Even though I didn’t want to bring this negativity into the Trip Report from our amazing float down the Canyon of Lodore in Dinosaur National Monument, I thought it was important to document and highlight this part of the experience from the planning stages of our trip for posterity’s sake.
As usual, neither Jackson nor I won a permit for the Green River in the lottery on Recreation.gov, but that was pretty much expected and wasn’t a big deal since we really wanted a Low-Use Season permit for mid-September and we were planning to try to get one when they became available in early March. Shortly before the initial release date of the Low-Use Season permits, the day of the release was changed from Monday to Wednesday for some reason. I usually don’t trust that these changes get made properly in the system, especially when Rec.gov is involved, so I checked on Monday morning anyways hoping that they might still become available in error. Well, I was right and they did mess up, so I grabbed a permit for the day I wanted and hoped they wouldn’t be cancelled later on, although I knew that was a definite possibility and I wasn’t keeping my hopes up. After realizing the mistake, Dinosaur stopped the availability of the permits on Rec.gov and ended up cancelling all the permits that were issued early, which meant I would have to try again on Wednesday morning. This wasn’t a big deal to me since I was kind of expecting it to happen for the process to be fair to all, which I understood.
However, what I was not expecting is that when I went to get the same permit on Wednesday morning and was able to successfully grab the date I wanted and add it to my cart, Rec.gov would not let me checkout because it said that I already had a permit for the season at Dinosaur, and you are only allowed to hold one permit at a time. This was false and an error with their system from when they cancelled the permit the day before, which effectively blocked myself and anyone else who grabbed a permit early from getting a permit on Wednesday.
So even though they had cancelled the early permits to keep the system fair for everyone, in the end they made it very unfair to those who got the permits on Monday because of their error. I was not happy about this at all, and to be honest, it ruined my mood for a couple of days afterwards.
In the end, Dinosaur realized the mistake and tried to fix it by holding another lottery for all the people who were effectively blocked from getting a permit on Wednesday, but of course I didn’t get anything out of that lottery either.
Thankfully, even though I was actively blocked from getting the permit we wanted, Jackson was successfully able to get one for a date later in the month and we were still able to experience the Canyon of Lodore in September. If you are interested in seeing the real-time dialoged from this situation, you can find it in this thread over on Mountain Buzz.