After years of trying and failing to book sites at Idaho’s more popular campgrounds, some people have just given up.

The campsites can be reserved through Recreation.gov, the vendor that handles booking and permitting for the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and more.

Reservations at many campgrounds open up on a rolling basis — six months ahead of time for individual sites and a year ahead of time for group sites. That means summer dates often first become available in winter. At popular Idaho campgrounds like those at Redfish Lake, it’s impossible to know how many hopeful campers are vying for the sites on Recreation.gov.

While a select few campers will succeed, others will scramble to add sites and dates to their online shopping carts, only to be met with a message declaring that all of the sites already have sold out within seconds, the Idaho Statesman reports.

“I’ve quit trying to make reservations at Redfish,” Roxann Jensen wrote on a Statesman Facebook prompt about booking campsites. “I gave up after experiencing ‘no spaces available’ year after year after year. I’m totally disgusted with this.”

Janelle Smith knows the frustration. Even she hasn’t been able to snag a spot at Redfish, and as a spokeswoman for Recreation.gov, she’s no stranger to the website’s reservation system.

“When you can’t get a site for years running and it sells out in minutes, we get that that’s frustrating,” said Smith, who is based in Boise.

Theories abound on why those campgrounds book up in the blink of an eye. Smith and other experts said they can’t know for sure why one camper gets a spot over another, but the answer could be simple: Some campgrounds are just that in demand.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO BOOK IDAHO CAMPSITES?

On a prompt in the Idaho Nature Lovers Facebook group, campers from across the site shared their experiences using Recreation.gov.

Patsy Diann Secrist said she’s heard of campers who book an entire week at a site starting on a Monday.

“They go to the website 6 months in advance and reserve from the Monday before through the desired weekend,” she wrote. “Then later on cancel the Monday through Thursday….weekend reserved.”

Some said they deliberately avoid popular spots because they’re so crowded, while others said they’ve simply given up. Still other commenters said they’ve noticed the rush for sites like Bull Trout Lake, Redfish Lake or Deadwood Lookout but have managed to snag a reservation.

“Have been able to book campsites in the past … at Glacier View Campground at Redfish Lake but only at 1:00 a.m. 6 months in advance,” wrote Shawn Murdock. (In most cases, Recreation.gov releases campsites at 8 a.m. Mountain Time six months ahead of the booking date.)

“One of the problems is that it is a hot spot that everyone tries to go because it’s the one place everyone talks about and it’s the same place everyone returns year after year,” Murdock said.

Julie Thomas, spokeswoman for the Sawtooth National Forest where Redfish is located, said the forest is busier than ever this year.

“Redfish Lake is always a favorite,” she said in a phone interview, adding that it often sells out for the entire summer.

Some have pointed the finger at bots, saying the same technology that scoops up event tickets for marked-up resale is responsible for the hard-to-book campgrounds, though there’s no evidence that the sites are being relisted and sold elsewhere.

“Certainly bots exist in any sort of reservation systems,” Smith said in an interview. “They’re out there. We use Captcha and developers monitor for bots and arrest those as best they can.

“It’s something we’re working on,” she added. “We’re implementing industry best practices.”

Smith said it’s more likely that some users are just faster than others at snagging their ideal spot. It also could be another symptom of Idaho’s recent population boom that’s affecting everything from traffic to property taxes.

’900 PEOPLE WANT 30 SITES’

Tom Zadick is the regional recreation manager for Recreation Resource Management of America, which contracts with the Forest Service to manage campsites in Arizona, Colorado and Idaho. His team manages campgrounds in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, where Redfish Lake’s popular Glacier View, Outlet and Point reservation campsites are.

He knows how difficult it can be to find an opening at one of the campgrounds.

“I’ve heard the horror stories of entire families sitting in a room with a dozen computers, hitting refresh (on the website) trying to book something and maybe one person will get it,” he said.

Zadick said the hard-to-book campsites are the result of “a perfect storm” of growing popularity, limited supply and the occasional person who abuses the system by reselling a site or overstaying their reservation.

“We have more demand than supply,” Zadick said in a phone interview. “The sites at Glacier View, Outlet and Point are some of the most requested in the United States. When 900 people want 30 sites, a lot of people are going to be turned away.”

According to Zadick, the popular campgrounds are world famous, drawing visitors from out of state and even as far as Europe and Asia, though he said about 50 percent of campers at Redfish are Idahoans. He compared the level of demand at Redfish to that at Lake Tahoe — except Tahoe has far more sites to accommodate that demand. And the traffic is spilling from Redfish Lake to the surrounding Sawtooth National Forest.

