🏕️ Free Camping, Mostly On Public Land
The free sites — what the page opens on — are overwhelmingly land owned
by all of us: Bureau of Land Management, National Forest, national
parks, Army Corps lakes and state lands. The wider catalog also carries thousands
of community-mapped campgrounds, private and commercial ones included. Everything
comes straight from the agencies' and mappers' own published data, so it's as good
as what they publish and no better.
The page opens showing free sites only, because that's usually why
people come looking. Uncheck Free sites only to see the fee sites
as well — while it's on, the count line above the list says free only
so you know the rest are there.
💵 Free, Fee, And "Not Stated"
There are three answers to "what does it cost", not two:
Free — the agency says there's no fee. Fee charged — the
agency or Recreation.gov says there is one, or the site is a state park or
a privately run campground, which charge by the night. The line under it
says which, with the price where we have one.
Fee not stated — nobody's record says.
We never guess free. A site marked Fee not stated is
not being called free, and it won't appear when Free sites only is
checked. Turn up with cash and a bit of skepticism, and check the site's
own page before you rely on it.
🧭 What's On The Way
Pick a trip in Your route and the map draws the whole drive — from
your profile's home town, through each on-the-way stop in your own order,
to the final destination.
Check Only show sites on my route and the list stops being "every
campsite in America" and becomes the ones near your road. The
distance box sets how far off the route counts — 50 miles by default.
Each row then tells you how far off it sits, closest first.
Your trip's own plans are pinned in blue with their names beside
them, so you can see which campsites sit near the nights you have already
booked.
The route starts from the Starting Location on
Edit Trip, or the city and state in your
profile if you haven't set one — so
that's the one thing worth filling in. Nothing here costs anything or
shares your location with anyone.
A pin marked ≈ sits at the center of its town,
not at a street address — stops, destinations and plans are placed from
their city and state. Link a plan to a park or a campsite to pin it
exactly.
Open 🔑 Map key under the map for what every pin, number
and color means. When a trip has both route stops and itinerary plans, only
one of them is numbered — pick which under Numbers on the map,
and the choice follows you to the other trip maps.
🗺️ Reading The Map
The map draws at most 600 pins. With more matches than that it shows a
spread across them — or, with a route on, the 600 nearest your
route — and the line under the map says so. Filter by state, agency or type,
or search, to see a smaller set in full.
Search finds your whole phrase anywhere, the description included; separate
words match in any order only in the site's name or its forest or unit — so
lake bear finds Bear Lake Campground.
Shade Public Land on the Map (a fold under the map, shut until you open it) paints land, not listed sites: BLM land,
National Forest (with private land inside the forest hatched
differently), and Michigan state forest, which only offers itself while
the map is over Michigan. The shading never changes the list below — it shows
where you may camp whether or not anyone has listed a site there, and the note
under the boxes gives each unit's night limit.
The three fee colors on the pins match the swatch row under the
map, and 🔑 Map key explains every other pin, number and line.
📋 Reading A Row, And Coverage
Each row names the site, what kind it is, what it costs and who runs it.
＋ Add to Itinerary puts it on one of your trips'
Itinerary as a place to stay, with its
coordinates already filled in.
Save These Campsites for Offline, below the list, downloads every page
of the list you're looking at to this device — do it before you drive out of
signal. You'll find it again, with no connection, under Offline Copy on
Trip Dashboard. A topo map is saved
with it — the whole area, and a closer look around every site on the
map — so the pins still have a map under them.
📝 Rate, add notes or a tip on a row keeps your rating and notes
private. A tip for other campers is the opposite: it's shown to every
visitor as soon as you save it, under that site, with no approval step — so
write it for strangers.
Coverage is uneven, and not in the way you'd expect.
Oregon has hundreds of free BLM sites listed; Arizona, a handful. That's
about which agency offices filled in the national database, not about
where you can camp. Most BLM land allows dispersed camping — typically 14
days in any 28 — whether or not a dot appears here. An empty patch of map
is not an empty desert: open Shade Public Land on the Map to see the land itself.