Who’s behind Tarn.

Tarn is built and run by one person — Nick. It isn’t a company, and the “we” you see around the site is a habit of writing, not a team. It also means that when you write in, you get me.

From the same publicly accessible availability information Recreation.gov shows on a permit or campground page — read anonymously, with no login. Park and campground names come from RIDB, Recreation.gov’s official open-data catalogue. Nothing private, nothing behind a password, and no copy of your Recreation.gov account anywhere near Tarn.

Tarn is not affiliated with Recreation.gov, the National Park Service, or any land agency. It’s an independent tool that reads public data.

• ·Never asks for your Recreation.gov login. Not for booking, not for convenience — Tarn has no account of yours to use.
• ·Never books or holds a spot for you. You get a link and book it yourself, which also means Tarn can never take a spot from another hiker.
• ·Never sells your data, and never profiles you or runs ads against it. What Tarn keeps, it keeps to run your trackers and send their alerts. A few services see the part they need to do that — the mail sender, Telegram if you link it, crash reporting. They are named, with every field and how long it is kept, in the privacy policy, which is the one place that owns it.
• ·No ads, no third-party analytics. There is no tracking script on this site, and even the fonts are served from here rather than fetched from someone else.

Tarn is in closed beta — invite-only, and free. Invites go out at the pace one person can add permits and answer people by hand.

Use the Feedback button inside the app, or the note field when you request an invite — both land with me directly. Tell me which permit you’re after and it usually gets added within a day.