Where Dispersed Camping Is Restricted or Banned

Search for whether dispersed camping is banned somewhere and you get headlines, forum threads, and app listings. What you almost never get is the order itself, with its number, its dates, and what it actually bans. That is why this page exists. Every row below names the order it came from, when that order starts and ends, and whether anything automatic is watching it go stale. Where we could not check something, we say so rather than paper over it.

No state bans dispersed camping outright

Not one of the states we checked. Every restriction we located is one of four much narrower things: it covers areas drawn in an order, it covers named roads, it applies during a season, or it caps how long you can stay rather than where you can go. That holds even for the places people most often call bans. The example that comes up most is a forest widely reported as marked sites only, whose own alert page turns out to publish a seven-night stay cap. Those are different rules with very different consequences if you get them wrong.

Here is the limit on what we are claiming. We searched the forests on this list and none of them bans roadside camping across its whole area. That is not the same as saying no such order exists anywhere in the country, and we are not saying that.

The kinds of restriction, and why the difference matters

The word “restricted” lumps together rules that behave nothing alike on the ground. We keep them apart, because the difference decides whether you are camping legally:

• Not shown at all: The forest or district bans camping along its roads, so we show no roadside camping there. (2 entries)
• Banned in named places: Camping is banned along particular roads or around particular features, not across the whole forest. (9 entries)
• Marked sites only, in named places: Inside the areas the order maps out, you can camp only at sites the forest has already built. (2 entries)
• Permit required: Camping in the named area is legal once you have picked up a permit, and not before. (1 entry)
• Banned for part of the year: During a named season, camping is either banned or pushed into marked hunter camps. (2 entries)
• Stay limit only: A cap on how many nights you can stay. It says nothing about where you may camp. (7 entries)

The last one costs people trips. A stay limit tells you when to move on, not that you cannot be there. If a stay limit is the only order on a forest, camping beside its roads is fully legal.

The two places we show no roadside camping at all

The way we map legal roadside camping is to draw a strip along the roads a forest has marked as open. In 2 places that gives the wrong answer in law, and rather than make the strip narrower we show nothing there:

• Pisgah National Forest, Pisgah Ranger District (North Carolina). You cannot camp within 1,000 ft of an open road here unless you are at one of the district’s marked sites. Limiting this to the one district kept 432 open roads on the five other districts while dropping Pisgah’s 68 roads and the 138 camping stretches we had drawn along them. Order 08-11-07-23-163 (2023-09-01 to 2026-09-01). We check this order again by 2026-09-02.
• Francis Marion & Sumter National Forests, Both forests, entire area (South Carolina). Your camp has to be half a mile from any road or parking lot, and both forests say plainly that RV and car camping does not count as dispersed camping. That is the opposite of a roadside rule: drawing a strip along these roads would map out the places you cannot legally camp. Published guidance, with no order number. We check this order again by 2027-06-01.

Francis Marion and Sumter: what a rule does matters more than how strict it sounds. A half-mile setback from every road and parking lot is not a narrower version of the roadside rule. It points the other way. Drawing a strip along those roads would map out the places you cannot camp, so there is no width we could pick that would be right. That is why we hold back both forests instead of trimming the number.

Pisgah: the opposite lesson, which is about how far a rule reaches. The ban is real, but it applies to one ranger district. Holding back only that district kept 432 open roads on the five districts that carry no such order. Dropping the whole forest would have looked like the cautious call and would have erased legal camping across most of it.

Every order we track, with its number and dates

23 entries. The last column is the part you will not find elsewhere. It tells you whether an expired order would be caught automatically, or whether a person read it off an agency page once with nothing watching it since.

Only 2 of those rows actually change what we show on the map, and those are the ones our build checks. Another 15 are written down on our side as notes, with nothing automatic watching their dates, and 6were read straight off the forest’s own page and are not in our records at all. We spell that out because it changes how much you should trust a row that is a year old.

