Maine’s Baxter State Park is making it easier for visitors to book a campsite for multiple nights online.
Effective Thursday, January 15, visitors will be able to extend camping reservations online for up to four consecutive nights beyond the park’s four-month availability window. Prior to this change, the reservation system made it challenging for campers to book a multi-day trip online.
Summer camping in Baxter State Park—the home of Katahdin—becomes available on a rolling four-month basis, meaning that on January 15, reservations become available for May 15; on January 16, they become available for May 16, and so on.
Until now, when the four-month rolling window opened for each day of camping, online reservations were limited to a single night, requiring visitors to call the Baxter State Park reservation office for extensions beyond the rolling reservation window.
Effective for the summer 2026 season, visitors will be able to use the online reservation portal to reserve their initial night plus three consecutive nights beyond the four-month rolling window at the same campsite.
The change does not alter the existing limitations of seven consecutive nights at a single site or campground and 14 consecutive nights within the park. A visitor who wants to prolong their stay within the same campground beyond four consecutive nights or relocate to a different campsite on any night must wait for the four-month rolling window to reserve that location.
This policy will also apply to in-person, mail-in, and call-in reservation requests, which will still be required for backcountry campgrounds/sites, bunkhouses, group areas, and accessible sites. An exception will allow for reserving multi-night backcountry trips that utilize multiple backcountry sites for up to the 14-night maximum, in order to facilitate the logistics of such trips.
Park officials are also changing when the online reservation portal opens. The reservation portal previously opened at 12:01 a.m., but will now open at 6 a.m.
