Brooks Lodge and Campground Reservation

I made a campground reservation at Brooks Lodge in Katmai National Park and Preserve. It was ridiculously hard to do!

Campground Entrance

In 2022, I tried to get a reservation for a room at Brooks Lodge, hoping to visit in 2023. I entered the lottery, and was not selected. But there was a cancellation, and the concessionaire offered me three nights in early July, which I accepted. My wife and daughter and I made the trip in July 2023 and we had a lot of fun watching the bears.

My daughter has one more year on her Air Force assignment in Alaska, so I want to visit her again and I want to make another trip to Brooks. The hotel is very expensive; this time we are going to stay in the campground.

Campground reservations are very hard to get. There’s no lottery; reservations are first come, first served. The reservations are usually completely taken within an hour of becoming available. And the reservation system makes all dates for the year available at once, at 8AM Alaska time on January 5. My daughter and I visited the recreation.gov site days before January 5 to become familiar with the site. I even went through the process of reserving a cabin in an unrelated location (without completing the reservation) just so I would be ready.

It turns out there are two ways to search, and I searched the wrong way. After logging in, users are presented with several links, one of which is entitled “Camping and Lodging”. This is the one that I tried to use, and the Brooks campground never appeared as an option even after conducting several searches. In the meantime, my daughter, luckily, used a different search box at the top of the page, with text that says, “What are you looking for?” She entered “Katmai”, and then got to the correct reservation page, but she only found dates available in June, which is much too early in the season. We talked on the phone and she described how she got to the correct reservation page.

I finally got to the reservation page and I was able to get three nights in early September. All reservation dates from early June to late September were gone by 8:30 AM Alaska time.

We originally wanted to get dates in late July, which is usually the peak of the salmon run, and consequently also the peak of the bear presence there. There’s a second peak in early September, so I think we’re still able to see bears again. Now I’m going to frequently check for cancellations, hoping to extend our stay.

We’re going back!