WildMove tracks the permits and reservations you need for U.S. national parks, and emails you before the application windows open. That is the whole product. Everything else on this site exists to support it.
Why this exists
Permit rules change every year, sometimes mid-season, and they are scattered across the National Park Service, individual forest districts, Recreation.gov, and in one case a tribal booking site that has nothing to do with any of them. Most trip-planning guides copy each other and go stale. In 2026 alone, 4 reservation systems were cancelled or suspended and plenty of guides still tell you to book them.
How we verify
Every entry in our dataset carries the official URL it came from and the date we last read it. We currently track 17 systems — 13 still required, 4 cancelled for 2026 — last checked on 2026-08-09.
- Primary sources only. NPS pages, Forest Service district pages, Recreation.gov permit listings, and BLM. Not other blogs.
- Dates are shown, not implied. Every table on this site says when we last checked it, so you can judge how stale it might be.
- Unconfirmed dates are labelled provisional. When we have verified a date for one season but have not seen the agency re-announce it, we say so on the page instead of presenting it as settled.
What we do not know
7 of the systems we track have gaps we have not been able to close — an unpublished results date, a shuttle ticketing system the park has not documented yet. Those are listed openly on the permit calendar under “What this page does not cover yet”.
We would rather tell you what is missing than let a complete-looking table imply we checked something we did not. If you are about to spend money or book travel, open the official link in the row. We put it there for that reason.
Who writes this
WildMove is a small independent project, not a media company. Guides are drafted with the help of modern writing tools and then edited against the sources above; research and editorial judgement — what to cover, what to flag, what to warn you about — stay human. We are not currently publishing under a named author byline, and we would rather say that plainly than invent one.
We are not affiliated with the National Park Service, the Forest Service, Recreation.gov, or any park concessioner.
How this is funded
Nothing on this site is paid placement, and no one can buy a recommendation. We expect to earn affiliate commission on some outdoor bookings and gear in the future; when that starts, links that can earn us money will be marked, and our affiliate disclosure will say exactly how it works. Permit dates will never be influenced by it — they come from the agency, and there is no version of them that pays better.
Corrections
If a date on this site is wrong, that is the most serious kind of error we can make. Email contact@wildmove.co with the page and what is wrong. Corrections go to the front of the queue, and the page’s “last verified” date updates when we fix it.
Safety
Permits are paperwork; the outdoors is not. Nothing here replaces current conditions, closure notices, weather forecasts, or your own judgement. Check with the managing agency before you go.