Field notes from our journey

Easier to search, easier to save

We refactored search to get better at understanding what you're looking for. We also fixed Mapbox issues and optimized our map experience across discovery and property pages.

Favourites are finally properly hooked up on our search panel. They can also be rearranged via drag and drop on your pinboard to allow for more control over your pinboard and lists.

Your privacy, your choices

New cookie banner that gives you control of your privacy settings. We built it specifically for Quebec's Law 25 and PIPEDA.

Additionally, every marketing email now has a one-click unsubscribe and your account settings explains what your marketing subscription is opting in to.

Parks Canada backcountry joins the map

272 backcountry zone sites across 10 bookable Parks Canada backcountry areas, and Waterton Lakes upgraded from a single dot to its full backcountry detail.

Into the BC backcountry

27 BC backcountry parks with 89 camping zones and sites, including the Berg Lake Trail and the Golden Ears backcountry. Availability watching now covers bookable backcountry zones too, with full-season calendars.

Backcountry data lives in systems that don't talk to each other, so we matched the reservation service against BC Parks' own site, park by park.

BC's first-come, first-served campgrounds

41 BC parks with 161 first come, first served frontcountry sites join the map, sourced from BC Parks' open data.

Your data, your call

You can now delete your account yourself, right from settings. We confirm by email, and after 30 days a scrub permanently erases what's left. You can also export everything we hold about you as an instant download. And marketing email is now an explicit opt-in, with a one-click unsubscribe in every email we send that works without logging in.

We wrote our privacy policy to be readable. This batch makes sure the product keeps every promise in it.

First come, first served arrives in Alberta

77 Alberta first come, first served campgrounds join the map, and 29 more merged into records we already had, along with Alberta backcountry zones and the Castle designated camping areas. We also rewrote 76 campground descriptions that arrived in government-brochure voice into our own.

A huge share of Alberta camping never touches a reservation system. Until now, none of it was on our map.

Get to know every single site

Tap any site on a campground page and it opens its own details card: size, hookups, access style, and a personal availability calendar scoped to your dates. And alert matches now appear on your alerts page as we find them, timestamped in your own timezone.

Housekeeping for campsite records

A deep cleaning pass on our campsite data. We merged duplicate site rosters where reservation systems listed the same campground twice, and enriched BC and Parks Canada site records with the details the booking systems know: site size, hookups, tent pads, and more. Alberta got the same treatment from its own booking system, so 104 campgrounds now carry per-site details, down to hookup amperage.

Tell us your dates

Campground pages now take your dates. Pick them and see which sites are open for your window, on a per-site availability calendar built from the watching we already do.

We only colour a date when we actually know: available, booked, or honestly unknown when our information is stale. A calendar that guesses is worse than no calendar.

Alert creation, rebuilt around the map

The alert wizard now opens on a full map. Pick a site, pick a campground, or drop a pin, and the alert's scope follows from what you chose instead of asking you to declare it up front. And when an alert expires, we now send a proper farewell email with how the watch went, match or no match.

Two more things landed alongside it: text messages are live, so you can verify your phone once and the $2 SMS add-on will text you the moment a site opens up, and the home page gained featured collections, small sets of campgrounds we curate by hand.

Aim your alert: one site, or a whole area

Unit and area alerts are live. If you know exactly where you want to stay, you can create an alert for that specific site. Alternatively, if you have no preference on the site, or even the campground, you can place a pin on a map and we'll watch all campgrounds within 50 km of that spot.

A friendlier look for your alerts

New designs for alert components. Each one is now a little claim-check ticket like the kind you get when you need to store your bags so you can adventure before checking in to your accommodations. Similarly, you can make an alert with us so you can keep planning your trip while we do the work behind the scenes to ensure you have a place to stay for the night.

Field notes from the people who've been there

Campgrounds now have reviews. You can rate a place, write about your stay, and read what other campers thought before you go. We leaned into the notebook feel the rest of Boondok has: your reviews live on a Field Notes page as private-first entries you can keep to yourself or publish for everyone.

Being honest about a place shouldn't out where you were and when, so public reviews never show the exact site you stayed at, and we round off the dates. The full detail stays private to you.

See the actual campsites, not just the campground

Property pages gained a section we call The grounds: the individual sites within a campground, each with its access style (drive-in, walk-in, boat-in) and whether it's reservable. Sites now show as pins on the property map, and hovering a site in the list highlights its pin, so the list and the map finally talk to each other.

If the site you want is already booked, the watch-alert button is right there on it, so you can ask us to tell you the moment it opens up.

Search that reads plain English, and a few smaller touches

Search got noticeably smarter. You can type the way you'd actually describe a trip, lakeside camping north of Kamloops with a boat launch, and it works out the place, the direction, and the amenities from the sentence. When it isn't sure about a place name it now tells you, instead of quietly returning nothing.

The maps picked up points of interest too: washrooms, water taps, playgrounds, boat launches and more now show as labelled markers on both the discover map and property pages, drawn from open mapping data. And you can finally put a face to your account, we added profile avatars with a curated set of nature photos and a built-in cropper.

Lists you can build together

Your favourites can now be sorted into lists. Find them as fun paper notes right beside your polaroids. You can invite friends and family by email and they can add and remove places alongside you. Lists are only available for signed in users.

Amenities and campsites placed automatically

We built tooling that places campsites and amenities, washrooms, water taps, playgrounds, on the map automatically by cross-referencing open mapping data against our own records, with confidence tiers so a hand-verified pin always outranks an automated guess. This was a huge effort and learning experience.

