How far is free camping really?

It’s Friday, you’ve found the spot, and the map says twelve miles to town. Here is what that twelve miles can turn into.

Published September 2026 · 374 campsites, every distance checked twice by two separate mapping tools

The spot is free, it’s on public land, and the Salmon River runs past it. The nearest town shows twelve miles away.

So you plan around twelve miles. Two jugs of water will do. Half a tank of fuel is plenty and you’ll fill up properly in the morning. Whatever you’ve forgotten, you can go and fetch.

The campsite is Mackay Bar. The town is Warren. The drive between them is 244 miles.

There’s no bridge. The river sits between the two and you can’t cross it, so the road climbs out of the canyon, goes round, and comes back down the other side. You can stand at that campsite and look across at the country the town is in. Getting there takes most of a day.

What the map is telling you, and what it isn’t

Mackay Bar is the extreme. The same thing happens in smaller amounts almost everywhere free camping does.

We measured the real road distance from every campsite in this guide to its nearest town. The typical one works out at 20.8 miles by road and 11.9 on the map. So the drive runs about 1.6 times the straight line, and on 89 of them it is double or worse.

That ratio is the useful part. When a map hands you a distance, it tells you roughly how much to distrust it.

Why it matters more here than at a campground

Pull into a campground with a fee on the gate and there’s usually a tap, a bin, and somebody to ask. Free sites are free because none of that is there.

Where our records say anything about drinking water, 130 of 166 say there is none. Where the road surface is recorded, 199 of 241 want high clearance or four-wheel drive. Phone signal, where anyone has written it down, comes back as “none” or “don’t rely on it”.

Most of these places are open ground with nothing marked out. You pull in, drive around, and pick a flat patch that isn’t someone else’s.

So everything you need, you brought. Everything you forgot, you drive back for. A jug of water short at a paid campground is a nuisance. Out here it can cost you a day.

The distance that catches people out

There are two questions, and only one of them gets asked.

The nearest town and the nearest supplies are rarely the same place. A town of two hundred people is a name on a map. There may be no pump, no shop, and nothing open on a Sunday.

So we measured that drive separately, to the nearest place big enough to expect fuel and somewhere to buy food. The typical campsite is 37.7 miles from one. 93 of them are more than sixty miles out. 22 are more than a hundred.

A hundred miles of forest road can run four hours each way. Arrive on a Friday evening, find you’re a jug short, and there goes Saturday.

What gets in the way

Usually it’s water.

At Mackay Bar it’s the river. In Montana it’s a reservoir: Peters Creek sits 42 miles down a gravel road along the Hungry Horse. Swan Lake is eleven miles away over the ridge, and the drive is ninety, because first you have to come all the way back up the water.

Then there are the dead ends. Plenty of forest roads meet the highway at one point and nowhere else. Camp up one of those and every trip out starts by driving back the way you came in.

It isn’t spread evenly either. Most of our ten widest gaps sit in the canyon country of central Idaho and along the Idaho–Oregon border. If the campsite you’re looking at is in that corner, expect the drive to be much longer than it looks.

What to do about it

Budget fuel by the drive. If a campsite shows fifteen miles out on a map, plan for twenty-five and you’ll be right more often than you’re wrong.

Fill up and stock up at the last real town, even when it feels too early. For 93 of the campsites here, it is the last one for sixty miles.

Ask how far it is back to the highway. That’s the trip you make at two in the morning when something has gone wrong.

Check the road surface before the distance. Twenty miles of washboard gravel takes longer than fifty on pavement, and it empties a tank faster.

The figures, by state

Every campsite page in this guide carries its own drive to town and to supplies. These are the totals behind them.

The ten widest gaps

How we checked it

We asked the same question twice, and kept only the answers that matched.

Think of it as asking two people for directions. If they both say about twenty miles, you set off. If one says fourteen and the other says sixty-nine, you don’t toss a coin. Something is wrong with the question.

Every drive on this page was worked out twice, by two separate mapping tools. They both read the same map, and they plan routes differently. On most campsites the two answers came out almost the same. On 82 of them the answers were too far apart to trust, so those campsites are out of every figure above. The same check dropped another 69 from the fuel and water figures.

Most of the disagreements lean the same way. The second tool says the drive is longer.

Here is what was wrong with the question. Some of these campsites sit where there is no road at all, down in a canyon or out in country no road crosses. A mapping tool can’t start a car journey from a place with no road. So it quietly moves the starting point to the nearest road it can find. That might be up on the rim, on the wrong side of the river. Then it measures from there, and the number it hands back looks perfectly reasonable.

Those campsites still have pages here. You’ll see “at least” in front of the distance on them, and a line saying the route is hard to measure.

464 campsites on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land, across Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, Utah and Montana. Town names and sizes come from US Census records and a public list of community names. Straight-line distances are worked out from map coordinates. Road distances come from two mapping tools built on OpenStreetMap.

Important: these are road distances and they assume the road is open. Many are seasonal and some want a high-clearance vehicle. Check with the agency that manages the land before you travel.