Orders our map cannot draw

Several orders above ban camping along one numbered road, or inside an area drawn on a map attached to the order. Today we can hold back a whole forest or a named ranger district, and nothing smaller. Being able to hold back a shape drawn on a map is the most useful thing we have not built yet. Until we do, an area-based order like the ones on Rio Grande, Deschutes, Bridger-Teton, or Uinta-Wasatch-Cache is listed here for you to read rather than applied to the map behind the scenes. That is the better of the two options: leaving out a restriction we cannot draw would give you no warning at all.

What the Colorado orders actually say

Colorado gets asked about more than any other state, and it has its own page here: dispersed camping rules by National Forest works through all eleven of its forests with their stay limits, campfire rules, setbacks, and permit zones. The short version, for anyone who landed on this page instead: all seven of the Colorado forests we have reviewed came back permissive, we hold back none of them, and every restriction we found covers a named area or a named road.

• Arapaho and Roosevelt: Order ARP-2024-03 (2024-05-24 to 2029-05-23) limits you to marked sites inside the areas drawn in Exhibits 1 to 6. It does not cover the rest of the forest.
• Pike-San Isabel: Order 2022-08 (2022-07-20 to 2027-07-20) restricts camping within a quarter mile of the roads listed in Exhibit B, on the South Platte Ranger District only.
• Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison: Order GMUG-2022-10 turned seven Crested Butte drainages into marked sites only, and the Taylor River Canyon allows camping in built campgrounds and nowhere else. The separate order covering the whole forest is a 28-day and 60-day stay limit, not a rule about where you can camp.
• Rio Grande: no camping on FR 250 between Horca and Stunner Pass, on FR 360, on FR 410, within 300 feet of Machin Lake, or in the Wheeler Geologic Area.

Keep in mind too that federal orders and state rules run alongside each other rather than one outranking the other. What applies comes down to whose ground you are on, and we answer the state half in dispersed camping on state land, state by state.

A stay limit is not a ban

7 of the entries here say nothing at all about where you can camp. These are the ones people quote as proof that a forest has closed to dispersed camping, and each one says otherwise if you read it:

• Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest (Nevada and California): The order covering the whole forest bans one thing only: camping more than 14 days in any 30. It says nothing about where you may camp. Order 04-17-24-04 (2024-04-09 to 2029-04-08).
• Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (Washington): The one camping order covering this forest caps you at 14 nights in a row, plus 28 equipment-days a year. It says nothing about where you may camp. Published guidance, with no order number (2025-05-19 to 2027-05-18).
• Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre & Gunnison National Forests (Colorado): The order covering the whole forest is a 28-day and 60-day stay limit, not a rule about where you can camp. Reading it as a ban would wipe out a whole forest for no reason. Published guidance, with no order number.
• National Forest System land in Montana (Montana): Camping is capped at 16 nights in a row and 32 nights a year, and that cap applies on every national forest in the state. Published guidance, with no order number.
• Chugach National Forest (Alaska): You can camp 14 days out of any 30, then you have to move at least 10 miles as the crow flies before camping in the same area again. Order 10-04-00-20-09.
• Angeles National Forest (California): You get 7 nights in a row per year, and 3 nights if you are within 300 ft of a city, county, or state road. That is a stay limit. This forest is widely described as marked sites only, and its own order does not say that. Order 05-01-24-12 (2022-12-16 to 2026-12-15).
• Los Padres National Forest (California): You get 7 nights in a row, or 21 nights across the year. It caps how long you stay, not where you go. Order 05-07-00-26-02 (2026-03-25 to 2028-03-24).

Treating a stay limit as a ban is not a safe mistake to make. On Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison it would erase a whole forest of legal camping for no reason. That is why we record the difference instead of hiding anything that sounds restrictive.

Where you get less than 300 feet

Assuming 300 feet is right almost everywhere and wrong in a handful of places. Where a forest publishes a narrower figure, that one wins. And one whole region drops the idea of a standard width and marks the roads individually instead.

The Southwest row is the one to read twice. There the map marks camping roads one by one with a symbol, so the question is not “is this road open?” but “does this road carry the symbol?” The printed map is the version that counts, not an app and not this page. For how to read one, see how to read an MVUM.

