“So, Ben, what are your hiking plans for next year?”
What a good question, and one I have been asked a couple times. It’s hard to say. I am not a professional backpacker, this website has never made me a thin dime, and my job is not as stable as I might wish. I had to cancel what would have been a grand week-long backpack last July when said job blew up in my stupid face. Plus I’m getting a jump on my mid-life crisis by starting graduate school, so I have even less of an idea than usual what my year will look like.
January 1 is a good day to cast such plans, both because of the symbolism and because you better know what you’re doing in January if you’re backpacking in Canada. In 2026, Parks Canada backcountry reservations begin to open on January 16, with different parks opening on different days. Even without the Canada Strong pass, many campgrounds at many parks sell out for most of the backpacking season on opening day; with the Canada Strong pass, the cash savings are modest but the added attention will make things worse.
That’s just Parks Canada. Suppose your trip takes you through a British Columbia provincial park, such as the North Boundary Trail, or the popular Highline Trail in Banff going through Mount Assiniboine. In that case, permits are booked on a three-month rolling window. Except for the Berg Lake Trail, which for some demented reason opened its entire stock on December 2 and is now completely sold out, all 103 tent pads, between mid-June and late September.
You could easily book the national park portion of your Highline trip in January, come back in May for the Assiniboine portion, and find that you’re screwed. Sometimes you can get around it; you can finish the North Boundary from Jasper National Park to the Berg Lake trailhead in a day reasonably comfortably. Sometimes you can’t; the Highline Trail has campsites in Banff both before and after Assiniboine, so you better know whether you’re staying in the provincial park or not.
So what am I going to do? What I always do. What everyone does. Book everything I can get the day reservations open, then cancel what I’m not going to use as life throws obstacles in my way. Then, ask if there might be a better way.
One problem is that there are, essentially, three types of backpackers. There are those who want to see the beautiful things they saw on Instagram. That’s not to be dismissive, much: most dedicated backpackers start off in that class. But they tend to prioritize the shorter, beautiful, well-maintained, and well-known trails and very often they don’t quite know what they’re doing, which can include how difficult and time-sensitive reservations are. Then there are those who want to get off the beaten path, sometimes but not necessarily for a week or more, but whose inclinations or lives keep them from anything larger: that’s where I come in. Then there are those who want to hike really far, which in Canada usually means people who want to hike the Great Divide Trail.
In November, the Great Divide Trail Association teased a “huge announcement“. It wound up being a fundraiser for a cable car over the Blaeberry River but pretty much everybody in the comments hoped for a unified permit for the 680-mile trail, which currently requires scarce reservations in three separate national park systems (Waterton Lakes, Banff-Yoho-Kootenay, and Jasper), two British Columbia provincial parks, and one Alberta provincial park, all with separate days where reservations open, plus a plethora of other provincial parks, wildernesses, and wildland zones that are no less paperwork but far easier to get. The Great Divide Trail crosses most of the most popular areas in the mountain parks: the Waterton shoreline, the Iceline Trail in Yoho1, the Highline Trail, the Rockwall, the Jonas Shoulder section of the Brazeau Loop, Skyline, and often the Berg Lake Trail. Even some of the less popular trails, such as Maligne Pass, are so tightly-restricted by the park that reservations are no easier to come by. Small wonder there are more GDT hikers saying “hell with it” and hiking without a permit, which is theoretically subject to a minimum fine of $5,000 under the Canada National Parks Act.
