ven before she could walk, Chris Dorsey’s daughter would smack the glass door that led to their deck and, more importantly, the outside world.
“If she could sleep outside every night,” Dorsey said, “I honestly think she would.”
Sloane is now 2½, and she still demands to be outside. Dorsey, 38, accommodates her as much as he can, and usually that means walking around the lake near their Arvada home, where they occasionally catch glimpses of foxes, coyotes and birds.
It also means taking her camping, even when his wife, Alexis, prefers their bed to a tent. But with most camping sites selling out in hours, six months in advance, and with Colorado’s unpredictable summer climate, even getting lucky and snagging a spot meant, say, wildfires could ruin their plans.
So Dorsey, who works in tech with the marketing firm Epsilon, developed a website, Campsite Ranger, to alert him when a spot opened. That’s not a new idea, he admits, but his site also offers other features. It has conditions of the campgrounds, including weather reports and air quality and will email you safety alerts when something goes south. It tracks timed-entry permits, such as those sold by Rocky Mountain National Park.
It even watches for campground closures, which were common this year because of wildfires, and will point users to another nearby spot, one that isn’t, say, closed by a wildfire. It does all this for free, though there are paid options, including tracking more than one spot.
“The sites were not only paid, they were only notifying me when a spot opened,” Dorsey said. “That’s 25% of the problem. The whole point of my site is to be proactive.”
A lifelong entrepreneur
After graduating from college, Dorsey wanted to work at an advertising agency in Gunbarrel, but they wouldn’t give him an interview. He decided to show up anyway. When he drove through Boulder, it was love at first sight.
“I didn’t care if I got the job,” Dorsey said. “I’m staying here.”
He did get the job. He left after a couple years to experience a big city and spent a few years in New York and Washington, D.C., with plans to eventually come back to Colorado. He had a long-distance relationship with Alexis after meeting her at a wedding — she was a bridesmaid and he was a groomsman — until COVID-19, when she came out to Colorado after her office closed and never left. They had Sloane in 2024.
Dorsey at first developed the site for himself. But when he told other friends about it, they wanted a link to it, and he began to think about the possibilities.
“I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 6,” Dorsey said.
He grew up in Maryland and, when he was in middle school, he bought tickets for Baltimore Ravens games and sold them for a profit.
Still, for now, he charges only for multiple watches or multiple weekends. Most users, he believes, will use the site for free. He sells memberships for $25 a year, locked in for life, though that price may go up once a certain number of people sign up. The site’s only been up a month, and he hasn’t advertised it, so he believes a dozen or so are paid members. Most, he said, are colleagues and friends who got to see the site first.
“The goal is not for me to make a lot of money on this,” Dorsey said.
The goal, he said, is to get people outside, especially those with young kids.
Hard-to-get camping spots
He feels the frustration of parents who want to share the outdoors with their children but have a hard time booking premier spots in time or knowing where to go. As a result, at least partly, kids had 25% fewer outings in 2025 compared to a decade ago, his site states.
Kathryn Bredahl of Arvada felt that same frustration as a parent of two young children ages 4 and 2. She and her husband, Steffen, used to enjoy dispersed camping, but once they had kids, just finding random camping spots for a weekend went out the window. They needed bathrooms and running water and safe areas for her kids to play without a bear thinking of them as snacks. But the hard reality of finding those spots in Colorado hit when she tried to book a place.
“Those places book up so fast,” Bredahl said. “Even if you’re looking in the spring, you’re not going to find any for the summer. After a bit, I didn’t even bother looking.”
But when Dorsey told her about Campsite Ranger — the two are friends — she decided to give camping another try. She even thought she could be optimistic: She put a watch on Rocky Mountain National Park’s crowded east side. The weekend before Labor Day, Campsite Ranger sent her an email: A campsite in the national park had opened up. She had two days’ notice. She decided to go for it.
“It was awesome,” Bredahl said. “It was so fun to get out there with my kids.”
Bredahl believes she couldn’t have done it without Camping Ranger: She doesn’t have time to stay on recreation.gov and watch for campsites on her own. She’s now a paying member and plans to set watches on multiple sites next year.
“We moved here to camp and enjoy the outdoors,” Bredahl said. “We haven’t been able to get out like we want. We want our kids to love the mountains like we do, and now we feel like we can again.”
This is Campsite Ranger’s most basic function, and other sites do this as well. But Dorsey hopes more parents of young children use it, even if they never go beyond his free service.
One of the main problems comes when knowledgeable campers book a site, often by staying up until midnight on the exact date of their release, but then cancel later. Recreation.gov bookings tripled from 2013-23 to about 9 million a year, according to Campsite Ranger, and yet peak-season occupancy at reservable federal sites were just over 50%. Those are sites busy people could use as long as they are notified about an empty spot in time.
Dorsey plans to add an upgrade soon, a collaboration with All Trails that will list popular hikes to pair with the most popular camping sites. He hopes to add in state parks and, at some point, other national parks as well. He has a lot of ideas: He’s even contemplating how his site could make camping comfortable for people like his wife, who appreciates the time outside but doesn’t love sleeping in it.
This story previously appeared on The Colorado Sun.
Copyright 2026 High Plains Public Radio.
