New this year, the national reservation system for permits to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness crashed Wednesday morning shortly after it opened.
Some users were able to secure permits when the system went live at 9 a.m., according to the U.S. Forest Service. But a technical problem with servers quickly followed, shutting out a mass of other users. On Wednesday afternoon, it remained uncertain when the system would reopen for business, the Forest Service said.
It could be days — a message on the website, recreation.gov, said there would be "advance notification of at least 48 hours or more" to allow paddlers and others to return to the site to make their reservations.
"We are very disappointed," said Superior National Forest spokeswoman Kristina Reichenbach on Wednesday afternoon, "and we know a lot of people are affected."
Reichenbach encouraged people to watch for updates on the reservation website and on social media.
Outfitters had complained loudly about changes to the system this year and warned supervisors at the Forest Service that the crush of first-come, first-served online reservations would overwhelm the capacity of the site — the same website used for booking reservations to national parks.
"We don't know why this happened," Ann Schwaller of the Forest Service wrote in a message Wednesday morning to outfitters, resort owners and other permitting cooperators around the BWCA. "We are sick over it as well."
She said in her memo that the Forest Service will reverse all transactions that went through before the system failed.
