About Permit Ranger
Permit Ranger exists because the best wilderness trips in America sell out in seconds, and getting a permit should not require refreshing recreation.gov all day.
What Permit Ranger is
Permit Ranger is a wilderness-permit toolkit built around one job: telling you the moment a sold-out recreation.gov permit opens on your dates. It watches 37 permit areas across the US around the clock, catching cancellations, quota drops, and release-day openings.
Alongside the alerts, it publishes plain-English guides to every park's permit rules, release dates, and lotteries, plus trail ratings and demand scores so you can pick the right entry point before you ever set a watch.
What it is not
Permit Ranger never books a permit for you and never holds inventory. When your dates open, you get a push notification with a direct booking link and you complete the reservation yourself on recreation.gov. That keeps the playing field fair and keeps your recreation.gov account entirely yours.
Why we built it
The people behind Permit Ranger are backpackers who lost too many summers to sold-out quota calendars. Cancellations happen constantly, but they get snapped up by whoever happens to be looking. Automated, respectful monitoring levels that out: you set the dates you can actually hike, and the service does the watching.