How this page stays current

Every entry our build enforces carries a date by which somebody has to read the order again, and that date is not for show. Three alarms sit behind it:

1. The calendar sets it off, not a person. A check runs against the real date every time we build the site, so a date that has passed breaks the build on its own. Nobody has to remember.
2. You cannot hit snooze. A second check rejects any review date set more than 18 months out, so pushing the date into the future is not a way to make the warning go away.
3. The data build reports it too. Every time we rebuild the camping catalog, it prints a list of the orders that are overdue and the districts we are holding back, and flags it as an error whenever anything has gone stale.

When one of those alarms goes off, there are three honest answers, and moving the date is not one of them. Either the forest reissued the order, so we update the dates and the wording. Or the order lapsed, so we delete it. Or its reach changed, so we edit which districts it covers. Changing the date alone would claim somebody re-read the order when nobody did.

An expired date never opens anything back up. An overdue restriction keeps hiding camping until a person reads the order again. If we switched it back on by itself, we could be pointing you at camping a reissued order still bans, and that is a worse mistake than showing you too few spots for a while. If we cannot confirm what a forest allows at all, we hold back the whole forest, because showing roads we never checked would be telling you something is legal when nobody looked.

What we have not checked

As of 2026-08-06 we have worked through the rules on 34 forests. If a forest is not in that group, it means we have not looked at it yet. It does not mean we found camping there unrestricted. Saying where the holes are is part of the job:

• In 15 states we have checked no forest at all. We have looked at nothing in California, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Maryland, Delaware and Hawaii. Another 4 (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey) have no National Forest land, so there is nothing there to check.
• Routt, Santa Fe, and White River National Forests. Each says that some areas allow marked sites only, without listing which ones, so we cannot tell you exactly where the open camping stops.
• Alabama’s national forest roads. The Forest Service publishes no motor vehicle use map data for the state, so we build the roads from its forest road inventory instead. That inventory says a road exists and is open for use, which is not the same as saying it was designated under 36 CFR 212. We rate our confidence here as medium for that reason.
• Whether any forest anywhere bans camping across its whole area. We went looking and turned up none. Every 2026 restriction we located covers a named area, a named road, a season, or a number of nights. That is what we found in the forests we checked, which is not the same as saying no such order exists anywhere in the country.
• 21 rows were checked by hand rather than by the build. 15 of those are written down on our side as notes, and 6were read straight off the forest’s own page and are not in our records at all. Either way, nothing automatic warns us when those orders expire. We left one report out. A claim repeated in a lot of places says a California ranger district bans car camping anywhere except one named road. It does not appear on the forest’s own order page, and we will not print it without an order number behind it.

Our data coverage page does the same thing for the data we load, state by state, including the gaps we know about in each region.

Is dispersed camping banned in any state?

We found no statewide ban on any forest we checked. Every restriction we located is one of four narrower things: it covers areas drawn in an order, it covers named roads, it applies during a season, or it caps how many nights you can stay rather than where you can go. That includes the places people most often call bans. Angeles National Forest is widely reported as marked sites only. Its own alert page carries Order 05-01-24-12, running from 2022-12-16 to 2026-12-15, which caps camping at 7 nights in a row per year and 3 nights if you are within 300 feet of a city, county, or state road. That is a stay limit, not a ban.

Which national forests do not allow roadside dispersed camping?

Two, on our list. The Pisgah Ranger District of Pisgah National Forest bans camping within 1,000 feet of an open road unless you are at one of its marked sites, under Order 08-11-07-23-163, running from 2023-09-01 to 2026-09-01. Francis Marion and Sumter National Forests require your camp to be half a mile from any road or parking lot, and say that RV and car camping does not count as dispersed camping. That one is published guidance with no order number. Both rules point the opposite way from a roadside strip: drawing one along those roads would map out the places you cannot legally camp, so we show no roadside camping in either.

Which states have national forest camping restrictions?

