Find a spot

Help guide · Updated June 25, 2026

What this is. The Find a spot panel discovers campgrounds in the area you're looking at, checks which individual sites are available across the dates you care about, and shows community ratings from people who've actually stayed there. Data comes from Recreation.gov — the U.S. government's public reservation system — so anything you see can be booked at recreation.gov.

Open the panel

Tap the calendar-with-search icon in the toolbar at the top of the map.

A panel slides up from the bottom with everything you need.

Find a spot panel showing Follow map, From and To date pickers, a Refresh button, and one campground result. — From the top down: Follow map, From/To date pickers, Refresh, then the list of campgrounds in view.

Pick your dates

The From and To pickers govern which sites the panel checks for availability. The default is today → today, which is enough for a last-minute spot tonight. Widen the range when you're planning ahead — a four-day trip needs four nights of overlap.

The count badge next to the title (1 in the screenshot above) is how many facilities matched the viewport — not how many available sites. To check actual availability you'll open a facility and look at the campsite list.

Pan around to find facilities

The list shows campgrounds in the current map viewport.

Follow map (the blue toggle) — auto-refreshes the list as you pan and zoom.
Refresh (the large light-blue button) — manual re-query, useful when Follow map is off or when reservation data may have changed.

Each row shows the facility name, parent area (e.g. Royal Gorge), state, and a count of campsites in that facility.

Open a facility

Tap any row to open the facility detail.

Facility detail for Turtle Rock Campground showing a photo carousel, 4.4 star rating, 24 campsites, and the Info tab with name, ID, type, and phone number. — Facility detail. The photo carousel pulls from Recreation.gov; swipe through to scout the area.

You'll get, depending on what Recreation.gov has on file:

Photo carousel — swipe through real photos of the campground.
Aggregate rating — average user star rating + review count.
Total campsite count — the orange badge by the rating.
Info tab — name, facility ID, type, phone, email, full description, recreation activities, facilities offered, natural features, and nearby attractions.
Campsites by rating tab — see next section.

The action row

Four icons sit at the top right.

Navigate

Starts turn-by-turn navigation to the campground entrance. Auto-minimizes the panel so the map is in view. From the individual-campsite screen it navigates to the site itself instead of the entrance.

Directions

Opens driving directions in Apple Maps — the iOS Maps app on iPhone, or maps.apple.com in a browser. Useful when you want the standard car-nav experience.

Show on map

Recenters and zooms the map to the campground, drops a labeled pin, and minimizes the panel so you can see the surroundings.

Favorite

Saves the campground (or individual campsite) to your favorites with a 1-to-5 star rating. Tap the star, pick a rating to commit. Once favorited the star fills yellow; a Remove favorite option appears in the popover.

Find the best-rated open sites

The Campsites by rating tab is where Find a spot earns its keep — it surfaces only the sites that have user reviews, so you skip the unscored campsites the algorithm doesn't know much about.

Campsites by rating tab showing 13 of 24 campsites have ratings, sort toggle between Rating and Next available, and a list of campsites with star ratings and next-available dates in green. — Only rated sites show here. The header reads **13 of 24 campsites have ratings**.

Each row shows:

Campsite number (the in-park label, e.g. 13), loop, and type (Standard Nonelectric, Tent Only, Group, etc.).
Star rating with the number of reviews in parentheses.
Next available date in green — the soonest date the site can be booked, given your From date.

The sort toggle at the top right switches between:

Rating — highest-rated first. Use when you have flexible dates and want quality.
Next available — soonest open date first. Use when you need somewhere tonight.

Tap a campsite

Tap any row to dive into a single site.

Campsite 13 detail showing a photo carousel of the site itself with its signpost, 5.0 star rating with 3 reviews, next-available date, and four tabs: Info, Ratings, Reservations, Facility. — Site-level detail. The photo carousel pulls from Recreation.gov and usually includes a shot of the signpost so you can confirm you're at the right one.

Four tabs at the top:

Info — name, loop, type, latitude/longitude, and other site-level metadata.
Ratings — individual user reviews.
Reservations — the availability calendar (see below).
Facility — jump back to the parent facility's detail.

The reservations calendar

The Reservations tab is a month-grid showing the booking status of every day for this specific site.

Calendar grid for campsite 13 with each day color-coded as Available, Reserved, Not yet released, Open/walk-up, or First-come/first-served. — Calendar grid for one site. Green = available, blue = reserved, yellow = not yet released by Recreation.gov.

AAvailable RReserved NNot yet released OOpen / walk-up FFFirst-come / first-served

What the codes actually mean:

A — Available: bookable right now. Tap Check reservations on recreation.gov to actually book.
R — Reserved: someone already has it.
N — Not yet released: Recreation.gov hasn't opened the booking window yet — most campgrounds release on a rolling 6-month schedule.
O — Open / walk-up: not on the reservation system; first-come, first-served at the campground.
FF — First-come / first-served: same idea — show up and grab the site if it's empty.

Campound doesn't process bookings — the Check reservations on recreation.gov link at the top of the calendar opens the site's listing on Recreation.gov in your browser, where you complete the reservation.

Get out of the way

The panel header has three sizing controls — same as the rest of Campound.

Minimize — collapse to a thin header pill. Your selection is preserved.
Maximize — go full-screen for browsing long campsite lists.
Close — dismiss the panel entirely.

Tips

Needs signal. Unlike Find a trail, Find a spot is online-only — availability data is queried from Recreation.gov on demand and isn't cached for offline use.

Only Recreation.gov sites appear. National Forest dispersed camping, BLM dispersed sites, and most state-park sites aren't on Recreation.gov and won't show up here. For dispersed camping, use the map's land-ownership layers and zoom in.

The "Next available" sort is your last-minute friend. Set From to today, switch to Next available, and you'll see which rated sites you could grab right now — or the very next night they open up.

Favorite specific campsites, not just campgrounds. Loop 13 of a campground might be quiet by the creek while Loop 1 is next to the road — favoriting at the site level lets you go back to your spot, not just the parking lot.