GoKawiilIt’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.
This story was produced in partnership with RE:PUBLIC Lands Media, an independent, nonprofit news organization. Sign up for RE:PUBLIC’s newsletter here.
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.
The Paria Vermillion Cliffs. Photograph: Bernie Friel/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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.