It’s a few minutes before 8 am Mountain Time on March 16, the day that river permit cancellations are released on Recreation.gov, the federal website for public land reservations.
Rec.gov, as it’s commonly called, administers everything from river permits and timed entrance fees at the most popular national parks to campground reservations on remote sites belonging to the Bureau of Land Management, and a lot of people are recreating on public land these days. There were 11 million reservations on the site in 2024, up significantly from 3.5 million reservations reported in 2019. At the center of it all is an unlikely player in the outdoor recreation space: The site is operated by the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a corporation known more for cybersecurity than rafting trips.
Early each year, outdoor enthusiasts gear up for Recreation.gov’s annual lotteries for some of the most iconic experiences in the country: a river trip down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, which flows through the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Backcountry permits to hike into the Wave, an otherworldly rock formation in Arizona’s Paria Canyon–Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness. Overnight stays in the rugged, lake-studded Enchantments, in Washington’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.
Odds of getting a desirable Middle Fork permit are around 2 percent. Each year, around 200,000 people apply in advance for 48 daily lottery spots to hike into the Wave. Rec.gov itself reports that a campground with 57 campsites can see 19,000 users trying to reserve them. That’s a .3 percent success rate.
For the majority who don’t draw a permit, there’s one final hope: the release date for cancellations, where your chances of getting a spot are often based on how fast you can click, and whether you can be online right when canceled permits are released.
That’s where a river runner I’ll call Jack was last March 16. A web-developer friend of a friend who is frustrated by the way permits seem to be snapped up faster than humans can possibly click, Jack decided to do some experimenting to see if the speculation that bots are grabbing all the permits seems true.
That speculation is based in reality. There’s a user on the outdoor forum Mountain Buzz who offers up a free scraperbot to anyone who wants to use it, and developers have shared their code. Last year Sam Carter, the host of the River Radius podcast, did an episode where he built a bot to show that gaming the Recreation.gov system was possible. He was shocked at the response. “So many people say they’re using bots, people are bragging about it,” he told me. He heard from people who’d built their own, groups who have their own server dedicated to getting permits, and people who paid thousands of dollars to have someone build one for them. It’s happening. The question is how pervasive it is, and how easy it might be for anyone to hack Rec.gov.
Jack wants to prove that the system isn’t working, so he’s built a series of bots to try to outsmart the other bots. He has multiple accounts and bots that can do everything from alerting him to permit availability to keeping permits in his cart for hours at a time. “I’m trying to simulate what I think other people are doing,” he says.
The night before the river cancellations he’s interested in are released, Jack opens the Inspect Element browser tool on Rec.gov and scrolls through the data to find what dates are going to become available. “If you were a web developer of any kind,” he says, “you would be able to find it.”
He has programmed several bots, attached to burner accounts with obviously fake names, to try to grab the dates he knows will come up when permits are released at the tick of 8 am. As a control, he also has a friend on a laptop nearby who will be attempting to grab a permit the old-fashioned way, by clicking through the site herself.
When the clock turns over, everything happens fast. The scripts start running, flashing between five different screens, running through the calendars on Rec.gov pages. Then, within a few seconds, the action stops. Jack goes to the accounts to see if his experiment worked. In the first cart, the bot has secured permits for the Main Salmon, the San Juan River, and the Middle Fork of the Salmon. It’s impossible to overstate what a big deal it is to score these three prime trips in a year, much less in a single morning. In the second cart, another unicorn: a second Middle Fork permit.
By the time Jack looks at the carts, all the other cancellation dates have disappeared from the screen. As for his friend? She was skunked, even though she knew where to look—insight the public shouldn’t have.
“I don’t know what to say except it’s terrifying that that just worked.” Jack said, shaking his head. “I think it’s evidence that more people are doing that. No way there’s enough people out there trying to continually refresh their page, scattergun-click the first thing they see, then click Book Now. There’s no way a human could do that.”
