The US Built a Site to Ensure Fair Access to Public Lands. Then Everything Went Wrong | WIRED
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It’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.
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.
Jack wants to prove that the system isn’t working, so he’s built a series of bots to try to outsmart the other bots. He has multiple accounts and bots that can do everything from alerting him to permit availability to keeping permits in his cart for hours at a time. “I’m trying to simulate what I think other people are doing,” he says.
The night before the river cancellations he’s interested in are released, Jack opens the Inspect Element browser tool on Rec.gov and scrolls through the data to find what dates are going to become available. “If you were a web developer of any kind,” he says, “you would be able to find it.”
He has programmed several bots, attached to burner accounts with obviously fake names, to try to grab the dates he knows will come up when permits are released at the tick of 8 am. As a control, he also has a friend on a laptop nearby who will be attempting to grab a permit the old-fashioned way, by clicking through the site herself.
When the clock turns over, everything happens fast. The scripts start running, flashing between five different screens, running through the calendars on Rec.gov pages. Then, within a few seconds, the action stops. Jack goes to the accounts to see if his experiment worked. In the first cart, the bot has secured permits for the Main Salmon, the San Juan River, and the Middle Fork of the Salmon. It’s impossible to overstate what a big deal it is to score these three prime trips in a year, much less in a single morning. In the second cart, another unicorn: a second Middle Fork permit.
The Salmon River near Stanley, Idaho.Photograph: Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
By the time Jack looks at the carts, all the other cancellation dates have disappeared from the screen. As for his friend? She was skunked, even though she knew where to look—insight the public shouldn’t have.
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