Thor Forums

[DenverTransplant]

Just had my first experience with the "new and improved" Recreation.gov site. I was looking to make reservations at our favorite spot in Rocky Mountain National Park (no I won't tell you what site, but it is in Moraine Park).

I started on Sunday, but found someone else had snagged our spot on Sunday and Monday (June 23-24) by making a reservation starting earlier that week. No problem, we will just arrive on Tuesday when RMNP is way less crazy.

The site tells you nothing about when reservations open for a site, other than its a 6 month rolling window, and that the telephone lines don't open until 10:00AM Eastern time. Not a word about the time when the window opens for on line reservations.

So I figure that all of Mr. Murphy's rules apply and sit up until midnight on Christmas Eve just in case they open the window at midnight. No such luck, but I did spend some time looking for a time, and the best I could find was a Trip Advisor post that said they were able to make on line reservations at 7:00 AM Central - makes sense as it 8:00 AM Eastern. Time to go to bed

So after staying out until after midnight, I drag my butt out of bed at 5:45AM (MST). Hooray! The site shows up as available and I select our days and click continue.... and..... get a message that says the the site isn't released until 10:00 AM EST. More coffee, queue up the reservation at 7:58 MST and wait for the clock to click over to 8:00 - Success! They even know who I am from the old site. A minute or two of entering credit card and lifetime pass data and I'm set.

So overall, the experience was decent, but the lack of explicit window opening times caused me to lose a bit of sleep and, some teeth gnashing and a few colorful comments. Actually a 10:00 AM open for on-line reservations does make sense and is more fair to those of us who live in points west.

I remember the old days of phone only reservations where if you wanted to get into Yosemite you had to play telephone roulette at midnight, only to find out that all the slots had been taken by folks on the east coast who got to call in at midnight their time. If you called the east coast reservation number they wouldn't take a reservation if you didn't live in the eastern time zone. So things have improved.

Their maps need some improvement as several sites are shown well away from where they really are. I also found that the site works like crap on Safari, but switching over to Chrome took care of those problems. I did get the "unable to show maps" a couple of times, but refreshing the page cleared those problems.

On a related issue, we also have used ReserveAmerica for Colorado State Parks, but found that this year that you can no longer access Colorado State Park reservations from ReserveAmerica. When you got to the Colorado State Park site and click on Reservations - it takes you to ReserveAmerican where you can make reservations just like we used to. You just have to come in from the State Parks site. Got to wonder what's going on behind the curtains.