Colorado Dispersed Camping: Access Road Analysis

Reaching a dispersed campsite is a question of what the approach road demands of your rig, not just whether the site is “open.” The Camprtron dataset records an access type for every reviewed site, drawn from USFS Motor Vehicle Use Map (MVUM) surface classifications and refined with PostGIS spatial analysis of road geometry. This page publishes the aggregate breakdown across 326 reviewed Colorado sites so you can see, before planning a trip, how the population splits across vehicle requirements.

The dominant finding: 43.6% of reviewed sites require at minimum a high-clearance vehicle. A passenger-car-only vehicle reaches about one in three reviewed sites, and among those, most (87 of 108) are free dispersed sites, with the remainder developed campgrounds open to passenger vehicles.

The 4×4-required category covers 19% of sites, and it is exclusively dispersed (all free). Every 4×4-required site in the dataset is dispersed, which tracks with terrain: the routes that need low-range four wheel drive tend to sit deep in National Forest land, far from developed infrastructure and the graded roads that serve fee campgrounds.

A note on method. The access type recorded for a site is its most demanding documented requirement, not an average. A route that runs as graded gravel for miles and then crosses one washed-out culvert is classified by the culvert, because that is the point that strands a vehicle. The MVUM surface class sets the baseline and the PostGIS pass refines it from public road-segment geometry. The breakdown below counts each reviewed site once, by region and access tier, and excludes any site whose description has not yet cleared human review. No coordinates, condition ratings, or per-site road scores appear on this page; the table is a population summary only.

Access type is assigned to each site based on the MVUM surface classification of the primary approach road: P (paved) and A(aggregate/gravel) codes map to “passenger-car accessible”; N(native/unimproved) maps to “high-clearance recommended”; roads with explicit high-clearance or steep-grade designations map to “4×4 required.” PostGIS spatial analysis refines the classification using road gradient and curvature within one kilometer of the site centroid.

The dataset covers 326reviewed dispersed and developed sites across Colorado’s National Forests and BLM land, as of 2026-06-12. Only sites where a human reviewer has confirmed the access assessment and description are included (the description_reviewedflag in the serving DB). Sites in the “not yet rated” category are awaiting MVUM data integration for their specific road segments.

The SQL query that produced these aggregate figures is committed to the Camprtron repository at marketing/data-queries/access-road-analysis.sql and is available for inspection. The downloadable CSV below contains the same aggregate counts. Never per-site rows, never coordinates.