As a human myself, I have been frustrated by my inability to win permits or to lock down good campsites. It came to a head for me last summer, when I was planning a trip down the Colorado River through Ruby Horsethief Canyon, in the deserty corner between Colorado and Utah. My husband’s college friends were coming out with their kids, who had never seen red rocks. We figured it would be easy to get campsites in early August, when the canyon is hot and the water is low. The rolling reservation window opens two months before each date, and on July 7, my husband logged into Rec.gov right at 8 am with a plan for sites to grab. I immediately heard swearing from the other room. “What the F, they’re all gone,” he yelled, smashing keys. Dates disappeared off the calendar. The campsites we wanted were gone, and so were most of the other ones. He refreshed the page; more dates disappeared. More yelling about ruined vacations. Eventually he was able to reserve a couple of less desirable sites, but we were flummoxed by how fast the options had disappeared.
Two months later, when we launched on our trip, we floated past empty campsite after empty campsite, including the ones we’d tried to get. For all the digital frenzy, the land was empty. A ranger passed us on a raft and said he’d seen it a lot that season—he didn’t know what they could do about it.
Earlier that summer, a group of friends had a similar experience on another highly sought-after permitted river section, the Gates of Lodore, a remote stretch of the Green River that flows through Dinosaur National Monument. They too found the boat ramp empty. Three private groups are allowed to launch each day, and according to an analysis of the 2022 numbers by The Colorado Sun, the odds of getting a permit are around 2 percent. But they were the only ones there. The permits were not being used.
That gap is showing up on other public lands. Maybe you’ve driven into a campground to find reserved signs on all the posts, but then watched the sites sit empty. I know I have. The Recreation.gov system was supposed to make it easier to access public lands, and to alleviate administrative work from federal land managers, who already have enough on their plates. Instead, it feels like a breaking point between the digital and physical worlds.
Even beyond bot usage, academics have shown that digital access through Rec.gov is inequitable, and that demand for camping and other public land access is outpacing technology and policy. Rangers can’t do anything about those empty campsites, which they want to see used. People like me are pissed they can’t get outside when they want.
And they’re also pissed that the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is profiting off of every single Recreation.gov transaction, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
As we work though our frustration about access, it’s worth considering why a consulting company Bloomberg once called “the world’s most profitable spy organization”—one that you might remember as Edward Snowden’s employer when he leaked global surveillance documents, and which recently lost 31 Department of Treasury contracts because a former employee leaked Trump’s tax documents—is holding the keys to our public lands.
When Sheri Hughes started working on the Middle Fork in 1980, she was 19 and didn’t know anything about river running. She just wanted a summer job near her hometown of Challis, Idaho. But she quickly fell in love with life on the river, and after her first rafting season, she got a job in the Middle Fork Ranger District of the Salmon-Challis National Forest, helping run the permit lottery. “People sent in a postcard with their three choices for what they wanted,” Hughes says, “and we literally pulled them out of a garbage bag.”
Back then, maybe 700 people would apply for 340 permit slots. But as the ’80s went on and the river got busier, the Middle Fork’s postcard program became untenable. They started experimenting with different systems, like a call-in system that crashed the phone system in Challis the day it opened, because the permits were so popular.
By the early ’90s, it was clear that they were going to have to transition to a digital lottery. At first, users had to print applications and mail them to the office, where the staff would input forms and try to manage the lottery equitably. “We worked really hard to make it fair. I’m a flaming Libra,” Hughes says.
Other public land managers were building their own digital reservation systems, which by 1999 were largely consolidated onto one website, ReserveUSA.com. In 2002 the George W. Bush administration created the Recreation One Stop program to unite those reservations. One major arm was Recreation.gov, which was administered by the Forest Service, even though it includes reservations for 14 federal agencies.
As Hughes’ team had found, the agencies tasked with land management didn’t have the tech skills or computing power to build an agile website for millions of users. It made sense to contract it out. In 2006, the contract was awarded through a bidding process to ReserveAmerica, a software development company now known as Aspira that had previously handled National Park Service reservations.
Two years prior, Congress passed the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, which authorized agencies to charge recreation fees for public lands. Fees for using federal land have existed since 1908, when rangers started charging for access to the road in Mt. Rainier National Park. FLREA codified what they could charge for and how it should be spent. It specified that at least 80 percent of fees must be kept and “used at the site where it was generated.”
