Can you still get a Wonderland Trail permit after losing the early-access lottery?

Yes, two real paths remain. First, walk-up permits: about a third of camp capacity is held back and issued in person at the park's Wilderness Information Centers up to one day before a start date. That works out to roughly 300 full circuits a season going to people who show up flexible. Walk-up success favors midweek starts, shoulder dates in September, and parties willing to accept a creative camp sequence.

Second, cancellations. Reserved itineraries get returned to Recreation.gov continuously all season as plans fall apart, and full circuits can often be stitched together from individual camp openings. This is a volume game: openings appear at random times and vanish fast, so checking once a day usually loses to some form of systematic watching. This is exactly the situation cancellation alerts exist for.

Whichever path you take, keep the trip's demands in mind while you improvise. The Wonderland is 93 miles with around 23,000 feet of gain and loss, 10 to 14 days for most parties, and camps are fixed, so a patchwork itinerary can hand you a 7-mile day followed by back-to-back big ones. Food caches at Longmire, Sunrise, White River, and Mowich Lake make odd itineraries more workable than they look on paper.