GDT hikers don’t like that, and who can blame them? I’m thinking of hiking a section of the GDT this year, and I would need two disconnected reservations at the same national park, and a permit (which is at least non-competitive) at a provincial park. People compare the GDT to the Pacific Crest Trail or the John Muir Trail, two popular long thru-hikes across multiple parks in the United States which only need one permit for a thru-hiker. But this is the exception and not the rule: the other two “Triple Crown” long-distance trails, the Appalachian and the Continental Divide Trails, do not have a unified permitting system. The real thing which makes long-distance backpacking easier in the United States is that their management agencies tend to like people using their trails. Such permits do not help section hikers, who make up at least half the long-distance hikers on the GDT and PCT. And while we all get annoyed at Parks Canada’s hostility to backcountry hiking, we can at least see their point. Dozens of backcountry campgrounds along the Great Divide Trail are already full almost every day of the summer. To give the Great Divide Hiker the simplicity and flexibility he desires, where he can walk into Floe Lake on the Rockwall whenever his feet happen to carry him there, would inevitably take space from people who just want to do the Rockwall. The problem is not insoluble (for example, don’t let GDT thru-hikers camp at Floe Lake! Make them dayhike Skyline!) but the compromises would not be as good as what people have in their heads.
The Great Divide Trail Association said it right: “just because we’re doing something special, does not make us special. We may tread more lightly and demand less from these paths, but others are just as entitled to access those spaces as we are.” Jasper National Park recorded 15,100 backcountry trail users in 2023 (the most recent annual report before the fire), a very significant proportion of which would have camped somewhere on the Great Divide Trail2; the Great Divide Trail Association estimates 150 to 200 people attempt to thru-hike the trail every year. So our third category, the ultra-hardcore hiker who feels like camping for two months, cannot be our top priority. Somebody that dedicated to hiking the GDT, with the athleticism and resourcefulness required to succeed, will usually be able to plan ahead and find a way or make one.
So what about our first two categories? The 15,000 Jasper backcountry users, the nearly 20,000 campers on the Berg Lake Trail, the 10,000 or so on the West Coast Trail every year, the great big growing mass of people who need to get away from the cities and live someplace wilder for a night, two nights, a week?
There are a few different approaches. At Golden Ears Provincial Park, for example, there are no backcountry reservations at all: one pays $5 for a permit (hopefully), hikes in to one of the backcountry campsites, and finds out if there’s room at the inn. And if you’re going to Viewpoint Beach or Halfmoon Beach on a nice summer weekend, you better be prepared to turn around and drive home because there probably isn’t. Even on off-peak days the popular Golden Ears spots can be just intolerably busy, but Golden Ears gets away with it because you’re never more than seven miles from the car3. It works in parks which few people visit because they’re so remote or such a hassle, but no, we’re not doing that in the national parks.
Another idea is that used by, among others, Glacier National Park in Montana. Every March, you may pay USD$10 to enter a lottery for backcountry reservations, and if you’re a lucky winner you have a fair shot at 70% of the park’s inventory. After the lottery period it’s a free-for-all over the scraps. The other 30% is held for people who walk up (or line up) on the day before departure to take their chances booking a trip. This at least means locals get a crack at seeing the park, because who would make the trek to Montana and go to a ranger station to see if they can pick something up? But it’s a bit harsh. The lottery requires a fee to keep people from spamming it with bots, but paying Parks Canada $10 in exchange for not getting a backcountry permit would stick in my craw. A generous walk-up allocation also works better at a place like Glacier, miles from anywhere, than it would at say Banff, 90 minutes from Calgary. Picture camping out on Connaught Drive in Jasper because you need to be near the front of the line for that last-minute Skyline trip. I’m sure the town and I agree: no thank you.
The Pacific Crest Trail releases 70% of their coveted northbound long-distance permits every November and the other 30% in January, first-come-first-served. Since the typical Pacific Crest Trail thruhiker starts in April, this makes a sort of sense for them, and perhaps if Parks Canada kept 30% of its backcountry reservations back until (say) April, people who don’t know their vacation plans eight months in advance would have an easier time. But, then, why not release them all in April? For the Pacific Crest Trail you’re taking three or four months off: you really need to arrange your life around the hike. Ordinary hikes simply aren’t the same.
