How to Find Free Camping in National Forests: 7 Tips, The Rules, and My Final 3 Spots!
We present to you a YouTube video published and produced by: Creativity RV
Video transcript summary.
Today I'm in the National Forest and I'm going to teach you everything I know about free dispersed camping in the National Forest. I'm very excited to share this part of the series with you, because I'm actually going to take you with me to visit these camping spots. I'll show you how to find these camping spots, show you a few, and I'll introduce you to two other places I've camped recently in national forests. There are several ways to find places for dispersed camping, such as searching for "National Forest near me" in Google Maps or searching for Forest Service Roads near you. It is important to respect the rules of these areas, such as the 14-day stay limit and not leaving litter. I'm going to show you three of my favorite places to camp in the National Forests recently.
How to Find Free Camping in National Forests
Video transcript: LivingOurDreamNow
Today I'm in the National Forest and I'm going to teach you everything I know about finding free dispersed camping in the National Forest. Hi everyone, it's Robin with Creativity RV and welcome to episode six of “Being a Nomad Changed Your Life”. This one is all about how to find free, dispersed camping in national forests. I'm really excited about this part of the series because I'm going to take you along with me as I go to each of these camping spots. So for my regular followers, this will be a mix of education for beginners and a way for you to follow my travels. Thank you for listening. By the way, this series comes out every Sunday, so if you haven't subscribed yet, please tap the icon at the bottom right of the screen. I'm just outside of Estes Park, Colorado, a beautiful place I'm going to show you Estes Park in another video, but right now I'm at a dispersed campsite that I found the other day and I'm going to walk you through how I found it, show you a little bit, and then I'm going to show you two other places I camped recently in the national forest. Growing up in Colorado, I wasn't a camper, but this seems to be my home, so I've done a lot of wild camping in other places. I've camped on the beach, in the desert, and just about everywhere recently, even sneak camped in downtown Denver and Boulder for a few days on the way here, but there's something about the forest national which makes me say, you have arrived, this is your home. So I'm very excited to share it with you, let's go learn how to find the best national forest campsites. There are several ways to do this, the easiest is if you are in the area, go to Google Maps and search for “national forest near me”. I often use these searches "RV near me", where I can get water, campsites near me, national parks near me, libraries near me for Wi-Fi, post office near me, you see the type. Google will locate you and give you a list of what's available nearby. If you're already there and have an internet signal, you can also search for "logging road near me" because when you're dispersed camping in the national forest, most of the time you're on logging roads. It's not like camping in the desert where you can go to lots of different places, most of the time dispersed camping in national forests involves hitting the dirt road, getting to a trail and I will say that when I started I thought it was hard to find and that I was hitting a wall going down these dirt roads that led to nowhere. So I'm going to try to give you some advice so that you don't have to worry. So, do a search for “national forest near me” or “forest road near me,” then switch to satellite mode to see the dirt roads. If you just use the map view they won't show you the dirt roads, I don't know if they don't map them all or don't know about them, but with the satellite view you can actually see them and see the small roads that branch off. This can still be a bit risky, as you can't really tell if they're stiff or cluttered or if for some reason they've been closed when you get there, so another thing to do is check your apps , your camping applications. I use "free campsites.net", but by the way, the GPS signal can be wrong sometimes, so I always recommend checking Google Maps and zooming in to see if it's the right place before you go there to make sure you go to the right place. “Free campsites.net” is based on user feedback, so there may be a hundred locations next to the one a person put in the app and no one knows about it, so no one goes there and everyone is crowded into this one place. You can use the same type of method, enter “free campsites.net” or “compendium” or “all stays” or “RV parky” or “Park Advisor” or whatever app you are using, ask it to give you directions to a location you're interested in, switch to satellite mode and zoom in to see the dirt roads around that location. If you plan to do a lot of dispersed camping or just wild camping on public lands in a particular state, I recommend getting one of these benchmark maps. This is the Colorado benchmark map, and I'm going to show you some images of why it's so useful. I didn't think I needed it, you can get a lot of cards for free online and you can also download some cards that I paid for and some that I got for free, but they just give you a little piece of 'an area, and if you want to go somewhere two miles away, you don't have that little piece, and you don't have an Internet connection to check. I found this very helpful because it really focuses on a particular state and gives you all the recreation areas, all the campgrounds, and all the national forest, or BLM, areas, and most importantly it shows you the paved roads, the dirt roads and then some of the smaller zigzag roads. So when I don't have Wi-Fi or not a good enough Internet connection to do this search, I have this map so I have more detail than I would have in a normal Google map. As I told you before, I also use the “US public lands” application. I didn't put a link to this app in my last video where I mentioned it because it depends on what type of device you have, what link you need, so just go to your app store applications and search for “US public lands”. It's about three dollars and it's actually created by another VR YouTuber named Techno Mattia. They're awesome by