Admin housekeeping, faster deploys

A cleanup pass through the admin: navigation fixes on the property pages, longer property lists so nobody pages through hundreds of campgrounds a screen at a time, and a fix for a rare map crash when navigating away mid-load. Under the hood, the deploy pipeline learned to detect which parts of the system a change actually touches, so shipping a small fix no longer takes 20 minutes.

Smarter stand-in photos

Campgrounds without photos of their own get a stand-in from our stock catalog, and that matching got smarter. The catalog is tagged by what a place offers, so a lakeside campground with paddling gets water, a forested one gets trees, and a mountain site gets peaks. Ties now shuffle instead of always picking the same image, so neighbouring campgrounds stop looking like clones. We also gave ourselves a tag editor in the admin, so when a match looks off we can fix the reason, not just the photo.

More places to find the right photo

Two new image sources, Pexels and Pixabay, joined Wikimedia Commons and Unsplash in our photo tooling. Different libraries are strong in different places. One has the great lake shots, another has the only decent photo of a small park nobody photographs. Searching them side by side raises the odds that every campground gets an image that actually looks like the place, with full attribution carried along, same as always.

Putting every campsite on the map

Most reservation systems draw their campground maps as pixel art, pretty diagrams with no geographic reference. This release was about converting those diagrams into something real. We built an internal overlay tool that aligns the schematic onto satellite imagery and derives GPS coordinates for every site at once, with per-site editing for the cases where bulk conversion needs fine-tuning.

The interesting problem here was georeferencing. Our tool lets you drag a pixel canvas onto a satellite view, and Mapbox's projection engine converts every pixel position to GPS. The kind of thing GIS software does, but it had to run in a browser and process hundreds of campgrounds fast enough to be useful. We also added draft saving so calibration work survives page reloads, and a data quality monitor that flags campgrounds where coordinate coverage is incomplete.

Some providers give GPS coordinates at the park level, not the site level. A campground with 192 sites shows as one dot. We'll need a different approach for those.

The plumbing under the map

The unglamorous foundation for what came the next day. We shipped a geometry ingestion pipeline for campground site coordinates across Western Canada, an image archive of campground reference maps for calibration work, and a unified external ID system so the same campground in three different provider feeds finally has a single name we can pin to.

Mapbox on the consumer site

The map landed on the public site. Search results now show as clustered pins on an interactive Mapbox map. Property detail pages got a map section with nearby campgrounds. We custom-styled the base map in two variants, a light Boondok style for daytime and a darker variant for evening browsing, both built on Mapbox's outdoor base because it already has the trail and terrain coverage that matters for camping. The dark one in particular feels right for the app.

Photos for every campground

Every property now has a photo. We pull from Wikimedia Commons with full CC attribution (photographer, license, source URL) and added an Unsplash integration alongside it as a second source. For campgrounds with no direct images, a stock catalog matches the property to the closest fit using its features, activities, and region, so even the data-thin ones look like a place.

We also cleaned up about 150 photos that the pipeline had matched incorrectly. Searching Arrow Lakes was returning photos of the Arrow Air Flight 1285 memorial. Searching Omineca was returning gold rush steamboat photos. It was entertaining to see random photos as hero images, but it wasn't production-ready. We also fixed a login failure that was affecting both the main site and admin.

The stock matching uses PostgreSQL's GIN index for tag overlap, which sounds fancy but really just means find photos tagged 'beach' for campgrounds near beaches. At our current scale it resolves in under a millisecond.

Property pages, search, the shape of browsing

Property detail pages landed with a photo gallery, highlights, and an at-a-glance sidebar. Search got a split panel layout with the map alongside the results, a smart classifier that adapts the results to what you're actually asking for, and a mobile experience built around a scroll-driven map-to-list transition.

Discover page looks editorial

The Discover page shipped with an editorial layout, parallax sections, horizontally scrolling story cards, and a typewriter search bar with recent searches and a keyboard shortcut. The curated sections lean toward popular destinations to give first-time visitors somewhere to start.

The alert creation flow

A full multi-step alert creation flow: search, scope, dates, filters, notifications, review, payment, confirmation. The calendar supports flexible date windows for when you don't have firm travel plans. The amenities filter has typeahead and grouped categories.

Settings

Account, appearance, language, notifications, all in one place. We added an avatar picker built from curated nature photos.

Favourites

A favourites page in a responsive grid, plus a heart toggle on Discover cards with a small pop animation so saving feels like something rather than nothing.

Home, with your name on it

The signed-in home page landed with a time-of-day greeting that uses your name, alert cards covering the watching/matches/expired states, a Discover teaser to nudge browsing, and proper empty and error states with retry so the page never feels broken when there's nothing yet.

The shell of the member dashboard

Consumer navigation (sidebar on desktop, bottom tabs on mobile), light and dark theme tokens, top bars for both layouts, and skeleton placeholders for every dashboard page. We built the empty shell on purpose. It's tempting to ship a whole finished page at once, but small visible steps are easier to course-correct than big ones. Putting the skeleton up first meant we could test the navigation, the mobile layout, and the theming before any real content existed.

Sign-in for early access

Sign-in landed for early access members, together with branded loading screens and account-related hardening across the early access flow.

Landing page redesign

The first landing page was functional but generic. We learned pretty quickly that functional wasn't going to carry us, especially for a product whose whole point is connecting people to specific, named places. The redesign tries to lead with photographs of real spots we care about rather than stock imagery of tents.

The first real button

An early access signup form on the landing page, a confirmation email with an activation link, and internal admin tooling to review and manage signups. The first feature with real moving parts: web form, email delivery, audit trail, admin dashboard. A lot of plumbing for one button.

The first commit

Repo created. Excited to start building after months of planning.