Pedernales Falls State Park - Texas

[KMcLaughlin]

Originally Posted by InterBlog

It's a huge problem and it's under-emphasized generally in many discussions as well as publicly (the impossibility of the situation makes Texas look bad, and rightly so). If you want hook-ups, my best suggestion is to keep iterating on the TPWD reservation page to see what you can get - keep trying to reserve on successive weekends out until you see vacancies. You may have to wait a long, long time. The last time I checked Garner State Park, which is about 140 miles from Pedernales and similarly popular, the lead time needed for reservations was 330 days.

Thanks. We think alike. Back in the spring, I started checking for availability at a few of the parks we targeted and kept extending the calendar through about October/November, with no luck for weekend sites that would accommodate our trailer. I did manage to get a site at Abilene State Park that worked well for our initial trip down to Texas, but that was not on a weekend. At this point I regret buying the annual Texas Parks pass. It appears that we won't be able to utilize it. I might try calling some of the parks about potential "overflow" sites that you mentioned and see if I can talk to a human being. We don't need electrical hookups, since we have solar. We just would need to dump tanks somewhere at the end of the trip. Meanwhile, we have found some municipal parks that we might check out.
Again, thanks for confirming what we suspected: reservations need to be made nearly 1 year in advance.

[InterBlog]

Originally Posted by KMcLaughlin

... I might try calling some of the parks about potential "overflow" sites that you mentioned and see if I can talk to a human being. We don't need electrical hookups, since we have solar. We just would need to dump tanks somewhere at the end of the trip. ....

This massive problem is one of the primary reasons why my husband and I opted for an Airstream Interstate rather than an Airstream trailer, which is what I originally wanted (husband won the argument and I'm very glad of that). The Interstate is a van and can stealth in locations where it would simply be impossible for trailers. The other option is backcountry parking lots, but there's no way a trailer could be parked overnight in those with impunity because they were designed for passenger vehicles and that portion of the rules WILL be enforced. At many parks, regardless of congestion, it's pretty easy to get a backcountry hiking and camping permit, which requires parking in some obscure defined location and then hiking a minimum of X amount of distance in before setting up a tent (X is often a quarter mile). Well, if one parks a motor vehicle (not a trailer), blacks out the windows, doesn't make any noise or run a generator, who would be able to determine whether there are people still in there or whether they did actually trot themselves into the backcountry? It's not exactly what was originally intended by the system, but neither does it cause problems or cause park staff to take issue with it.

Shoot, this past spring, the whole notion of X distance away from the parking lot was made moot by burn bans in many parks, because the backcountry tent campers were forced to return to their vehicles every time they wanted to cook a meal with open flame (personal gas stove or whatever). So in that scenario, people were half-living in the backcountry parking lots regardless of their intentions or what the rules said that they were "allowed" to do.