Data & Methodology

Camprtron ranks dispersed (free) and developed (reservable) camping across Colorado. Every rating traces back to authoritative public-domain government data, joined and analyzed with a PostGIS spatial pipeline. Nothing here is crowdsourced, and nothing is invented. Where a data source is thin or missing, we say so on this page rather than fill the gap with a guess.

Data sources

Camprtron draws from the following public-domain government datasets:

• USFS Motor Vehicle Use Maps (MVUM): road access classification and seasonal travel windows for National Forest System roads. This is the backbone of every access-type rating.
• Recreation Information Database (RIDB): developed campground locations, facility attributes, and reservation status from recreation.gov.
• BLM surface management data: land-status and ownership boundaries used to confirm where dispersed camping is permitted.
• National Hydrography Dataset (NHD): rivers, streams, and water bodies, used for water-proximity scoring.
• Colorado Parks & Wildlife (CPW): fishing-water classifications where coverage exists.
• USGS elevation and trail data: peak proximity and trail access for hiking and mountain-biking scores.

The spatial pipeline

Source layers are loaded into PostGIS and reprojected to a single Colorado-appropriate coordinate system (NAD83 / UTM zone 13N, EPSG:26913) so distances are measured in meters on the ground rather than degrees on a globe. Every candidate site is then enriched with nearest-neighbor distances to peaks, perennial water, trails, and roads. All measurements are stored in canonical units (meters, feet, and minutes) and converted only at display time, so a unit mix-up cannot silently corrupt a score.

The scoring model

Each site receives a composite score from 0 to 1, computed from seven weighted criteria:

• Peak proximity: distance to named summits
• Water proximity: distance to perennial water
• Privacy: isolation from roads and neighboring sites
• Fishing: access to fishable water
• Hiking: trail access
• Mountain biking: access to bike-legal trails
• Drive time: routed travel time from your trip origin

Dispersed and developed camping are ranked as two separate lists, because they answer different questions and should not be forced to compete on the same axis. When a criterion does not apply to a search, its weight is redistributed proportionally across the remaining criteria, so a missing factor never shows up as a misleading zero.

A small number of hard gates run before ranking. A water-required search drops sites with no perennial water within range, and a drive-time-max gate drops sites beyond the limit you set. Access type is never a gate. We rank a rough road lower for a passenger car, but we never hide it.

Drive time

For trips within roughly 250 km of your origin, drive time is a real routed estimate from a road-network routing engine, cached so repeat searches stay fast. Beyond that range, Camprtron falls back to a straight-line estimate and labels it as estimated, so a far-away result is never presented as a precise routed time it is not.

Access type and rig suitability

Every site carries an access-type label derived from MVUM road classification: passenger-car, high-clearance, or 4×4-capable. When you tell the app about your vehicle, Camprtron turns its clearance, drivetrain, and tires into a capability tier, compares that tier against each site’s access type, and returns a suitability verdict. That verdict is computed fresh for every search. It is always a warning and never a filter, so you stay in control of what you are willing to drive. This page and the public site show only the access-type label; rig-specific verdicts live in the app.

Coordinate precision and what stays private

Public-facing coordinates on this site are rounded to roughly 1 km precision (two decimal places). That is enough to show which area a site sits in for search and discovery, while exact campsite coordinates, trip-specific ranks, rig verdicts, and live availability remain inside the app. This split is deliberate. General location is a discovery detail; a precise pin is a trip-planning detail.

Known limitations

Honest data means naming its edges:

• Seasonal closures are derived, not live. Colorado has no single statewide live closure feed, so closure windows are inferred from MVUM seasonal road designations. Always confirm current conditions with the managing ranger district before a trip.
• Fishing uses a water proxy. Where the CPW stocked-water overlay is sparse, fishing scores fall back to nearest perennial water, which favors sites near streams and lakes generally rather than confirmed stocked fisheries.
• Some signals are still being built out. Per-site elevation bands, cell-coverage estimates, and full site descriptions are in progress and are simply omitted rather than approximated when a backing source is not yet integrated.

Freshness

Reference layers are refreshed from their source feeds through an ETL pipeline that reloads RIDB, MVUM, hydrography, and land-status data, then recomputes derived signals such as access tiers and seasonal windows. The “last updated” date at the top of this page reflects the most recent methodology revision.