Hughes took a job with the burgeoning Rec.gov team, and in 2009, the Middle Fork became the first lottery permit system to operate through the site. She says building it was a headache because the software had to be secure enough to manage money and personal information, but flexible enough to book reservations and lotteries and tickets across a range of geographies and time frames. “The programmers said, ‘We’ve done defense contracts that were way easier than this,’” she says.
When the contract was up again, Booz Allen Hamilton entered the bidding process. They proposed a new model. Instead of getting paid for the hourly work, as in most contracts, they would build the website for free and get paid via a surcharge on every transaction. That made it attractive to the government, which didn’t have to lay out any money. Booz Allen Hamilton had to rebuild the entire site—while the data belongs to the government, the software does not. Its initial five-year contract can be extended until 2028, and so far it has been.
BAH, which was founded in 1914, has worked on government contracts since 1940, when it was brought in to help with the Navy’s telecom and intelligence systems. In 2024, it was the 11th-biggest government contractor, billing the United States for more than $8.5 billion. Rec.gov was its first contract having to deal with public lands. Hughes says that while the BAH contractors often didn’t have experience with recreation and land use, they seemed excited about the work. It was a way for them to diversify what they were doing.
The new site was initially better, she says. BAH incorporated new functions that made the system smoother. But over time, as more programs moved to the platform, and as the federal workforce was reduced, it got worse. Moving to an online interface and cutting staff on the ground meant that there were fewer people checking and enforcing rules.
By the time Hughes retired in 2021, cracks were starting to show. They’ve only widened. Now, in part because of DOGE-induced staff cuts, there are fewer rangers on the ground and in leadership. On the government side, the Recreation.gov program doesn’t currently have a manager, and many other leadership jobs are vacant. The Forest Service press office declined to answer questions about current staffing and digital interference. When I tried to get through to the Rec.gov call center—which BAH is contractually obligated to manage—the wait time was 95 minutes. Hughes says it’s a challenge to keep the system running well, and that impacts the natural resources they’re trying to manage.
“I handed them a perfectly running system,” Hughes says. “And it’s just a shit show now.”
One of the biggest questions about the whole Recreation.gov juggernaut is just how much money Booz Allen Hamilton receives off each transaction. The contract is publicly available, but the way money flows through the system is a black box. Despite multiple requests, the Forest Service wouldn’t give me more than a rote email that regurgitated the answers given on the site’s FAQ page.
Booz Allen Hamilton arranged an interview for me with Will Healy, the senior vice president who runs the Recreation.gov program and has been involved in it since the beginning. “It’s actually a really clear line,” Healy says. “We do all the tech. We have built the system, we manage the hosting, we do the security,” he says.
But BAH also benefits from every transaction on the site. Healy says that arrangement was part of their business model in initially building the site for free. “It’s the nature of the contract,” he says. “We invested, we used our own money.”
That means that when you book a reservation—say, to camp in Channel Islands National Park or drive Acadia’s Cadillac Summit Road—a portion of that money goes to BAH. It is not clear exactly how much. Healy wouldn’t tell me the breakdown, or comment on the company’s contract. The Forest Service says it’s a trade secret, and the financial records we requested from the Forest Service through the Freedom of Information Act had the exact amounts redacted. But there are some hints as to how much money is changing hands. With the $2 timed-entry tickets, for example, the contract states: “The Government anticipates continuing to pass 100% of the convenience/processing fee directly to the R1S Support Services contract service provider.”
We do know that Booz Allen Hamilton is making much more money than it originally projected. In the contract, the company estimated that it would make $87 million in the first five years, and a total of about $182 million over 10 years if the contract was extended, which it has been.
According to their invoices, Booz Allen Hamilton billed for more than $140 million in the first four years of the contract. The Forest Service didn’t return our FOIA request for more recent numbers, but one analyst, Canadian sales strategist Blair Enns, projected that they could make $620 million by the time their contract expires in September 2028.