God forgive me for saying this, but might BC Parks be doing it right? Not the December Berg Lake Trail permit-dump; that is a wide-awake screaming nightmare and I will never camp on the Berg Lake Trail, ever4. But the three-month rolling window. If you want to start hiking August 1, you hit the website on May 1 and take your chances with that day’s crowd. If you’re lucky, you book your entire trip from August 1 to August 8 or whenever you’re done; if you’re unlucky, you say “well maybe I can start on August 2” and try again tomorrow. Of course the full selection isn’t available every day; those who got permits starting July 31 took their share of August 1’s campsites too.
Three months is plenty to book vacation and arrange a trip to a mountain national park; in fact you could probably make it two. The rolling window is the key. It’s not perfect. On a really popular trail there might be a lot of days where you roll out of bed at 7 AM and try to get lucky, and some people work at 7 AM on jobs where they don’t have easy access to Discover Camping. Construction workers are allowed to go to the backcountry too. But the advantages are huge: you don’t need to plan eight months in advance, and the closer to the departure date you can book a reservation the more likely you are to actually be able to use it. A regular Parks Canada experience is flailing around searching for dates where you can string your campsites together: “I’d like to leave August 15. Oh no that one’s booked up. Well I think I can do August 8, let me check… no, I get caught on day 3, maybe I can do August 22? Could I possibly make it another seven miles on day 1 and start August 12?” Meanwhile other people are snatching up reservations every second; it calls for extensively quick thinking, whereas the thought process when everyone booking that day is starting the same day is comparatively simple, and if construction workers are allowed to go into the backcountry so are people with IQs of 95 who don’t think on their feet so well.
Maybe the best solution is a bit of all of these (well, not Glacier). Have an “opening day” in January or February where 40% of the reservations are released; give the inflexible their fair shake. After that, it’s a rolling window for the other 60%5. The software development challenges of mingling both approaches are not considerable; in fact, BC Parks and Parks Canada both use the same reservation software so it may already be there.
Perfect fairness is not an option on this Earth, but the backcountry is only getting more popular, and people’s lives are only getting less certain. We can make it easy to plan, and reward thinking ahead, while still allowing that precious bit of flexibility that makes sure the backcountry is enjoyed by as many as possible.
- This is, strictly speaking, an alternate, but the main route is so run-down and un-fun, and the alternate so lovely in spots, that it’s rarely taken by choice.
- Parks Canada does not share statistics on the popularity of specific trails, but the report states that “close to 70% of the overnight use in the backcountry is concentrated in the four main areas: Skyline, Maligne Lake, Tonquin and Brazeau.” Skyline and Brazeau are on the GDT. If this sounds intolerably vague, Jasper is actually unusually good at revealing this sort of information.
- Unless, like me, you don’t drive. This is why I go to Golden Ears in April.
- Since everyone knows “anecdote” is the singular of “data”, here’s mine: in 2025 the Berg Lake Trail reservations opened in a similar screaming scramble on a more reasonable date of April 2. That September I day-hiked the Berg Lake down from the North Boundary. I passed the upper campgrounds, Robson Pass and Berg Lake and them, fairly early in the morning and I would swear something like a fifth of them had not been slept in the previous night. Despite what people say, if a Banff or Jasper backcountry campsite is sold out, chances are it really will be full or close to it. But on one particular day, one with gorgeous weather to boot, Berg Lake got a lot of no-shows.
- I pick percentages divisible by five out of respect for Parks Canada’s hallowed “I dunno how many tents you can fit there; call it five” booking system.
Interesting perspective. I moved to Calgary in 1996 and joined an outdoor club. We never had any issues booking backcountry sites and I remember enjoying so many of the pristine places that one can only hope to see now. I never thought it would come to this. I’m not sure of the answer although I do feel they need ot have a “check-in” system where you check in two weeks before, then again within 48 hours of your start date and if you don’t check in at the 48 hr mark, your spots are released. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve arrived at a backcountry campsite where the reservation system said it was fully booked, to find I was the only one there, or only half of the spots were actually occupied. As someone who lives near the mountain parks, who can plan on relatively short notice, this absolutely burns me.
Really interesting read. At heart, any system designed to allocate X camping spots to 10X hopefuls is going to leave many people disappointed. The current booking systems can be frustrating, but I have a lot of faith that the people running them have done their due diligence and genuinely care about making them as fair as can be.
