My friend Ian smiled broadly as he looked at his phone.

He had just received confirmation for a hard to get backpacking permit within Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, he told me. His face said it all: His summer backpacking trip to the Rae Lakes Loop was a go!

For serious backpackers, tent campers and especially car campers with children, getting a reservation either for a back country permit in a national park or a slot in a car-camping site on the coast is about as difficult as landing a reservation at a fine dining restaurant in Los Angeles or Pasadena. Perhaps more difficult.

Nature is all around us. It’s just hard to reach.

Maybe you’ve heard some of the theories: Backpacking, hiking and camping activities began to increase during the Great Recession. It was an inexpensive vacation for people out of a job or earning minimum wage. Hiking trails in the local Angeles National Forest became more crowded in the past 10 years, rangers tell me. Many parking lots at trailheads are filled often before 7 a.m. on weekends.

GPS has become a common tool for finding hard-to-reach spots. Postings on YouTube and Instagram of someone jumping into a creek (never advised) draws others to the same spots. Young people between 16 and 34 years old are discovering the outdoors and use their phones to find bloggers who spell out trail locations, landmarks and routes.

First responders say inexperienced hikers take risks, or come ill-prepared to the rugged, unpredictable San Gabriel, Santa Monica and San Bernardino mountains, leading to injuries, sometimes fatalities.

But it’s more than just a dangerous rush to a waterfall wearing flip-flops.

The national parks, national forests and monuments are experiencing record high numbers of visitors. More people camping makes for more competition for campsites on overcrowded reservation systems. You can reserve sites only by going to www.recreation.gov. Some try to reserve a site up to a year in advance. Yosemite is one of the hardest parks to get into.

Just for fun, I searched for a reservation at Potwisha Campground in Sequoia & Kings Canyon last week for a weekday in June, not a weekend. It turned up 36 matches, of which all but one site were filled. The screen screamed “Find Next Avail. Date” in red ink. And this is a modest tent campground (no electric hookup) you can drive to, 4 miles from the park entrance. When I tried Buckeye Flat Campground for the same dates, all the campsites were filled.

The planner in the family finds ways around this logjam. Ian said he used an automated computer program that pings the site every minute. There are even websites that give backpackers tips on how to acquire backpacking permits to the nation’s most beautiful sites. One of the better tips after being denied was change your plans.

In the Angeles National Forest, things are different. All the individual campgrounds are first-come, first-served. No reservations are taken, spokesman Phillip Desenze explained. Only the group campgrounds accept reservations. Basically, you load up the car with your tent, camp stove and a cooler full of food, drive into the canyon and take your chances. Desenze said it’s best to stop at a visitor center or station for real-time data on campground openings.

“Typically, there are campground (sites) available,” he said, even on weekends. But holiday weekends are often booked early. Even Buckhorn in the Angeles back country fills up early on Fridays, requiring folks to be there by 5 p.m., Ian said. “It’s not uncommon for all the sites to be filled by late afternoon or early evening at least during the summer season,” he wrote in an email.

Too many people looking for nature only think of Yosemite or Kings Canyon or Joshua Tree. Perhaps by keeping sites unreserved in the Angeles, more people will skip the bling of famous parks and experience the calm of sleeping under the stars in the local mountains. The list of Angeles Forest campgrounds is long and a lot like life, not guaranteed.

Steve Scauzillo covers transportation and the environment for the Southern California News Group. He’s a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing from The Wilderness Society. Follow him on Twitter or Instagram @stevscaz or email him at sscauzillo@scng.com.