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| Above, The Beast at Yosemite's North Pines Campground. Photo by Armand Vaquer. |
When I went to the national park reservation site to get a campsite at Yosemite National Park back in November 2015, it was because I knew ahead of time when sites at North Pines Campground would be available at 7:00 am on a specific date.
I went to the site just before 7:00 and found about a third of the campground's sites were already reserved. I picked a spot and got it.
Thankfully, it was because I had high speed Internet that I got in and reserved a site right away for the following April.
I considered myself lucky. But there was a nagging feeling that there were some "insiders" involved as a third of the sites were already taken within a minute or so after the sites on the reservation system opened up.
It appears that the system may be more inequitable than I suspected. A study seems to bear this out.
According to Wyoming Public Media:
In the last couple of years, national park campgrounds introduced reservation systems as a way to deal with an influx of users. A new study has found that this system is creating an equity problem.
Will Rice, University of Montana Assistant Professor of Outdoor Recreation and Wildland Management, said he realized a reservation system may not be fair when he saw that on any given day you might have 19,000 people vying for 57 campsites in a federal campground..
"When the odds are that low, any little advantage makes a huge difference to just having a little bit faster internet speed, or having one more friend out in the world who's also helping you," said Rice.
The article goes on to state that possibly a lottery system may be more equitable.
To read the full article, go here.
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