The campsites you can only walk to
· 3 min · CampsiteFit
Recreation.gov records, per campsite, how you get to it: Drive-In, Hike-In, Boat-In, Walk-In. It is a plain field with a plain vocabulary, and it decides something absolute — whether a vehicle can reach the site at all.
4,196 bookable federal campsites say you cannot drive to them. Until this week, this site did not read that field. 193 of those sites were publishing a rig limit.
What that looked like
A site marked Hike-In, whose type read STANDARD NONELECTRIC, carrying a
published length. Nothing about the type string said walk-in. Every rule we had
worked from the type, so every rule passed it through, and the site went out
with a number on it.
At Windy Hill the number was 10 ft. At Lake Mary, 14 ft. At Longview, a group camp reachable only on foot published 30 ft and named a rig in its permitted equipment.
None of those is a rig limit. You cannot tow anything to a site you walk to, whatever length the pad measures.
How it got past everything
The site already had rules for this shape of problem. A site type containing WALK or HIKE or BOAT is treated as walk-in. A site permitting only tents is treated as taking no rig. A driveway is only read as a rig limit where the site is an ordinary campsite with its own measured pad.
All three are working rules that catch thousands of cases. All three read the
site type or the equipment list, and the access field is neither. A site can
say STANDARD NONELECTRIC, list a trailer as permitted,
publish a driveway length, and still
be somewhere you arrive on foot. Every one of those three rules will wave it
through.
The field that would have caught it had been in the data since the first import.
The fix, and its shape
An explicit non-drive-in answer now removes the rig fit outright, before any equipment or driveway figure is trusted.
Two details that matter more than the rule:
Absent means unknown. Most sites state no access at all, and those are decided by the rules that were already there. Only an explicit Hike-In, Boat-In or Walk-In removes anything.
A site reachable either way keeps its fit. The vocabulary allows
combinations, and ten sites in the corpus read Hike-In,Drive-In. If you can
drive to it, you can drive to it; the presence of a walking route does not take
that away.
Where they are concentrated
Hike-in and boat-in sites are not scattered evenly. Four campgrounds hold a large share of them, and all four are places people plan whole trips around:
| Campground | Sites you cannot drive to |
|---|---|
| Assateague Island National Seashore | 68 |
| Hodgdon Meadow, Yosemite | 64 |
| Moraine Park, Rocky Mountain | 61 |
| Lodgepole, Sequoia | 54 |
If you are towing to one of these, the number that matters is not the campground's maximum. It is how many of its sites you can reach with a vehicle at all.
Why this keeps happening
This is the fourth time the same thing has gone wrong here, and it always looks like this: a field the source publishes, that nothing reads, quietly making a page say something untrue.
Campsite coordinates sat unread for months. So did the access field. So did the type field that says a facility is a library rather than a campground. In each case the data was correct, committed and free, and the defect was that no code opened it. Counting 232 campgrounds twice came from the same place: a field the source publishes and nothing compares.
The counter-measure is not vigilance. It is asking, on a schedule, a very boring question: what does this source publish that nothing here reads? That question has now produced four real corrections, and it will produce more.
The access field itself comes from the Recreation Information Database, which is public domain, and every campground page links to the record it was read from. How it is measured says what each value does to a rig answer.