Recreation.gov keeps two separate stay limits for a campground, and the page you book from generally surfaces one. The second one is the one that runs out.
The fields are named maxConsecutiveStay and maxStay. On September 23, 2026 we read the campground record behind every National Park Service campground in Recreation.gov’s index. There are 555 of them and 426 return a record. Of those 426, 282 carry a consecutive-stay number, 239 carry a separate total-stay number, and 206 carry both.
Joshua Tree’s Black Rock Campground is the clean version. Its record sets the consecutive stay at 14 consecutive days and the total stay at 30 nights, and tags that second number “Each Year”. Those do not contradict each other. They are two rules stacked: 14 nights in a row on any one visit, 30 nights in the park’s campground across the whole year. Two full-length stays and your year at Black Rock is nearly spent.
The clock nobody reads
That tag on the total is the part that decides what the number means, and it is not always a year. Across the 239 campgrounds publishing a total, the period reads “Each Year” 160 times, “Selected Dates” 43 times, “Rolling 30 Days” 31 times and “Each Month” 5 times.
Four different clocks, and the number itself can be identical on all four. A 30-night cap that refills every rolling 30 days is an entire season of camping. A 30-night cap measured each year is one long winter and you are done.
Six places the headline number is unreachable
At six campgrounds the per-visit figure is larger than the period figure, so the bigger number cannot actually be taken. Catoctin Mountain Park’s Adirondack Shelters list 14 consecutive nights against 7 nights each year. Yellowstone’s Mammoth Campground lists 30 consecutive nights against 14 nights each year, and Lewis Lake and Slough Creek carry the same pair measured over “Selected Dates”, which is how Yellowstone’s summer and winter split lands in a booking system.
Another 111 of the 426 carry neither number. The record’s plain-text stay limit field was empty at all 426.
What this actually is
None of it is the law. These are booking constraints, written by whoever set the campground up in the reservation system. The enforceable rule is the park’s own, and we have written before about how park camping limits are counted parkwide and by season rather than per campground.
Yellowstone shows the gap at its widest. The park’s campgrounds page, last updated February 25, 2026, gives operating dates, fees, site counts and amenities for 11 campgrounds and states no stay limit anywhere on it. For most visitors the booking system’s number is the only number they will ever see, and it is not the one a ranger enforces.
So before a long stay, open the park’s camping page, look for its compendium, and call the campground if the two disagree. The posted sign and the land manager’s current guidance beat any website, this one included. For the free public land around the parks, start with Wyoming free camping or California free camping.