Free camping on federal land: two different things

"Free camping" covers two arrangements that have almost nothing in common. One is a developed campground that charges nothing: a real site with a fire ring, a table, usually a vault toilet, no fee tube in sight. The other is dispersed camping, where you pull off a forest road and camp with no facilities at all. Both are legal, both are free, and mixing up the rules for one with the rules for the other is how people collect tickets.

Free developed campgrounds

Hundreds of federal campgrounds charge no fee at all, most of them Forest Service and BLM sites too small or too remote to justify a fee collection route. They work like any other first-come campground: find an open site, occupy it, obey the stay limit on the entrance sign. We list every one we track on the free campgrounds page.

Know what free buys you. Usually no drinking water, so haul your own, a gallon per person per day. Almost never trash service, so everything you carry in leaves with you, and a bag of garbage left beside a full wildlife-proof bin counts as littering. A vault toilet if you're lucky, and toilet paper only if the last visitor was polite. No hookups, no host most of the time, no reservations ever. For a self-contained camper this is the best deal in American recreation. For someone expecting a KOA, it's a rough night.

Dispersed camping on BLM land

On most Bureau of Land Management land, you can camp anywhere outside developed recreation sites unless the area is posted closed. The standard limit is 14 days within a 28-day period, after which you have to move at least 25 miles. Individual field offices adjust both numbers, and heavily used areas near towns like Moab or Sedona have replaced open dispersed camping with designated-site systems. The rules for a specific area live with its field office, via blm.gov.

Use existing disturbed sites, the bare patches with a rock fire ring already in place, rather than flattening new ground. Camping within about 200 feet of a water source is prohibited or discouraged nearly everywhere, both for the water and for the wildlife that needs to reach it at night.

Dispersed camping in national forests

Most national forests allow dispersed camping off open roads, generally with a 14-day stay limit, though the exact limit and the distance you must camp from the roadway vary forest by forest. The controlling document is the forest's Motor Vehicle Use Map, a free PDF on each forest's site at fs.usda.gov, which shows exactly which roads are open and which allow roadside camping. If the road isn't on the MVUM, driving it is illegal, camping included.

Cell coverage is not a given out there. Download the map before you leave pavement.

Staying welcome

Free areas close because people trash them, and the closure process is well underway across the West. The habits that keep a spot open are not complicated. Pack out every scrap, including the micro-trash around the fire ring. Bury human waste six to eight inches deep and at least 200 feet from water, or better, carry a portable toilet, which a growing number of designated dispersed areas now require. Keep generators to daylight hours and keep some distance from the next camp; the person who drove twenty miles of washboard did not do it to hear yours. And when a fire ban is on, it means your propane fire pit too, unless the order says otherwise. Read the actual order.

Where none of this applies

National parks are the big exception. With narrow exceptions, sleeping in a national park means a developed campground or a backcountry permit, and sleeping in your car at a trailhead pullout is a ticketable offense rangers actively look for. The free land near a park is almost always the national forest or BLM land outside the boundary, which is why the areas ringing Yellowstone, Zion, and Joshua Tree are dispersed-camping classics.

Verify before you drive

Dispersed rules change faster than any database tracks them. Fire restrictions can ban campfires or close whole areas by midsummer, popular corridors flip from open dispersed camping to designated sites, and a wet spring can gate a road into July. One call to the ranger district or field office that manages the spot answers all of it in five minutes, and the office phone numbers are on the same agency pages as the maps. Ask about stay limits, fire rules, and road conditions, in that order.

If the answer is discouraging, fall back to the free developed campgrounds nearby. Same price. Someone else already built the fire ring.