I wanted to camp more, and I'm not much of a planner.
A Better Camper began as a pet project. I wanted a way to find somewhere new to camp in British Columbia without having to turn into the sort of person who books four months in advance, and after a couple of summers it got good enough that other people might want it too.
It started as a list for me
I live in Kelowna. For years my summers went the same way. I'd decide I wanted to go camping, open a map and end up back at one of the same three places I already knew. It was never for lack of options, since there are 1,700+ campsites in this catalogue, but they're spread across several different agencies, plenty of them never show up on the maps most people use and none of them can tell you whether a particular weekend is a good weekend to go.
So I kept a list. Before long the list needed to know how far away everything was, and then what the forecast looked like, because a good site in four days of rain isn't much of a trip. After that it needed smoke and fire bans, which for a fair chunk of every summer now are what decide where you can go at all. That's roughly how a list turned into an app.
The part I'm bad at
People who camp well in this province are organised about it. They set an alarm for the morning the booking window opens, they settle on dates back in the spring, they keep a second choice ready and their group chat answers. I have never managed any of that. I'm far more likely to notice on a Wednesday that the weekend is free and start looking on Thursday night, which in British Columbia in August is a hard research problem. You need to know what's open, what's close, what's smoky, what's under a fire ban and which roads your car can actually handle.
So the app does that part for me. Planning ahead obviously works, and if you're good at it you probably don't need any of this. I built it for all the weekends I hadn't planned.
What it does
- Catalogues 1,700+ campsites across British Columbia: BC Parks campgrounds, the free Recreation Sites that most maps leave out and private grounds.
- Ranks them for your dates using the forecast, smoke and air quality, active wildfires and fire bans, road access and how long the drive from your door actually takes.
- Sends you to BC Parks or the operator when you want to book. We never take the reservation or the payment.
- Isn't a live feed. Conditions come from public sources on a refresh cycle, so treat everything here as a strong hint and check the official page before you drive.
There is a lot of mountain biking in here
I ride a lot, so once the app knew where every campsite in the province was, I couldn't resist working out which ones sit close to a trail network. That is where the mountain biking pages came from, and I am not especially sorry about it. If you don't ride, none of it gets in your way.
Still a side project
It's one person in Kelowna, and it's still in beta. Some of what's here is wrong: a road rated too kindly, a campground that closed without much notice, a photo attached to the wrong lake. Most of the ones I've fixed got fixed because somebody emailed me about them.
[email protected]. I read everything that comes in.
David
Kelowna, BC