The uptick in traffic is one reason for that. But the model has also changed since 2016. That year there were less than 3 million reservations through the site; in 2023 there were roughly 9 million. BAH says there are now 5,800 facilities and more than 128,000 sites and activities to reserve. More facilities have shifted to using Rec.gov’s system, and things that were free, or didn’t exist, are now run through Rec.gov, where they come with a charge. That includes things like free Christmas tree–cutting permits for fourth graders (now with a $2.50 fee!) and timed entry tickets to national parks, introduced in 2021, which are nominally free but have a $2 processing fee. Booz Allen Hamilton gets a percentage of every permit application fee, even if you don’t win a permit.
That might be news to you, because it’s not clearly delineated on the site. As one former ranger, Betsy Walsh, told me, she often talked to people who were surprised. “People want to support the parks, so they’re fine with fees,” says Walsh, who worked at several parks before being let go from her job at Thomas Edison National Historical Park during the 2025 DOGE layoffs. “But you’re not supporting the parks. You’re supporting a private company.”
It’s not transparent. And in the past few years, several groups have gone to court alleging that it’s not legal, either.
In 2022, a Nevada hiker named Thomas Kotab sued the Bureau of Land Management, arguing in his complaint that the $2 fee for visiting Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area violated FLREA, which says public participation is required for setting fees and that it needs to be clear how much money stays on the landscape. The BLM moved to dismiss the case, but the district court ruled in Kotab’s favor on the public-participation aspect of his claim. The fees, however, were never changed.
The next year, seven plaintiffs filed a class-action suit, Robyn Wilson et al. v. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that the company was “forcing American consumers to pay Ticketmaster-style Junk Fees to access National Parks and other federal recreational lands.” BAH filed a motion to dismiss, alleging the plaintiffs didn’t understand the contract. “To be sure,” its memorandum asserted, “certain federal agencies charge reservation fees to the users to help cover the government’s costs of operating Recreation.gov, including the USDA’s payments to Booz Allen. But those fees are charged by the agencies in their ‘sole discretion.’” More than six months after filing their lawsuit, the plaintiffs filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss their case. Their lawyers did not reply to requests for comment.
These cases underscore the core complaints about Rec.gov. “The frustrations are threefold: Use has grown, agencies are hobbled and could do more, and then the third piece is Rec.gov,” says Kevin Colburn, the national stewardship director for the advocacy group American Whitewater. “Why are we paying more and getting less? It’s the story of America right now.”
Throughout the system, rangers are bearing the brunt of people’s dissatisfaction. “People booked tickets through Rec.gov or with us in the visitor center, and the systems didn’t talk to each other,” says Walsh. “People would show up and claim they had tickets but couldn’t verify them. That led to stress and visitor conflict, and this was a park that didn’t have security or law enforcement.”
Rangers don’t have a lot of power to correct bad behavior. They can’t open unused campsites until after people don’t show up for their reservation, so the first night of a no-show can’t be used by anyone else. They can’t do anything about unused sites besides marking the user down in notes that are shared internally. One ranger told me he didn’t know if it made any difference—“We’re basically just blocking an email address,” he said. Some rangers told me they see the same group of people show up every year, while other people wait decades for a spot.
When BAH won the contract for Rec.gov, it was required to “provide a means to identify and suppress suspicious transactions including but not limited to web robot activity” and “recognize and prevent potentially duplicate profiles and provide a means to remove duplicate information.”
Both the company and the government acknowledge that there are issues on those fronts. “The site does experience attempted bot activity,” the Forest Service press office replied to me, “but multiple defenses are in place to detect and block large-scale attacks or efforts to capture multiple reservations.”
Healy says BAH has acknowledged the problems with bots enough that it has built availability alerts, which let users know when spots open up, to try to stay ahead of bots, and ahead of new businesses like Campnab or Outdoor Status, where you can set alerts for popular campsites or ticketed activities. In a statement, he emailed: “Booz Allen has implemented multiple defenses to detect, prevent, and mitigate bots that attempt to take advantage of the system; is constantly monitoring potential bot activity on the site; and is partnering with industry-leading vendors to leverage advanced solutions for identifying and mitigating that activity.”
But, he says, it’s tricky to create the right amount of friction to stop bad actors while still making the site accessible. “Believe me when I say the people involved want it to be fair,” he says.