“We’re seeing visitation numbers three times what they were a few years ago,” Zadick said. “Campsites that never used to fill up are full from Wednesday night through the weekends.”

And when that many people are vying for a few spots, things can get tense, especially at the handful of nearby walk-in campsites.

“We’ve literally had people almost in fistfights at Sockeye,” Zadick said.

He said some guests are “literally trolling the (walk-in) campgrounds, and the second someone leaves, they jump in.” Others sleep in their cars near walk-up campgrounds in hopes of securing a spot when another group leaves the next morning.

Zadick said his company is working with the Forest Service and Recreation.gov to find a solution for the overcrowding and competition. There’s a chance all the campgrounds in the Redfish Lake area may become reservation sites. Other popular camping areas have adopted lottery systems for reservations.

“There’s various opinions around how we can correct (the issues),” Zadick said. “I don’t know that there’s any easy solution.”

Before any potential changes are made, they’ll go through a public comment period.

“Frustrated comments don’t do any good,” Zadick said. “We know it’s not a perfect system. The public could help us help them. We’re open to suggestions and constructive criticism.”

HOW TO BOOK IDAHO CAMPSITES

There’s no magic bullet for booking your ideal campground, but Smith and Boise National Forest spokeswoman Venetia Gempler offered a few tips that could make it easier to reserve a spot:

Come prepared: Smith advised doing a “dry run” of the Recreation.gov website so you’re familiar with the steps for making a reservation. The site switched to a new vendor last October and was completely overhauled, so it may look or operate differently than the last time you used it.

Smith also said it’s helpful to know what site you’re hoping to get and which dates you want to book.

“I’m not the kind of person who books my summer down to the day six months out, but certainly people do,” Smith said. “Be ready to just book right away.”

Be flexible: While most work schedules make weekend camping convenient, that also means weekends are the busiest. If you’re willing to schedule a trip during the week, you may have better luck. In addition, Smith pointed out that popular holidays like the Fourth of July and Memorial Day weekend are also more difficult to book.

Have a backup plan: Keep in mind four or five sites that you’d be alright with camping at so you can book there if your first choice falls through.

“We only have so many sites,” said Thomas, the Sawtooth National Forest spokeswoman. “The only advice we can give is … you might have to have some other options.”

If you don’t get your preferred site, consider exploring. Dispersed camping is allowed on public land for campers who don’t mind giving up amenities like toilets. There are also many campgrounds across the state that don’t sell out, as well as walk-in campsites without reservations.

Smith also pointed to Recreation.gov’s trip building tool, which lets you choose a starting point and destination and see which campgrounds or experiences are available along the way.

And if you just have to have that campsite on the shore of Redfish Lake, you could try using bots in your favor. Websites like Campnab will scrape Recreation.gov regularly and send you alerts if a date opens up (for a fee, of course), and similar browser extensions exist, too.

Kate likes to curl up under the covers for the night on Seth Simpson’s bed. She likes to wrestle with Simpson’s dogs, and she wears a handsome leather collar. But you can’t really call Kate a pet, Simpson of Kuna explains.

She’s a coyote.

Simpson, who has wanted to own a coyote since he was a child, caught Kate as she was wandering outside her den in the Idaho desert last May. She was about six weeks old. Though Kate has spent most of her 8 months at Simpson’s side, she’s still a coyote in every way, he says.

“My goal has never been to train her, to make her a pet,” Simpson, 21, says. “She’s still a coyote. She’s a wild animal that tolerates people. I can’t call her a pet.”

Simpson is no stranger to pets. As the owner of Gem State Kennels, a dog-training facility in Kuna near Boise, Simpson knows the ins and outs of canine behavior — at least, domestic canine behavior.

“Kate doesn’t have any traits similar to a dog, hardly, besides the way she looks. Even the most shy dog wants to be around people,” Simpson says. “She’ll never approach somebody and ask to be petted.”

Instead, Simpson says, Kate is hyper-alert. She’s perpetually in a “playful puppy” stage, though she’s calmed down a bit as she matures, Simpson says.

Still, she loves to be in the house, where she sits on the couch and even uses a litter box. (Simpson says he didn’t need to train Kate to use the box; he attributes it to instinct.)

And bringing Kate into the family has earned him plenty of attention, whether from friends who come by to watch Kate wrestle Simpson’s dogs or his 20,000 followers on Instagram who post question after question about Kate, telling Simpson they hope to one day have coyotes of their own.

The Idahoan and his coyote have been featured on various hunting and outdoor websites, and comedian/commentator Joe Rogan has mentioned the pair on his podcast. Simpson, who knows other people who own coyotes, says the attention is a little overblown.

“It’s nothing new, and it’s definitely not unheard of,” Simpson says.

