About WildernessBeta

I'm Chris. I've been planning my summers around wilderness permits since 2016.

Angels Landing twice. Whitney twice, with a third attempt this summer. The JMT. The Thorofare. South Sister. Yosemite wilderness. I won a Wonderland Trail permit once, but by the time my number came up the only available campsites were the last few days of September — too cold, and it conflicted with the school year. I've applied for the Enchantments lottery more times than I can count and haven't won yet. In 2020 I had a Glacier backcountry permit in hand when the park cancelled all backcountry permits due to COVID. I've tried several more times since. Still waiting.

Beyond lottery permits, I've navigated timed-entry reservations for Arches, Yosemite, and Going-to-the-Sun Road, and climbing permits on Mount Shasta.

Every winter I sit down and map out my summer. Which lotteries to enter. Which release dates to watch. Which cancellation windows are actually worth refreshing. The problem is that information lives everywhere — buried in NPS PDFs, scattered across Recreation.gov, rehashed in Reddit threads from three years ago, and summarized in blog posts that haven't been updated since the rules changed.

WildernessBeta exists because I got tired of building that picture from scratch every year. The goal is one place with accurate permit windows, lottery dates, and release patterns — maintained and updated, not just published once and forgotten.

If something is wrong or out of date, I want to know: [email protected]