UKH

What’s the current situation with regards to Camp 4 and the other Valley campsites? Do you have to book or can you just turn up?

Camp 4 cannot be booked. Queue on the day (and go early)

Camp curry can be booked but is pricey

So the current Recreation.gov site states:

Camp 4 is currently on reservations which release one week in advance. There are no first come, first served sites and there is no lottery this year.

So are you saying this is not the case and you can just turn up and walk in?

That's not true. Just the opposite in fact: it's required for all campsites now. Info here:

https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/camping.htm

You may be lucky with last minute cancellations but that not reliable.

Yeah don’t give advice if you don’t know the answer.

to the op, I always stay out of the park now in El Portal. The camping in the valley is a nightmare 

Sorry dude, that's a change from when my mate went recently 

Unsure on camp 4 but the other campsites have booking systems that are released a fair few months in advance. For example, we booked for the Pines campsites to stay October 2022 and the spaces got released in April/May i think.

loads of info here once you sift through it- https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/campgrounds.htm

Camp 4 was completely full while we were there (middle two weeks of October), i don't think there'd have been any chance of getting in and we didn't want to risk not having somewhere to stay as we didn't have a back up.

Last time I went I did this, it’s much easier but is expensive and tbh not a particularly nice campsite. 

I've stayed in the Pines a few times. If you're hoping to book a pitch you need to be online at the exact time they're released as you can watch most of  them disappear in the first few minutes. I think they become available on the 15th five months in advance. The time is probably 3pm BST but you'd need to check that. When we were organising group visits we'd have a bunch of us, each poised over a laptop or phone, waiting to pounce as the seconds ticked round!

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?

It was walk in at 'Sunnyside' when we there cragging - but that was some time ago!

Second this. We had 5/6 of us trying to book two spots in pines. We did get them, but it was a bit frantic and a couple of people ended up with nothing. Once you've got something in your basket it's held for you for 15 min before being released again as an option, so it's easy enough to check with mates as to =who's managed to get what in their basket. The refund option is ok too if you do end up buying too many spots, get the full refund minus a pretty small admin fee.

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.