The restrictions we track sit in North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado, Oregon, Wyoming, Utah, Illinois, California, Washington, New Hampshire, Maine, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Montana and Alaska. That is where we have found and read a current order, not a ranking of which states are strictest, and a state missing from that list has not been cleared. It usually means no forest there has been through this review yet. Colorado accounts for the largest share, with orders on Arapaho and Roosevelt, Pike-San Isabel, Rio Grande, and Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison, and every one of them covers named areas or named roads rather than the whole forest.

Why are national forests restricting dispersed camping?

The orders rarely explain themselves, so we can only tell you the pattern in the ones we have read, and the pattern is heavy use in a small number of places. The restrictions cluster around lakeshores and the ground just outside built campgrounds, around popular river canyons like the Taylor River and the Middle Fork Snoqualmie, and along specific roads within easy reach of a highway, such as Nacimiento-Fergusson Road and FR 250. Several others are stay limits aimed at people living in one spot for months rather than at campers passing through. Almost nothing we found restricts the quiet, remote parts of a forest.

How far from a forest road can you camp?

300 feet is the national figure under 36 CFR 261.58(e) on most forests unless a sign says otherwise, and several forests print it on their own pages, including White River, Rio Grande, San Juan, Apache-Sitgreaves, and Custer Gallatin. Some publish something narrower. Humboldt-Toiyabe uses 150 feet. Ozark-St. Francis, Ouachita, and George Washington and Jefferson each publish the same 150-foot figure. Kisatchie allows vehicle camping within 100 feet of the middle of the road. In the Southwest the question changes shape: the map marks individual roads with a camping symbol, so a road being open does not mean you may camp beside it, and on the Coconino the 300 feet applies only where that symbol appears.

Does a 14-day limit mean dispersed camping is restricted?

It caps how long you stay, not where you camp, and mixing up the two is the most common mistake in secondhand accounts of forest orders. Humboldt-Toiyabe’s Order 04-17-24-04 bans one thing: camping more than 14 days in any 30. The only order covering all of Okanogan-Wenatchee caps stays at 14 nights in a row plus 28 equipment-days a year, and says nothing about location. In Montana, camping on every national forest is capped at 16 nights in a row and 32 nights a year. The order covering all of Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison is a 28-day and 60-day stay limit. Reading it as a ban would wipe out a whole forest for no reason.

What happens if you break a forest order?

It is a federal crime, not a parking ticket. Under 36 CFR 261.1b, breaking any prohibition in that part or any order issued under it carries up to six months in prison, a fine set under 18 U.S.C. 3571, or both. These are Class B misdemeanors, and 18 U.S.C. 3571 caps that fine at $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for an organization. In practice a first offence usually ends in a citation rather than the ceiling, but the ceiling is real and the officer writing it does not need to prove you read the order. That is why the order in force matters more than anything an app or this page tells you.

How do you know a forest order has not changed since this page was written?

Every order our build enforces carries a date by which somebody has to read it again, with three alarms behind it. A check runs against the real calendar every time we build the site, so a date that has passed breaks the build on its own. A second check rejects any review date set more than 18 months out, so pushing the date forward does not make the warning go away. And every rebuild of our camping data prints the orders that are overdue and the districts we are holding back, flagged as an error. An expired date never opens anything back up: an overdue restriction keeps hiding camping until a person reads the order again, because switching it back on by itself could point you at camping a reissued order still bans.

Check the order yourself before you go

Nothing on this page replaces the order that is actually in force. Checking takes about a minute:

1. Work out the forest and the ranger district. Most restrictions above apply to one district, so a forest-wide answer will be wrong on at least one of them.
2. Open that forest’s own alerts page on fs.usda.gov and read the current camping order. Nobody collects these in one place. Each forest posts its own, which is exactly why they are so easy to miss.
3. Download the current motor vehicle use map from the Forest Service maps page. In the Southwest, check whether your road carries the camping symbol. A road being open is not enough there.
4. Read the dates on the order. If it expired, the forest has either reissued it on different terms or let it lapse. Either way, the copy you found online may not be the one in force.

For what the rules look like when no local order narrows them, see BLM and National Forest rules compared and what boondocking is. To browse the built campgrounds we have reviewed in a given state, start at camping by state.