In reply to robw007:
> Thanks folks - some great advice. It's for my youngest who's over there now and looking to visit the Valley in the next few days. Hes expressed some frustration at the booking process - I wondered if you could access the cancellations at the campsite/s?
He's probably not going to have any luck at that notice with booking unfortunately. Could try the backpackers campsite, can't remember exactly how that works.
The pines campgrounds book out campsites (pitches in the UK), for up to 6 people, so if there's less than 6 people using a campsite you can always ask to join their group on their campsite. I've done this for a whole trip before and it wasn't ideal, depending on how lucky you get you can end up moving most days and obviously requires talking to people (fortunately I was with someone else more confident at asking people for favours than I am, we also usually offered to pay and keep our selves to ourselves which I think helped, typically we found that people didn't want paying so it actually worked out quite cheap). Last time I was out there we had a couple of walkers ask to use our campsite and we said yes. The campsites are quite generously sized normally, so it works out quite well.