What's changed about camping?

mockturtle wrote:
I don't like to make reservations and miss the spontaneity of just showing up at a FS campground. Now most of them take reservations and are apt to be full. While I'm glad to see families out camping and enjoying their time off from work and school, things will probably never be as they were, say, ten or 20 years ago and we casual campers will have to find new options. Dispersed camping is sometimes OK but other times it is risky, with full-time homeless 'tweekers' and other druggies whose cluttered campsites indicate that they are not limiting their stays to two weeks.

I go back and forth on whether reservations have improved the camping experience or made it worse. Certainly the ability to plan ahead and know you have a site in advance is a big plus. The counter argument though is that these reservations are being booked out six months or more in advance for many places and so now you have to plan these things way far out for summer months and plans often change in that time. How many times have we all been at a campground that was "full" only to have reserved sites go empty?

I don't know what the right answer is but I wish that they would limit a percentage of sites that can be reserved six months out to say no more than 25%, and another 50% can only be reserved within a month and the final 25% remain open to first come first serve or same day reservations.

At the very least, they need to start expanding the number of campgrounds in some of the popular areas to meet demand.