Lake O'Hara, summer 2022. The spot that started it all.
Hey , I’m Daniel.
I made this thing.
Thanks for being here. Really. I built Schnerp on my laptop one weekend in 2022, fully expecting nobody but me to use it.
How it started
Schnerp exists because I got jealous at a dinner party.
It was March 2022, and a friend had just booked Lake O’Hara — a gorgeous high-alpine lake in the Canadian Rockies. He was telling everyone. I wanted to go too, so I asked:
“Nice — how do I get a spot?”
He laughed.
“You don’t. Bookings dropped back in January. I was 60,000th in the queue and everything was sold out by the time I got in.”
“Wait, you just said you booked one.”
“I refreshed the page all day at work until someone cancelled.”
Wait 💡 — refreshing a page all day is the wrong job for a person, and the perfect job for a computer.
So I went home and wrote a tiny script that watched the Parks Canada page and emailed me when something opened up. A few weeks later, a cancellation hit and I booked it.
That summer I made it to Lake O’Hara.
On the alpine circuit, the pictures take themselves really.
That should’ve been the end of the story. I’d built myself a toy, it worked once, on to the next thing.
But I told a friend about it. He asked if I could set one up for him. Then he told his friends. They told theirs. My inbox started filling up with strangers asking if I could watch a campground for them too. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a favour and became the thing I do.
So, uh, why “Schnerp”?
Valid question.
It’s a word my friend group uses when talking about hunting powder at a ski resort a few days after a storm. We’ll put in massive effort, staying high on traverses and suffering long run-outs, just to schnerp a single turn in untracked snow.
In that context, it vaguely means to acquire a scarce resource. When I was thinking about names for this project, I realized we’re doing the same here, just with campsites.
I also wanted something unique for the domain, and low-key wanted more people to say the word schnerp.
It’s fun to say. Try it.
More than a million alerts later
What started as one email to my own laptop has now sent over 1.5 million. Right now, someone’s phone is probably buzzing about a cancellation at a place I’ve never heard of — someone I’ll never meet, who hit the same “sold out” screen that once stopped me.
Parks Canada and Recreation.gov. DOC huts on New Zealand’s Great Walks. Park Stay WA and Parks Victoria down in Australia. A long tail of state, provincial, and regional systems from Fiordland to Florida. 48 booking systems across 4 countries at last count.
If those alerts have taught me anything, it’s that “sold out” doesn’t mean forever. Life happens, plans change, people cancel — and the trip you’d written off is usually still within reach.
It’s also the only way I get out these days.
Backpacking to Floe Lake, Kootenay.
Paddling on Maligne Lake, Jasper.
Bikepacking in Kananaskis.
Road tripping in Western Australia.
But the best part isn’t the places I've been, it's the stories I hear from fellow schnerpers.
Hyeonji wrote to tell me she got engaged at a spot she Schnerp’d. Anne-Sophie waited three years for Mount Assiniboine, then had booking day collide with her licensing exam — one alert later, her crew had the trip of a lifetime at Lake Magog. Meg, a grandmother in Calgary, uses it to get spots on the water for camping trips with her grandkids. Carlie wrote about piecing together the Great Divide Trail with her daughters after a rough health year.
My favourite came from Emma in New Zealand. Twenty-one years ago her friend group — the “Heavenly Hikers” — walked the Milford Track, minus one friend home with a new baby. They spent two decades ticking off every Great Walk while she waited for another shot; when they finally got a booking, a cancer diagnosis took it away. Then one winter afternoon, an alert landed while Emma was doing her online groceries. She phoned her friend, fresh out of radiotherapy, and with her on the line booked the walk they’d been chasing for twenty-one years.
I keep every one of these emails in a folder called Good Vibes. On the hard days, that’s where I go.
What Schnerp actually does
We watch sold-out campgrounds for you and ping you the second a cancellation pops up. That’s it. We don’t book the site. You do that, with a direct link we send. We’re not competing with the reservation system. We’re just the friend at work hitting refresh on your behalf, 24/7, with better reflexes.
The idea hasn’t changed since that first script — someone should be watching, even when you’ve looked away.
In a perfect world there’d be enough campsites for everyone and nobody would have to refresh a booking page at work. But it’s not a perfect world, so until then, we keep watching. Someone put it better than I can:
I kind of hate that Schnerp exists, but I’m glad it does.
— Jack Hauen, Google review
Yeah Jack, same.
Anyway. Go outside. I’ll keep an eye on the calendar.
— Daniel