These problems aren’t unique to public land, of course. They plague booking sites from Ticketmaster on down. It’s widespread enough that in 2016, Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS) to try to outlaw bots that scoop up tickets, but the law only addresses events with over 200 people. It doesn’t apply to things like campground reservations or hiking permits, where bots are scraping for a single opening at a time. On the bright side, there doesn’t yet appear to be much of a secondary market for scalped reservations.
There’s a difference, of course, between tickets to a Taylor Swift concert and time on public land. But if getting a good campsite becomes a race for who has the most computing power, then can we really say public land is for everyone?
To answer that question, we have to address the equity issues inherent in the Rec.gov system. That’s what academics who study the future of outdoor recreation told me. “In some ways the online reservation systems are democratizing,” says University of Colorado Boulder economics professor Jonathan Hughes, who studies public resource allocation. “But the sense I have is that certain folks might have better resources for managing that online system.” (Like Jack, Hughes made his own bot to see if it would work—it did.) Looking strictly at economics, Hughes has found that the current system benefits higher-income users and makes it hard for rangers to combat no-shows.
In 2022, a professor at the University of Montana named Will Rice, who runs the school’s Wildland and Recreation Management Research Laboratory, published a paper analyzing campsite reservations booked in advance through Rec.gov. He found that those who got reservations came from higher-income zip codes than those who got walk-in campsites. He says there are several reasons for that: access to high-speed internet, knowledge of how the system works, and logistics. Sites open months in advance, and reservations can get snapped up within seconds. For instance, if you do shift work, you might not know your schedule that far out or be able to be online at 8 am when the booking windows open.
A $20 campsite reservation means different things to different people. For some, it’s a lot; for some it’s nothing. What Rice and other researchers have also found is that savvy high-dollar users will book more days than they need, to ensure their spots even if they don’t use them. As Rice notes in a Forest Service management guidebook he cowrote in 2024, Allocating Recreation With Fairness at the Forefront, there are no real incentives for people to cancel reservations they’re not using, aside from getting a few bucks back.
Those worries have bubbled up to Congress. In 2023, Republican senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and John Barrasso (Wyoming) repeatedly asked the Department of Agriculture for details about how money for the contract was allocated and how much BAH was making. “The American people have a right to know the answer to each question we asked because the answers involve their parks and their money,” they wrote.
In 2024, Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, introduced the Review and Evaluation of Strategies for Equitable Reservations for Visitor Experiences Federal Land (RESERVE) Act, which would task the National Academy of Sciences with studying the fee structure, transparency, reservation system design, user demographics, and data accessibility of the current Rec.gov system to come up with ways to make it more equitable.
The bill passed the Senate in December 2024 but failed in the House during the last Congress. Padilla reintroduced it in May 2025.
Will Rice says there are many ways to make the system more equitable. Montana’s hunting lottery, for example, gives people their odds of winning and makes it clear where the money goes. (“With microeconomics,” he says, “we make better decisions.”) Since 2006, the Grand Canyon, arguably the most desirable river permit in the country, has been running its own weighted lottery, separate from Rec.gov, where your chances of winning improve over time, and where you can’t bot the system and go year after year.
In addition to those systemic changes, our friend Jack sees an array of potential technical fixes: auditing users who send thousands of requests a second, filtering for suspicious users, and closing off the data that let him see permit release dates. “That would slow me down, and I think that would go a long way to having people feel like there’s something changing,” he says.
Jack, who has given back every permit he got with a bot, says that he’s reported the issues he’s found to BAH and the Forest Service without any response. He says that they’re not even doing basic things to protect information. “There’s a part of me that wants to get caught,” he says. “It would refresh my faith in the system. My real phone number is attached to the bot accounts—it would be so easy.”
This spring, as boaters and campers and hikers log into Recreation.gov for another try at a permit, Jack has been back in front of his computer again, trying to see if the bots can still get permits, trying to see if the organizations we let steward our public lands—through covenant or through contract—have changed anything to make access more equitable. He’s worried they haven’t, and that permits will still go to the fastest bot. “It feels like an abdication of the idea of stewardship,” Jack says.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