What seems to puzzle some people the most is the duality of Simpson’s relationship with coyotes. In some photos, he holds Kate. In others, he poses next to the bodies of coyotes he’s shot and killed. It’s a conflict that Simpson says even gives him some pause.

“The more I’ve been asked (about the conflicting ideas), the more I realize it’s a hard question,” Simpson says. “Just because I do coyote hunting doesn’t mean I don’t like coyotes.”

Idaho law considers the animals pests, which means there’s no tag required to hunt them, no coyote “season” and no limit on how many a hunter can take. And because they’re indigenous to the state, there’s no law expressly forbidding ownership of one.

“I enjoy hunting coyotes because they are so hard to outsmart,” says Simpson, who adds that he’s learned a lot about the animals thanks to Kate. “I consider them to be amazing animals.”

Simpson said his background of hunting and caring for livestock that has framed coyotes in his mind in a way that he thinks many people from different backgrounds can’t understand. Moreover, most of the critics aren’t trying to understand, Simpson says, and they were around long before he had Kate.

“When it comes to hunting, hunting dogs and wild animals, there are always people who are going to disagree with what I do,” he says.

Growing up, Simpson participated in 4H and Future Farmers of America, raising livestock that he knew would end up slaughtered for food.

“As a kid, you learn not all animals are pets,” Simpson says.

That lesson applied when he took Kate home.

“It’s hard to have an emotional attachment to something that doesn’t have an attachment to you. She has a name, but she doesn’t even respond to it,” Simpson says.

He says he’ll take care of Kate for the rest of her life regardless, letting her spend her days on a zip line where she can roam the yard outside. Simpson is careful to keep her diet as close to “natural” as he can, hunting mice and rabbits for the coyote and buying scraps from friends who own a wild game butcher shop.

As much as he can, he tries to let Kate do what she enjoys, Simpson says. He hopes she’s the first in a long line of not-quite-pet coyotes, though with plans to start a family soon, he knows he’ll need to take a hiatus when kids are in the house.

For Simpson, Kate has been a childhood dream come true.

Cheri Glankler has been rescuing dogs for 20 years — the last five of those spent in Garden Valley — so the elderly retriever that ended up in her care in late June was nothing out of the ordinary. At least initially.

From the outset, the dog looked rough. She was found collapsed on a ranch off Idaho 55 near Horseshoe Bend and brought to Glankler covered in fleas and ticks.

“Please share if you know someone is missing her,” Glankler wrote in a Facebook post in the Lost Pets Boise page.

But Glankler had a hunch about who might be missing the dog. And the internet did, too.

Right away, comments started pouring in on Glankler’s post: Could this be Mo, a dog lost in the area last fall?

Mo, a 12-year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever, had gone missing September 13, 2016, between Horseshoe Bend and Placerville. A former hunting dog, Mo still accompanied her owners, Darwin and Cindy Cameron, on hunting trips and relaxed in their camper. Somehow on the September trip, Mo was let out of the camper and took off in search of Darwin.

For the next three months, the Camerons, who live in Boise, stayed in the area searching for Mo with no luck.

Mo or no?

Glankler, a fan of Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, or “Chessies,” had heard about Mo when the dog went missing months ago. She’d hoped to hear about the dog’s safe return, but after a season of heavy snow, she wasn’t terribly optimistic.

The past year’s hard winter would’ve been tough to survive in the wild, even for an animal in its prime, Glankler said. The dog she had rescued, though a hardy Chessie (a dog known for its wooly, oily coat that was bred for the extreme cold of retrieving in the Atlantic), was completely deaf and clearly pretty old. Glankler couldn’t be completely sure this dog was Mo.

Still, she tracked down the Camerons and reached out. They were apprehensive, Glankler said. In the past nine months, they’d had many false alarms, and each time they realized the dog in question wasn’t Mo, they hurt a little more. The last they had heard, a hunter in Jerusalem Valley had seen a brown dog in the forest, running from wolves.

“I was positive it was her,” Glankler said. “But I didn’t want to dash (Darwin’s) hopes.”

There was something about this dog that Glankler swore was a sign — and then there were the squirrels.

Glankler was walking the elderly retriever on her property one day when a squirrel streaked by. Despite how weak the rescued dog was, she “nearly ripped my arm off,” to chase the critter, Glankler said. Talking to Darwin Cameron’s brother, Glankler asked, “How is Mo with squirrels?”

“Game on,” he replied.

Game On

With some persuasion, the Camerons made the trip to Glankler’s Garden Valley home from Boise, nervous but hopeful as they had been for the last nine months that somehow they would be reunited with Mo. Glankler warned them that, even if the dog she had was Mo, their reunion might not be quite what they expected.

