CAMPANAC.Powered by public lands intelligenceMore Than Just Parks
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U.S. Forest Service · Los Padres National Forest · CA

Colson Campground

The agency doesn’t say how you get a siteIts record carries no access type, so treat it as a place to phone before you drive.
Get directions
Right now
Listed not openA database flag with no reason and no date
Drawn from the record · 2,000 ft · 6% tree cover · Bortle 4 sky
2,000 ftElevation
6.1 miWater · an unnamed pondOcean · 25.6 mi · to the Pacific Ocean
10.5 miE of Santa Maria, CA
6%Tree cover
Bortle 4Night sky · 834th darkest of 1,201 in CA

The place

the agency’s own description

In the agency’s own words

Colson Campground closed permanently in April 2021. Please contact the Santa Lucia Ranger District for more information about the closure. The following campgrounds are open and can be accessed off Hwy 166: Bates Campground, Miranda Pine, Rock Front OHV Area (Buck Springs Campground, Paradise and Baja Campground), Horseshoe and Brookshire.

Source: USFS Enterprise Data Warehouse · Aug 24, 2026

Around the campground

Fall color · reported 8 days ago, 32 km away
No change
Source: More Than Just Parks foliage tracker, joined to this campground by distance (32 km) · Oct 9, 2026

Phone before you drive

recreation.gov publishes no availability for a campground you can’t reserve, so there’s no thirty-night reading to draw here. The season bar above is what the agency does publish.

Booking window6 months outBooking opens 6 months ahead; today unlocks arrivals through April 16, 2027. The agency publishes no reservable season in the record we hold, so the window may close earlier than that.recreation.gov
Runs itU.S. Forest Servicethe agency’s record
Directions
Every line of the receipt · 3

What you actually pay

The sign priceU.S. Forest Service
The U.S. Forest Service publishes no per-night rate for this campground that we can read, so there’s no sign price to print. That’s a gap in the record, not a free campground.
The booking feerecreation.gov
We hold no recreation.gov booking record for this campground, so we can’t say whether a booking fee applies.
What a stay costs
The agency publishes no nightly rate for this campground, so there’s no total to show.
How we know this receipt · 4
Booking fee, change fee, cancellation fee, no-show: Rules and Reservation Policies, Recreation.gov, the published fee schedule, curated by hand into lib/reservation-fee-schedule.json (9 rows, each carrying its own verbatim sentence). The publisher states these policies were last updated September 2019. · Sep 9, 2026
The two totals: Derived by CAMPANAC by adding the agency’s own published nightly rate to recreation.gov’s own published reservation fee. Both components are cited above; the addition is ours and is shown only where every component is known. · Sep 9, 2026
Who keeps the booking fee: Recreation.gov facility policy text, Dead Swede Campground (facility 234221) · Not on the national policy page. This is agency policy text recreation.gov publishes on individual campground pages; this site holds it verbatim on 45 active campgrounds (campground_rules.cancellation_description, scripts/load-facility-rules.mjs). · Sep 9, 2026
The contract: Reservation Gods: Who Stole Our Campsites and Sold Them Back to Us, More Than Just Parks, April 2025 · Apr 1, 2025
Source: USFS Enterprise Data Warehouse · Aug 24, 2026

record Aug 24, 2026 · How we know all this

Seen something wrong here? Tell us.

Getting there

the map and the coordinate
Coordinate34.93980, -120.16980

Where it is

Source: USFS Enterprise Data Warehouse · Aug 24, 2026

The weather

the next four days · the thirty-year normal

Next four days, and the thirty-year normal

Forecast

This Afternoon91°Sunny
Tonight66°Mostly Clear
Saturday91°Sunny
Saturday Night57°Clear

NWS forecast for Sisquoc, CA

Source: National Weather Service, LOX forecast office · Oct 17, 2026

Typical weather

Typical October night 43°F, day 78°F.

Coldest month of the year: typical December night 32°F, below freezing. Bring a bag rated colder than that, and expect ice in the water bottle.

100°32°20°

Daily high and lowDays with 0.10 in or more

A normal is the 1991-2020 average for the month, not a forecast: about half of all Julys are colder than the July line. The seven-day forecast above answers the other question.

Measured at: NEW CUYAMA FIRE STN, CA (USC00046154), 28 miles away and 160 ft higher
Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Climate Normals 1991-2020, monthly normals · Sep 8, 2026

The land, and who answers for it

what threatens it · who answers for it

What threatens this place

developing
Los Padres National Forestlogging, drilling, rollback
Watch
Roadless
Horseshoe Springs14,089 acres · 1 mi · inventoried roadless area
Roadless
Tepusquet Peak5,821 acres · 3 mi · inventoried roadless area
Roadless
La Brea14,031 acres · 6 mi · inventoried roadless area

You’re camping on ground somebody wants. We track the threats and the comment deadlines.

Source: MTJP Threatened Lands map · Oct 5, 2026

Who answers for this land

Salud Carbajal, official portrait

Colson Campground is in California’s 24th congressional district. Its representative, Salud Carbajal (D), votes on the laws that decide what happens to this land. Public-lands grade so far: A+. See every public-lands vote →

Seen something wrong here? Tell us.

Source: U.S. Census district boundaries and the MTJP Congressional Public Lands Score

How we know

every fact on this page, and where it came from
Right now: U.S. Forest Service’s own recreation database flags it not open and publishes no reason and no date. That’s a flag, not a notice.
Listed not open: USFS EDW Recreation Opportunities, openstatus field: a not-open flag in a database, with no reason and no date published; read there since Sep 9, 2026. A flag, not a notice, so this page doesn’t call it a closure. · Oct 16, 2026
Elevation: USGS 3DEP elevation point query at this campground’s coordinate · Sep 7, 2026
Night sky: VIIRS Day/Night Band annual cloud-free composite, VNL V2 2024 (Earth Observation Group, Colorado School of Mines), read at the published coordinate: 0.27 mcd/m² of artificial all-sky glow, ranked against the 1,201 rated federal campgrounds in California · Sep 8, 2026
Sky-glow model: Duriscoe, Anderson, Luginbuhl and Baugh (2018), a simplified model of all-sky artificial sky glow derived from VIIRS Day/Night band data, the National Park Service sky-glow model
Fall color: More Than Just Parks foliage tracker, joined to this campground by distance (32 km) · Oct 9, 2026
Reported by: USA National Phenology Network (Nature's Notebook), reported no change · Oct 9, 2026
Cell signal: the Forest Service’s own campground description, read as text by CAMPANAC. None of this is a measurement. It’s what the land manager published about the place, and phones, carriers and weather all disagree with each other; treat it as a warning, not a promise.
Nearest place of any size: Sisquoc, CA, 8.1 mi NE (a census designated place). Straight line.
Nearest town: U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line 2024 places, measured by CAMPANAC to the town boundary; population is the ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimate · Sep 9, 2026