Where do you want to go?
Craters of the Moon
Idaho
169 places · 112 confirmed free
Mount Bachelor
Oregon
88 places · 76 confirmed free
Zion National Park
Utah
79 places · 26 confirmed free
San Francisco Peaks
Arizona
50 places · 41 confirmed free
Trapper Peak
Montana
48 places · 47 confirmed free
Free means free
A place is listed here only if it costs nothing to sleep there. Not cheap. Not free in the off season. If a permit costs money, it is not on this site.
Where free open land has a paid campground sitting inside it, we say so at the top of the page. You will never have to hunt for it in the small print.
The things you need
Most directories tell you a place exists. We tell you what you want to know before driving three hours down a gravel road: is there drinking water, is there a toilet, how long can you stay, and what does the ground look like from above.
No guessing
Fee records disagree with each other more often than you would think. Where they do, we say so plainly. We do not quietly pick whichever answer suits us. Where nobody states a fee at all, we write exactly that.
Is free camping actually free?
We read the fee wording for every campsite here, in the words of the agency that manages the ground. On 134 of them, nobody has written down whether it costs anything at all. Eight answer the question with “contact the field office”.
How far is free camping, really?
We worked out the real drive to town from every campsite in this guide, twice over, with two separate mapping tools. The typical drive is about twice the distance a map shows. One campsite in Idaho sits 12 miles from town down a 244 mile road.
Going somewhere with no water and no toilet?
Most of these sites have neither. Here is what experienced dispersed campers actually carry.
State photographs, all public domain: Craters of the Moon, National Park Service · Mount Bachelor, Lyn Topinka, US Geological Survey · Zion National Park, Vulturesong · San Francisco Peaks, Coconino National Forest · Trapper Peak, Roger Peterson, US Forest Service. Each one is a landmark our listings in that state are near. Every campsite page shows an aerial photograph of that actual place instead.