Rec sites: free or cheap, first come, cash

A recreation site is a campsite on Crown land, cleared and kept by the province, not a park. Expect an outhouse, a fire ring and usually a table, and little else: no water, no power, no showers. Some are on a paved road just outside town; more are at the end of a gravel forest service road shared with logging trucks. A local operator looks after the busier ones and collects the fee in cash.

They matter because they are a second system with its own supply. When every BC Parks campground within two hours of Vancouver is booked for a July weekend, the rec sites in the Chilliwack River valley and around Harrison Lake are not in that calendar at all.

Every row is read from the site’s own page on sitesandtrailsbc.ca: the site count, the overnight fee, the operator’s booking site, the status and its comment (a page can say “open” in one field and “closed for a bear” in the next; we show the closed). The road note comes from the page’s driving directions. The date next to each table is the day we last read them, and the rows are replaced, never edited, on the next read. Sites we could not confirm on an official page are not here.