The annual rush to secure precious backcountry camping permits at Rocky Mountain National Park had to be shut down Monday morning shortly after reservations went on sale due to “technical difficulties,” and has been delayed a week.
After computer glitches developed soon after sales opened, officials shut down the system and announced sales would begin Tuesday morning, but on Monday evening they pushed that back to March 8. Park officials said the complications were caused by the Pay.gov website, which was unable to process payments.
Kyle Patterson, the park’s public information officer, said a few people were able to make reservations “while the system was glitching for the majority of campers.” Those reservations are being cancelled in the interest of fairness.
“Our wilderness office has contacted those individuals and we will be issuing refunds,” Patterson said. “We will begin again on March 8.”
Presumably thousands of people were waiting online at 8 a.m. Monday in hopes of getting those coveted reservations. Tiffany Warble of Fort Collins and her husband, Eric Fetherman, were online at the appointed time with multiple devices and browsers running.
“Last year was our first year putting in at the March 1 draw date, and we learned the hard way why it was important to be on at the moment that the form opens because we did not get the routes and sites we had been looking for,” Warble said. “We were all ready to go, had our dates, had our backup dates, we were like, ‘We’re going to do it right this year.’ We were on at 7:58, counting down the minutes.”
At first, they thought they were in luck.
“Within the first 30 or 45 seconds, the link popped up where we knew the form would be,” Warble said. “We tried clicking that link, and the first time it just kind of spun and spun. It wasn’t able to get a form to load. We tried again, and a third time. We just kept trying, and eventually one of us was able to get through to the form, but the form was having issues.”
Soon after that, Warble said, the site went down entirely.
This is not the first time the online reservations system has been used, but in previous years at the park’s backcountry office. That part of the process typically attracted large crowds of people who drew their place in line via hand-drawn lottery. That option was not made available this year because of COVID-19.
Now Warble — and many, many others — are to sure to be waiting Monday to try again.
“Oh, yes,” Warble said. “I’m glad they shut down the system because we were ready and wanted to have a fair shot at those popular campsites. I’m really glad we are going to be kicking this off, and hopefully having a more successful kickoff, to the backpacking season.”
Updated March 1 at 5:50 p.m. The following corrected information has been added to this article: The wilderness camping reservation launch was originally rescheduled to March 2 but on Monday afternoon, Rocky Mountain National Park announced it would be moved to March 8.