the way, if you haven't seen their channel yet. This app allows you to zoom in on different public areas in order to see what is national forest, what is BLM, what is Corps of Engineers, etc. So it's also very useful when you're looking for these places. Another thing I recommend is to leave early in the morning, because even if you have a place and another place of backup, sometimes going down these roads you find something that you like even more than the one you thought of, and the one that you thought may not work. I recommend having two or three places maybe picked out or a backup place in town if you have to stay at a Wal Mart, but then once you get to your place let's talk about the rules so you can just relax and enjoy it. In national forests, like most public lands, you can usually stay 14 days before you need to move. Of course, all of these rules can change depending on the jurisdiction of the forest and the rules that apply there, so I will always check the United States Forest Service website for that location. So let's say for example I'm in the Pike National Forest or the Roosevelt National Forest or something like that, I'll just go to Google and search for that, and I can see who manages it, and by the way, great advice If you don't know where to go or you want a place that has a Wi-Fi signal, or you want a more secluded place or a place with more people, whatever you're looking for, call the local little ranger station, their number is in the lower left corner of this web page when you search for the national forest, call them and they answer the phone, they're local, and you can say, hello, I'm looking for this and they give you suggestions. I have always received a great amount of information when calling them. Just call and see what the rules are, but usually 14 days, sometimes 7 if it's really crowded, but usually 14, then you have to move a certain length of miles to a new place if you want to stay in that same region, it's usually a mile or five miles depending on the national forests. Additionally, national forest dispersed camping does not have restrooms, trash cans, or water, so you will need to bring everything you need for your stay and then return it following Leave No Trace principles. If you're not familiar with it, the name says it all, you want to leave the place as it was when you arrived, with no trace of human activity, no litter, no abandoned TVs or diapers. You won't believe some of the things I've seen there, and if you're like me, you'll pick up after others when they don't leave the place as good as it should be. Note though that the closer you get to a town, the more likely you are to find the remains of parties that took place, as people will party and then leave, so the further away from town you go, the better. will be there to find you a clean, secluded place. Another rule is you have to be a certain distance from a water source, I'm going to have to check this one out, so look at the screen here, I think you have to be 200 feet from a water source water for camping, so you can't camp right on a river. And of course, don't dump your gray or black tanks directly on the ground. Now, let's talk about the places I've camped in the last month and a half since returning to Colorado. I'll show you three places, including where I am now. Currently I'm just outside of Estes Park. I camped at a campground called Hermit Park for a few days because I knew I was going to arrive in Estes Park later that evening and wanted to be sure I had somewhere to go, I didn't want an internet signal, I just wanted to not be connected to the world for a few days, so I chose this campsite to do it, and I filled up with water from there and found my next place which is on a forest road. I actually saw the sign for this forest road when I went to the campsite. When you start experiencing the RV life, you'll be amazed at the things you see that you've never seen before, like the "forest road" or "national forest access this way" signs, sometimes there even has a little sign that says "FS" 232 or something that shows you the way to a logging road, they aren't always signed but I was surprised how many signs there are that I don't never noticed before. I took out my precious benchmark card because I had no internet signal at this campsite and I checked this forest road, I took this road and I found what I thought was a good place, then later I went to my new place that I love. The next place I'm going to show you is near Colorado Springs, it's off the road called Rampart and that's where I was in the crazy weather video, and I moved about a mile away a few days later and stayed there twice after that. It was busy, but I had a view of Pikes Peak out my window that you just couldn't beat and a very strong internet signal. It was only about three miles from the town of Woodland Park near Colorado Springs and since it's a busier town, there were people living in the forest there and a lot of people living there who were going working, which is cool, but it just meant it was busy, so it was nice as a place I would come back to, but it didn't give me much solitude. Now I'm going to show you the first place I camped near Lake George, Colorado. I tell you if you go hiking in this place it makes you want to put on bib pants and spin around singing, the hills are alive with the sound of music, it's so beautiful. So here is some footage of that. As you can see, you can camp for free in dispersed camping in the national forests, there are several places you can camp, several ways to find them and I think you will love it once you get there. If you are already there, please put in the comments below your favorite places for everyone and for me, because I would love to go visit them. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't already to this series "Being a Nomad Changes Your Life", every Sunday I release a new video that will show you how to be a full time nomad and I put them together all in one place which you can find in my reading list under “Being a Nomad”, so all the resources you need will be in one place. Otherwise, I'll also show you my travels, so stay tuned for that. A tour of Estes Park is coming soon, so stay tuned. Please like, share and subscribe, I wish you all happy travels and be free.
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