CAMPANAC.Powered by public lands intelligenceMore Than Just Parks
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U.S. Forest Service · St. Joe National Forest · ID

Laird Park Campground

1Heads up1 fire 49 mi away
Wildfire
Belmont fire · 49 mi away · 2 acres · updated Oct 16, 2026
Fires: NIFC/IRWIN via MTJP wildfire tracker · Oct 16, 2026
First come, first servedNo reservation, and none to be had: the sites go to whoever pulls in first.

This is how it should work.

Get directions
Right now
Listed not openA database flag with no reason and no date
Drawn from the record · 2,750 ft · 57% tree cover · Palouse River within reach · Bortle 3 sky
2,750 ftElevation
997 ftWater · Palouse River
19.8 miE of Palouse, WA
57%Tree cover
Bortle 3Night sky · 415th darkest of 523 in ID

The place

the agency’s own description · what’s there

In the agency’s own words

Laird Park Campground, located in the northwest Idaho town of Potlatch and named in memory of A.W. Laird, a lumberman and early leader in the Potlatch Lumber Co., is a fantastic location to bring your family, friends or maybe even your boy or girl scout troupe for some outdoor fun and swimming. The recreation area has a sandy beach (a result of a swimming beach dam built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933), 2 group picnic areas as well a half-mile interpretive trail. Fishing is a popular passtime here too, with abundant opportunities for rainbow and brown trout from the Palouse River.

Source: Recreation.gov data (RIDB), full extract · Aug 23, 2026

Around the campground

On the water
River, Beach
Hiking
Picnicking
Fall color · reported 13 days ago, 32 km away
No change
Source: Recreation.gov activity records · Aug 23, 2026
Fall color: More Than Just Parks foliage tracker, joined to this campground by distance (32 km) · Oct 4, 2026
Official page: Laird Park Campground →

Nothing to book, just show up

One of 1,623 federal campgrounds where the site still goes to whoever pulls in first. Get there before noon on a summer weekend.

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.

BookingNo reservationsNothing to book, and no release date to wait forthe agency’s record
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
Nothing. This campground takes no bookings, so there’s no reservation fee to pay.
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: Recreation.gov data (RIDB), full extract · Aug 23, 2026

rules read Sep 7, 2026 · record Aug 23, 2026 · How we know all this

Seen something wrong here? Tell us.

Getting there

the map and the coordinate
Coordinate46.94387, -116.64591
The agency’s pageOfficial page ↗

Where it is

Source: Recreation.gov data (RIDB), full extract · Aug 23, 2026

The weather

the next four days · the thirty-year normal

Next four days, and the thirty-year normal

Forecast

Overnight42°Mostly Clear
Saturday61°Mostly Sunny1% rain
Saturday Night36°Mostly Clear then Areas Of Frost1% rain
Sunday59°Areas Of Frost then Mostly Sunny

NWS forecast for Princeton, ID

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

Typical weather

Typical October night 35°F, day 59°F.

Coldest month of the year: typical December night 25°F, below freezing. Bring a bag rated colder than that, and expect ice in the water bottle.

90°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 Augusts are colder than the August line. The seven-day forecast above answers the other question.

Measured at: POTLATCH 3 NNE, ID (USC00107301), 10 miles away and at about the same elevation
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

who answers for it

Who answers for this land

Russ Fulcher, official portrait

Laird Park Campground is in Idaho’s 1st congressional district. Its representative, Russ Fulcher (R), votes on the laws that decide what happens to this land. Public-lands grade so far: F. 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 17, 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: 0.097 mcd/m² of artificial all-sky glow, ranked against the 523 rated federal campgrounds in Idaho · 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 4, 2026
Reported by: iNaturalist fall color observations, reported no change · Oct 4, 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: Princeton, ID, 8.2 mi ENE (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