Lake O'Hara, summer 2022. The spot that started it all.
Hey , I’m Daniel.
I made this thing.
Thanks for being here. Really. I built Schnerp on my laptop one weekend in 2022, fully expecting nobody but me to use it.
How it started
It was March 2022. I was at a dinner party and a friend was going on about how he just booked Lake O’Hara, a gorgeous high-alpine lake in the Canadian Rockies. So I asked:
“Cool, how do I go?”
He laughed.
“Dude bookings dropped back in January, I was 60,000th in the queue and everything was sold out by the time I got in”
“So… how are you going then?”
“I just refreshed the page all day at work until someone cancelled their spot.”
Wait đź’ˇ Refreshing a webpage all day is literally what computers are for. I could automate this!
So I went home and wrote a tiny script that watched the Parks Canada page and emailed me when something opened up. A few weeks later, a cancellation hit and I booked it.
That summer I made it to Lake O’Hara.
On the alpine circuit, the pictures take themselves really.
That should’ve been the end of the story. I’d built myself a toy, it worked once, on to the next thing.
But I told a friend about it. He asked if I could set one up for him. Then he told his friends. They told theirs. My inbox started filling up with strangers asking if I could watch a campground for them too.
A month later a reporter at Global News tracked me down, and I was on a morning show trying to explain what “schnerp” meant on live TV.
So, uh, why “Schnerp”?
Valid question.
It’s a word my friend group uses when talking about hunting powder at a ski resort a few days after a storm. We’ll put in massive effort, staying high on traverses and suffering long run-outs, just to schnerp a single turn in untracked snow.
In that context, it vaguely means to acquire a scarce resource. When I was thinking about names for this project, I realized we’re doing the same here, just with campsites.
I also wanted something unique for the domain, and low-key wanted more people to say the word schnerp.
It’s fun to say. Try it.
What it turned into
What started as one email to my own laptop has now sent over 1.5 million. Right now, someone’s phone is probably buzzing about a cancellation at a place I’ve never heard of.
Parks Canada and Recreation.gov. DOC huts on New Zealand’s Great Walks. NSW NPWS and Parks Victoria down in Australia. A long tail of state, provincial, and regional systems from Fiordland to Florida. 31 agencies across 4 countries at last count.
It’s also the only way I get out these days.
Backpacking to Floe Lake, Kootenay.
Paddling on Maligne Lake, Jasper.
Bikepacking in Kananaskis.
Road tripping in Western Australia.
But the best part isn’t the places I've been, it's the stories I hear from fellow schnerpers.
Hyeonji wrote to tell me she got engaged at a spot she Schnerp’d. Marissa wrote about introducing her son to the backcountry for the first time. Carlie wrote about piecing together the Great Divide Trail with her daughters after a rough health year. Hamish wrote about finally locking in a Paparoa hut for an Easter trip.
Turns out I really like helping people sleep on dirt.
What Schnerp actually does
We watch sold-out campgrounds for you and ping you the second a cancellation pops up. That’s it. We don’t book the site. You do that, with a direct link we send. We’re not competing with the reservation system. We’re just the friend at work hitting refresh on your behalf, 24/7, with better reflexes.
In a perfect world there’d be enough campsites for everyone and nobody would have to refresh a booking page at work. But it’s not a perfect world, so until then, we keep watching. Someone put it better than I can:
I kind of hate that Schnerp exists, but I’m glad it does.
— Jack Hauen, Google review
Yeah Jack, same.
Anyway. Go outside. I’ll be refreshing on your behalf.
— Daniel