Get your campsite. From the couch.

Every February we decide that this is the summer we finally camp at Lake O'Hara, or take the kids to Rathtrevor. Every February the booking site tells us that every weekend from June to September went months ago, in minutes, to people faster than us.

Those sites come back, though. People cancel all the time. Plans change, the weather turns, somebody books three options and drops two. A spot reappears for a few minutes and then it is gone again. To catch one you have to be refreshing the page at 11pm on a Tuesday.

So I built something that refreshes the page at 11pm on a Tuesday.

CampFromTheCouch

camp.fromthecouch.com watches campsite availability for you. Pick a park, tell it your dates and how many people, and it checks around the clock. The parks where spots disappear fastest get checked the most often. The booking itself still happens on the official site. This just makes sure you hear about it first.

However you want to be told

When a site opens up, you choose how it reaches you. A notification on your phone, using a free app called ntfy with no account to sign up for. A notification in your browser, on your laptop or your phone. An email. Or a message into Discord, if that is where you already live.

You can pick more than one, and most people should. Each destination is tracked on its own, so if your email bounces or a webhook breaks, the other ones still go and the broken one keeps retrying. An opening never gets quietly dropped because one notification failed.

It covers six Canadian reservation systems: Parks Canada, BC Parks, Ontario Parks, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Yukon. That is about 450 parks, plus the Mount Assiniboine helicopter shuttle, where seats are scarce and cancellations are the only way in. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec run on different reservation platforms, so they are not in yet. It handles the awkward requests too, like any two nights together between August 16 and 30 for four people on two pads, or Magog Lake and Og Lake only, nothing else.

It is invite-only while my friends and I kick the tires. If you want in, there is a request form on the site: leave your email and I will get back to you. And if a campsite ping saves your summer trip, the couch accepts coffee.