rosa Island though is that they have backcountry beach camping permits available. Of course, not while I’m there. These permits are available from mid-August to December.
San Miguel Island is the farthest and least visited. Camping is available year round but the ferry only goes out there from June through November so, unless you’re Richie Rich or a pirate who has their own boat, good luck.
Here is the link for the camping reservations: https://www.recreation.gov/search?q=Channel%20Islands%20National%20Park
Personally, I will be backpacking on Santa Cruz Island. I am taking the ferry to Prisoners Harbor and staying at the backpacker campground. The next day I am hiking to the other side of the island and taking the ferry back from Scorpion Cove. I couldn’t effectively arrange this online but I just called the office at Island Packers and they made the reservation for me easy peezy.
Saguaro National Park
This one less complicated to plan than Channel Islands. No boat equals not as challenging. Saguaro is right by Tucson and there are PLENTY of places to camp for free around here that are really close to the park. That makes the fact that there are no campgrounds in the park absolutely fine with me. One less reservation to worry about. I am going to backpack there though. And that requires a reservation at a backcountry campsite (or more if you are planning a longer trip).
There are two districts in Saguaro but my backpacking trip is taking place in the Rincon Mountain District so I don’t have any information on the other one.
They have information about each backcountry campsite, water availability (basically there is none), and how many miles the hike is to get there on here: https://www.nps.gov/sagu/planyourvisit/exploring-the-rincon-mountains-brochure-information.htm . I am a visual person when planning hikes so I needed a map in order to understand anything on this brochure. The hiking map for the district can be found here: https://www.nps.gov/sagu/planyourvisit/maps.htm .
Once I had a few options of where I would be willing to go (I just wanted to do a semi-quick overnight trip since I didn’t want to carry a million gallons on water), I headed on over to see what was available around the time I wanted to head over there. On the first of every month, reservations are released for the whole-month-two-months-from-now. Meaning on April 1st, all June reservations will be released. I was late to the game but still got a reservation for one for late April no problem. There seems to be plenty of availability left for the spring even though these dates have been released for a while. Go here to build your reservation itinerary for a Saguaro backpacking trip: https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campgrounds/10028678/itinerary .
Big Bend National Park
I guess everything IS bigger in Texas because this national park is HUGE. There are three campgrounds (Cottonwood, Chisos Basin, and Rio Grande Village), “backcountry” car campsites, and backcountry hiking options to choose from. This park must have a lot of groups that come through because it has an INSANE amount of group campsites in the campgrounds. Both Cottonwood and Chisos Basin have group sites available to reserve well in advanced and Rio Grande Village is ONLY group sites. I am not going to go any further into booking any of these sites because camping in a big group gives me hectic vibes and I don’t like the idea of it out of summer camp.
So individual campsites! If you’re an advanced planner you ain’t going to like this. Cottonwood only allows reservations 14 days in advanced. Chisos Basin allows them 6 months in advanced but they were inconveniently closed when I wanted to go. All campsites, including backcountry, can be reserved here: https://www.recreation.gov/search?q=Big%20Bend%20National%20Park&entity_id=2584&entity_type=recarea
No bother though, because I would rather book one of their “backcountry” car campsites any day. They call these “primitive road campsites.” They don’t make it easy though. For some cluster-eff of a reason, they have all their backcountry campsites on the same page whether you can get there by car or you have to walk. And they don’t denote which campsites are which AT ALL. They do give them very cute and clever names though that are not helpful at all. Effing creative types.
Instead of playing campsite roulette, you can determine which stupid name belongs a roadside campsite here: https://www.nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/roadsidecamps.htm . There are some listed as “improved” for those without 4 wheel drive vehicles like me. Some of the road campsites are reservable but some require you to get a permit day of. I like taking the guesswork out so I reserved one. You can look at where the sites are on this map: https://www.nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/upload/BIBEmap1.jpg .
I didn’t reserve a backcountry campsite here so I don’t know what to do for the backpacking campsites. You’re on your own there bucco.
P.S. If you want to paddle or anything on the Rio Grande, you have to get a permit. You do this day of in a Visitor’s Center.