Camping where there is no campground.
On most national forest and BLM land you can camp away from any campground, for free, with no reservation and no host. It is the oldest way to use public land and the least documented: the agencies publish a campground record for every fee site and almost nothing for the rest. This page holds what they have digitized, says where it came from and when it was read, and puts the rules first.
Before you go
the part of this page that matters most- It is legal in most places, and not in every place.
Dispersed camping is camping outside a developed campground, on land the public owns. The BLM allows it on most of its land unless an area is posted closed or carries a specific restriction, and most national forests allow it outside developed sites. One forest order or one field office rule can close a whole drainage for a season, and a posted sign beats anything on this page.
- The Motor Vehicle Use Map decides where you can drive.
A national forest publishes an MVUM saying which roads are open, to which vehicles, in which months, and where you may pull off a road to camp. The corridors here are read from the Forest Service’s own MVUM data and carry the date we read it. Districts reissue these maps, so a corridor drawn from an older reading is a picture of an older rule.
- Fourteen days, then move.
The BLM limits dispersed camping to about 14 days in any 28-day period and asks you to move on afterwards, often 25 to 30 miles; stay limits vary by state and field office, and most forest districts set something similar. Keep vehicles on designated roads and trails, camp in a spot already used within about 150 feet of a route, stay 200 feet from lakes and streams, and pack everything out.
- Call the district office.
Fire restrictions, road washouts and seasonal gates move faster than any dataset, including this one. Every row below that carries the agency’s own page for the place links to it, and that page carries the office and the phone number. Payette National Forest offices
- Public land only.
Everything here is on national forest or BLM ground. Rest areas, truck stops and store parking lots are not public lands, the rules there belong to somebody else, and they are not on this map.
MVUM corridors read Aug 24, 2026. Site records read Aug 26, 2026. 43 CFR 8360 is the BLM’s own regulation.
Where they are
1,738 points and 915 corridor segmentsThis is a register of known and designated sites, not a national inventory. It holds the places two agencies have digitized as points and the road corridors one forest has digitized as lines. Dispersed camping is legal in a great many places that appear nowhere in it, and a place that appears in it can still be closed today. Campgrounds are off this map on purpose; they have their own.
What the register is made of
Every point in the Forest Service’s national recreation-opportunities layer whose activity is recorded as dispersed camping. Each one carries the forest that administers it and the agency’s own page for the place. The layer.
The BLM’s national recreation points, class “Campsite - Primitive”. Most are unreservable and free; a good share are numbered boat camps along a river the BLM manages mile by mile. The layer.
Lengths of road where the forest’s travel-management decision permits camping within a stated distance of the roadway. 1,372 miles across 525 roads, all of it in Payette National Forest.
What it is missing
The MVUM dispersed designation was never digitized nationally. The Forest Service’s national MVUM road service carries no dispersed-camping field and no dispersed-camping symbol class; the dots printed on the paper maps stayed on the paper. Our loader re-checks that against the live service on every run rather than trusting the finding. One forest, the Payette, publishes its own MVUM-schema corridor layer, and that is why all 915 of the corridor segments here are in Idaho.
The points lean hard on two states. Oregon and Colorado are 1,064 of the 1,738 rows, 61% of the register, because two BLM river programs number every camp along the bank. A state with three rows is a state the agencies have not digitized, not a state without dispersed camping.
Long-Term Visitor Areas are not loaded. The BLM’s seven LTVAs in California and Arizona, where a winter permit buys months rather than fourteen days, are a separate program and are not in this register yet.
Where the record is thickest
units holding the most known sitesEvery state we hold a record for
27 of 50The states not listed hold no digitized dispersed record at all. That is a gap in the agencies’ data, not a statement about the ground.