I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to book a camp site in a California State Park lately, but it’s not always the most – shall we say “user-friendly” experience. The web sites are often clunky or broken and the information they provide isn’t always complete – nobody likes booking a camp site then pulling into the reserved spot to find out it’s wedged between the bathroom and the dumpster. Well, a little while back a reader told us about a site that’s hoping to change all that – Hipcamp .

Currently covering California State Parks and National Parks (and eventually to cover National Forests, too!), Modern Hiker readers will appreciate Hipcamp’s intuitive design. At a glance, you can see which parks and campgrounds have openings today, this weekend, and next weekend – or you can search by location or by using a giant Google Map with everything they cover.

Clicking on an individual park or campsite will bring up a wealth of information, including travel tips, contact info, campground maps, and all of the activities in the park – including, of course, hiking. In many of the National Parks, you can even drill down to specific campgrounds to see what’s in that region (although those campgrounds don’t always offer online reservations).

All in all, it’s an excellent site – and does a great job of answering one of the questions we seem to get most often: “Where can I camp near X?” That’s why we’re very happy to announce that Hipcamp and Modern Hiker have partnered to help get you the best outdoors info as easily as possible.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been rolling out a new CAMP button on our trail write-ups:

Clicking on that from Modern Hiker will take you directly to the most relevant Hipcamp camping page (or as good a page on camping info as we can find!), and Hipcamp users will find Modern Hiker trails all over their site, too – and we’ll continue adding more as the sites grow and cover more regions.

On their site, Hipcamp’s founder Alyssa Ravasio said “Our mission is to get more people outside. By making it easier to discover great campsites, we hope to inspire a broader demographic to embrace the outdoors and commit to protecting our beautiful planet.”

We couldn’t agree more.