“They all expect this kind of Disneyland response like you see sometimes in videos when veterans come home,” Glankler said. “And to be perfectly honest, that’s abnormal. People don’t understand that (the dogs) have gone into survival mode.”

This rescue dog had been through serious trauma, and even seeing a familiar face would take some adjusting to. When Glankler’s rescue dog greeted the Camerons, she was subdued — but there was a familiarity there.

“I knew right away,” Glankler said. “She went to Cindy and pushed her head into Cindy’s belly. Cindy was looking her over and looking for all the signs that this is Mo — a stitch in her right eye, her fatty tumor.”

Darwin sat down and the dog ambled over to him. She sat down squarely on his foot, “which is exactly what Mo does.”

“He wanted to believe it was her but he was afraid to believe it was her,” Glankler said.

The Camerons had one more way to tell. “Go get the bed,” Cindy told her husband.

They’d brought Mo’s bed with them, hoping the dog would recognize a sign from her previous life. When the dog started sniffing the bed, Glankler said, it was obvious. There’s a real difference in the way canines sniff their own scent and the way they explore the scents of other dogs, Glankler explained.

“I think you have your girl back,” she told the Camerons.

The Legend

When the Camerons left Garden Valley with the dog Glankler rescued, they were 99 percent sure she was Mo. After a few days’ time at home, they’re 100 percent certain, they said. Mo knew just how to get through the garage and the house. It was little details like that that made them sure.

Now, they said, their focus is on getting Mo back to stable health and making up for lost time. While she was gone, Mo lost about 50 percent of her body weight. It was clear that she had spent the entire time on her own in the wild, Glankler said.

“The way she looked, there’s no way someone was taking care of her,” she explained.

Darwin said another priority is thanking the hundreds of people who spent time looking for the lost dog.

“The sheriff’s office, the hunters who set aside their tags and their hunting trips to help look for a lost dog,” Darwin said. “Boy, we’re blessed to have her back.”

Glankler has a nickname for Mo after all the elderly canine went through: The Legend. She said she plans to start a new rescue in Mo’s honor that bears the same name.

It’s not often in dog rescue that Glankler gets a happy ending, she said. And Mo stole Glankler’s heart with her tenacity and bravery.

“Who saved Mo? Mo saved Mo,” Glankler said. “Even here when I would take her out on a lead, she was searching. She knew who she was looking for. She’s incredible.”

GARDEN CITY (AP) — This week, a Garden City wildlife rehabilitation center welcomed two cute new additions — but their arrival isn’t all rosy.

The cubs, which rescuers at Idaho Black Bear Rehab believe are both female, were brought in on July 4 after their mother was shot and killed in the Kings Lake area of Washington State.

“Someone felt threatened by the mom and shot her,” explained Sally Maughan, founder and president of IBBR. “Then they discovered the cubs and contacted Fish and Wildlife, who got in touch with us.”

Because the orphans were brought in on Independence Day, the IBBR staff thought it was only fitting that the pair have patriotic names. America and Liberty (or Abearica and Libearty) are about four months old, Maughan estimated.

For now, IBBR staffers haven’t assigned the names to either cub in particular. Sally said the little bears’ personalities will become more apparent as they grow, and the names will stick then.

America and Liberty will likely be released into the wild next year in the late spring. Maughan, who said she doesn’t think “a life in captivity is appropriate” for bears, expects the pair will likely be taken back to the Washington wilderness where they were found. But right now, the small cubs — one chocolate brown and the other black — are being formula-fed and exploring their new environment as rehabbers give them time to settle in.

“They need to feel secure,” Maughan said. “Their world’s been turned upside down.”

The bear cubs arrived at IBBR amid a nationwide boom in stories about bear attacks and intrusions — also on the Fourth of July, a black bear attacked a 60-year-old woman hiking with her two dogs in North Idaho. A teenager in Alaska was killed last month by a bear after the boy got lost running a race. A professional runner in Maine recently survived pursuit by two bears. And a bear in Colorado was caught on camera scavenging through a kitchen as homeowners slept through the whole thing.

Maughan explained that the folks at IBBR aren’t necessarily anti-hunting. In fact, she said, several hunters donate venison to the rehab to help feed the bears. Maughan said IBBR emphasizes being BearWise in order to avoid conflicts and run-ins with the wild animals.

“I wasn’t the person who shot (the cubs’) mom, and I don’t feel I have the right to judge,” Maughan said. “I know they felt threatened, and I hope they made the right call.”

What’s important to Maughan now, she said, is the fact that America and Liberty made their way to IBBR.

“You always wish there were no orphan cubs, but we are so glad they were found,” Maughan said.