Upper East Branch Campsite
2Heads uppark alerts
- Right now
- OpenThe agency lists it open
- A night
- FreeNo camping fee
- Sites
- 1All of them booked ahead
- Season
- Year-roundOpen year-round
The place
the agency’s own description · what’s there
In the agency’s own words
A large walk-in campsite located along the East Branch of the Penobscot River with access to the river. Picnic tables are available for campers, as well as a fire ring and access to a vault toilet. This site makes for a magnificent place for night sky viewing.
Facilities
- Toilets
- Vault Toilets - year round
- Drinking water
- None, bring your own
Around the campground
- On the water
- River
- Fall color · reported 2 days ago, in Penobscot County
- Past peak
No reading yet, book on recreation.gov
Every site here is reservable, and the record lists none held back for anyone who drives up.
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.
We make nothing when you book. The link goes straight to the government.
Every line of the receipt · 11
What you actually pay
Derived by CAMPANAC: the agency’s own record says there’s no camping fee, plus one $8 recreation.gov reservation fee for the booking. A weekend here means Friday and Saturday night, booked once. Optional charges (an extra vehicle, a second tent, a dump-station fee) are listed separately and aren’t in this total.
Who keeps the booking fee
The agency’s own policy text says the reservation fee and the cancellation processing fee are “retained by the reservation service contractor”, and that a campground concessionaire will decline to refund them because “they did not receive these fees”. Recreation.gov is run under contract by Booz Allen Hamilton. What share of your booking fee the contractor keeps isn’t published in any federal dataset we can read, so we print no number for it. Our reporting on the contract →
How we know this receipt · 5
record Aug 24, 2026 · How we know all this
Getting there
the map and the coordinate · the phone number
Where it is
Katahdin Woods & Waters National Monument CampingKatahdin Woods and Waters National Monument · 0.8 mi
Stair Falls CampsiteKatahdin Woods and Waters National Monument · 2.1 mi
Haskell HutKatahdin Woods and Waters National Monument · 2.7 mi
Haskell Deadwater CampsiteKatahdin Woods and Waters National Monument · 3.2 mi
Pond Pitch CampsiteKatahdin Woods and Waters National Monument · 4.1 mi
Grand Pitch Lean-toKatahdin Woods and Waters National Monument · 4.5 miThe weather
the next four days · the thirty-year normal
Next four days, and the thirty-year normal
Forecast
NWS forecast for Patten, ME
Typical weather
Typical October night 37°F, day 55°F.
Coldest month of the year: typical January night 5°F, below freezing. Bring a bag rated colder than that, and expect ice in the water bottle.
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.
The land, and who answers for it
what threatens it · who answers for it
What threatens this place
You’re camping on ground somebody wants. We track the threats and the comment deadlines.
Who answers for this land
Upper East Branch Campsite is in Maine’s 2nd congressional district. Its representative, Jared Golden (D), votes on the laws that decide what happens to this land. Public-lands grade so far: C+. See every public-lands vote →