Empty sites are infuriating, but what’s the solution? A check-in system sounds interesting, but the devil is in the details. What if I’m driving from afar and only intend to hit the trail at 6 pm? What if the park’s visitor centre is a 90-minute drive beyond my trailhead? What happens if someone misses or misunderstands the explicit email reminders that “it is necessary to check-in before your stay” and shows up to their campsite to find it full? Maybe you shrug and argue that people shouldn’t be so careless — but people will be careless, and the fallout is going to be campsite confrontations and camping on undesignated sites.
The rolling three-month window is a reasonable system. But it’s not perfect. For one, it doesn’t make the morning booking process any less mad-dash — for any given date, there are just as many people vying for just as few spots, whether those spots are released three-months in advance or on a specific date in January. Secondly, there is a cunning exploit: since it’s not reasonable to expect campers on multi-day trips to have to run this gauntlet on several successive mornings (with the whole trip jeopardised if one booking is missed), the standard procedure is to let people book trips _starting_ on a given date, three months prior to that date. Thus, if you want a spot at Egypt Lake on the 3rd of September, you can boot up your computer on the 1st of June, book two nights at Lost Horse Creek and a third at your desired hotspot, a full two days ahead of most everyone else. Then, either cancel the first two nights at some later date or, if the system has been designed to prevent you from doing that, simply not show up and swallow the extra $30 — a small price to pay for many.
I can vouch for the severity of the morning mania even with a rolling window. In 2024 I secured a spot at Many Glacier campground in Glacier NP (US), which at the time (and maybe still) used a rolling window like BC Parks. It took me three attempts to nab the site. I had heard that it was a game of seconds, and read that it was sensible to time-keep not with your own computer’s clock, but with the US NIST’s atomic clocks on time dot gov. On the first day, I clicked “book” at 07:00:00: “sorry, that site has already been taken”, read the ensuing pop-up. On the second day, I clicked “book” at 06:59:59: “sorry, that site has not yet become available to book”, I was told (of course, by the time I refreshed the page and tried again, the space had gone). On the third day, I clicked book at 06:59:59.5, and secured the spot. It makes sense, I suppose, that the signal takes a few fractions of a second to travel from my network to the servers of parks dot gov. But it was insane to me that those fractions of a second seemed to matter.
This problem doesn’t occur when booking sites in Banff NP, for example, because there is a lottery-based queue system that redirects people onto the reservation website in drips and drabs. I think this is better — both in that it reduces the technical demand on the website, and that it doesn’t disadvantage (so much) people who are slow to navigate it. But there are still unresolved technical challenges — such as how to prevent the tech-savvy from masquerading as multiple users to game a higher place in the queue — and the lottery system leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of those dedicated campers who’d wish for their superior effort and advanced planning to afford more guarantees.
Speaking of lottery systems, one definite misstep I think Parks Canada has made is with the day-use shuttle to Lake O’Hara. In 2024, at least, it was possible to enter the lottery arbitrarily many times, at a cost of something like $10 per pop. This was stated explicitly on the booking page — it wasn’t an exploit. Maybe Parks Canada realised that there was no way to stop people from doing this anyway (perhaps with a different email address or a different credit card it would always be possible to pose as another hopeful punter) but presenting it as a legitimate option seemed to fly in the face of the idea that Canada’s Parks should be for everybody, irrespective of their financial situation.
The only modest tweak to these systems that I can really get behind is, as you also advocate for, releasing sites in two or three separate batches (say, the first batch six months in advance, the second six weeks, and the third three days). The shuttles to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake operate thus, and had they not, I wouldn’t have been able to visit these places on my first trip to Banff in 2023. A system of separate batches caters both to those who wish to plan far in advance and those who wish to be more flexible (or don’t realise that reservations are required until late in the day). It also gives the really desperate, who are willing both to make plans in advance and change them at short notice, several shots at nabbing their desired campsite.