About Free Camp Guide
What this is
Free Camp Guide lists 464 places you can camp for free on public land in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Utah. Most are not campgrounds in the usual sense. They are dispersed sites, pull-offs and stretches of forest road where camping is allowed and nobody charges you.
Information about these places exists, but it is scattered across government databases that were never built for the public to read. This site gathers it into one page per site, in plain English.
Who runs it
I'm May, and I run Free Camp Guide. There is no company behind it and no team. If something on this site is wrong, it is my mistake, and I would far rather hear about it than not.
Where the information comes from
Every listing is built from public records published by the two agencies that manage most of this land: the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Those records are public and free for anyone to use.
The facts are theirs. The writing is ours. Every description, every set of directions and every explanation of the rules on this site was written here, from what the records say. Nothing is copied across.
How it is checked, and where it falls down
Government records disagree with each other more than you would expect. Building this site turned up campgrounds recorded as free that charge, fee columns left blank on hundreds of records, and sites listed that are not campsites at all. Those were taken out.
Where the records genuinely do not say something, this site says nothing rather than guessing. If a listing does not mention drinking water, that means nobody wrote it down — not that there is none. This is the single most important thing to understand about the information here.
None of it is a substitute for checking with the agency before you drive somewhere remote. Roads close, fires close whole districts, and fees get introduced. See our terms for the full picture of what this site can and cannot be relied on for.
How it makes money
Reading this site is free and always will be. Nobody can pay to be listed here, and nobody can pay to be listed higher. There is no paid placement of any kind, and there never will be — a directory that sells its own order is worthless to the person reading it.
Corrections
If you have been to one of these places and found it different from what we say — a fee that appeared, a road that washed out, a site that closed — please tell us. Reports from people who actually went are the most valuable thing this site receives.