If your camping trip starts with booking a Recreation.gov site and ends with photos around the fire, here's how Campound's features fit together — from finding an open night, to planning the drive around live availability, to keeping the whole trip on your map long after you're home.
Get it on the App StoreTap Find a spot and Campound searches reservable campgrounds by your date range — night-by-night live availability comes back from Recreation.gov, so a campground that's fully booked doesn't clutter your results. You see the actual open sites, not just the name of a facility that might or might not have room.
Filter by amenity (drinking water, RV hookups, showers, dump station), tent-vs-RV, campsite type, capacity, or reservation window. When peak-season sites open at 8am 6 months out, the search runs in seconds so you can grab an open spot before someone else does.
Read the Find a spot guide →Tap any facility to open its detail card: overall rating, star breakdown, individual campsite ratings, most-recent user reviews, amenity list, contact info. Then flip to the Campsites by rating tab and Campound shows every campsite in the facility ranked by rating with color-coded availability pins — green for available on your dates, gray for booked. A tap on any campsite pin drops you into its month-view calendar so you can see how the availability moves week to week.
If your dates are flexible, the calendar view is where you shift them. Move the range a few days earlier or later; watch the "green" density change; grab the window that has your best pick open.
Open the Trip planner, drop an origin and a destination, and Campound draws the driving route and searches every reservable campground within a corridor around that route — you set the corridor width. Great for a road trip where you want to stop somewhere reasonable each night but aren't picky about exactly where.
Every corridor match includes live availability from Recreation.gov for the dates you set, so booked-solid places don't waste your attention. The rows sort by proximity to your route by default; sort by rating to see the highest-reviewed options in the corridor first.
Read the Trip planner guide →Star campgrounds you're considering and they land on your Trip's shortlist. The shortlist syncs across your devices, so the campgrounds you starred while planning on your iPad show up on your phone the next morning when your co-planner wants to weigh in. Star ratings on each shortlist entry help you sort — 5-star sites bubble to the top.
Delete the ones you're not going with and reorder the rest. When you're down to a final pick, the shortlist keeps the alternates in reserve — because plans change and it's nice to have a "next best option" a tap away.
Campound doesn't handle the booking transaction itself — that's Recreation.gov's job, and their reservation system is deep in campground-specific rules that we won't try to replicate. But every facility detail card has a Reserve on Recreation.gov button that opens the correct campground page pre-filled with your date range, so you land on the exact confirmation screen instead of hunting through the site.
Same for individual campsites — the campsite-level detail links straight to that campsite's booking page on Recreation.gov.
Once you're on the road, tap Directions to your booked campground. Campound gives you turn-by-turn voice, ETA, and drift-recalc — with the hybrid router that hands off from Mapbox's paved driving directions to Campound's own off-road router when the last stretch of road turns to gravel. If your campground is 4 miles up a forest road with no cell service, the nav keeps working the whole way.
Every layer we've discussed — land ownership, trails, roads, campsite locations — ships as bundled tiles that render offline. Download the states you're going to be in before you leave, and the map keeps drawing whether you have signal or not.
Read the Navigation guide →Every photo you take through Campound's camera is geotagged and clustered on your map. A weekend of shots around your campsite reads as one thumbnail cluster; tap in and a carousel opens with all the pictures. Swipe through, delete the duds, keep the keepers.
Photos are stored locally on your device with 320px thumbnails for the map layer and full-resolution originals in Files. When you sign in, both flow up to your account and sync to your other devices. Anonymous mode works too — everything just stays on-device.
Tap the star on a facility, a campsite, or the whole trip and it lands in your Favorites with a 1-to-5 rating. Next year when you're planning the same weekend, your rated favorites are the first thing you see — sorted so your 5-star sites are at the top.
Favorites sync across your devices via your Campound account. Your co-planner sees the same list. Your kid's iPad shows the same list. The list is the memory of every campground you've loved.
Once you're at your campground, Campound is your local guide too. Turn on the Trails layer and every trail near you — from the National Forest, from the National Trails system, and every state or local trail with data — shows on the map. Tap any trail for length, elevation gain, maintainer, and open dates for hikers. Ask Siri "what trail am I on?" and the same detector answers, hands-free.
Turn on the Fishing layer if you're near a Gold Medal reach for a shot at trophy trout. Turn on the Vehicle Routes if you're deciding whether the road up to the ridge is legal for your rental car. The whole outdoor toolkit is on the same map whether you're using it or not.
Find the trail, follow it without cell service, and log the whole hike to Apple Fitness as a proper workout with route.
MVUM legal-use decoded, forest-road nav that keeps working past the last cell tower, dispersed sites you can share via AirDrop.
All the features, all the personas, all in one map. Free. No account. Works offline.
Free. No account required. iPhone, iPad + Apple Watch. Live Recreation.gov availability included.
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