Mogan Ridge Roadside Dispersed Campsite 5 (Hoosier NF)

public land records

Thin — A single weak source put this here. Treat the location itself as unconfirmed, not just the details.

Designated roadside campsite in the Hoosier NF "Mogan Ridge Area", Tell City Ranger District. Official map sheet: https://www.fs.usda.gov/media/241273 (dated 9/5/2024, read 2026-08-14). Hoosier NF dispersed-camping rules (read 2026-08-14 at https://www.fs.usda.gov/r09/hoosier/recreation/dispersed-camping): "There is no charge for dispersed camping." Stays limited to 14 days in a 28-day period and 28 days total per calendar year. Personal property must not be left unattended overnight. Camp at least 200 ft from trails, trailheads, roads, water, rock shelters, caves and historic structures unless in a designated site. "Firewood restrictions apply throughout the Forest" - check for fire bans before you go. Map sheet adds: campsite may be occupied up to 14 days in a 30-day period but no more than 30 days in a calendar year; use the existing campfire pit and dead-and-down wood only; bury human waste at least 200 ft from campsite and water; pack everything out. COORDINATE IS DERIVED AND ONLY APPROXIMATE. The USFS publishes these campsites only as symbols on a raster map sheet, and this sheet carries no USFS point feature that could be used to anchor it. It was georeferenced by matching the trail drawn on the sheet to the same trail in the Indiana DNR "Dispersed Camping" GIS layer (https://gisdata.in.gov/server/rest/services/Hosted/Dispersed_Camping_RO/FeatureServer/0), with the print scale taken from the Hickory Ridge sheet. On the two sheets where that method could be checked against USFS point data it was off by 230-250 m, so treat this coordinate as +/- ~250 m: correct road, correct stretch of road, not a pinpoint. The campsite is marked on the ground with a small post and tent symbol visible from the roadway. VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING. --- REVIEW 2026-08-20 (nightshift-verified) --- RULES SOURCE RE-FETCHED TODAY: https://www.fs.usda.gov/r09/hoosier/recreation/dispersed-camping (page footer now reads "Last updated July 6, 2026") -- every rule this row quotes is still on it, word for word: "There is no charge for dispersed camping"; stays limited to 14 days in a 28-day period and 28 days total per calendar year; "Personal property must not be left unattended overnight"; the 200 ft setback from trails, trailheads, roads, water sources, rock shelters, caves and historic structures "unless in a designated campsite"; "Firewood restrictions apply throughout the Forest"; and "Bring enough water for the duration of your stay." The page also still states that dispersed camping is NOT allowed "along roads unless in a designated site" -- which is exactly what makes these designated roadside sites worth mapping. MAP SHEET COULD NOT BE RE-READ: the page still links all eight roadside area sheets at the SAME media IDs recorded at discovery (241270, 241271, 241272, 241273, 241274, 241275, 241276, 241277), so the sheet has not been withdrawn or renumbered -- but https://www.fs.usda.gov/media/<id> returned HTTP 502 Bad Gateway on every one of them, on eight attempts spread across the fire, with and without a Referer. THE SHEET THAT ACTUALLY PLACES THIS CAMPSITE WAS THEREFORE NOT RE-READ TONIGHT. That alone is enough to keep this row off the map: the row's own coordinate is derived from that sheet at +/- ~250 m and already says VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING. NEW CHECK THIS PASS (this is new evidence, not a re-reading): the coordinate was tested against two live USFS EDW services -- Basic Ownership (https://apps.fs.usda.gov/arcx/rest/services/EDW/EDW_BasicOwnership_01/MapServer/0) and Road Basic (https://apps.fs.usda.gov/arcx/rest/services/EDW/EDW_RoadBasic_01/MapServer, layers 0 and 1), both queried today. For this pin: the nearest USFS-inventoried road is FS route 1131.306 LONG RUN CREEK (TRAIL SYSTEM), maintenance level 1 - BASIC CUSTODIAL CARE (CLOSED), and the pin lies 345 m from it; the ownership polygon under the pin is classed USDA FOREST SERVICE inside the Hoosier National Forest. FLAG, AND THIS IS THE WORST OF THE MOGAN RIDGE FIVE: the pin is 345 m from ANY inventoried road, and the nearest thing to it is a closed trail-system route, not a drivable road. For a site whose whole description is 'roadside', being a third of a kilometre from the nearest road is a contradiction the map sheet needs to settle. Also checked today: EDW's Recreation Opportunities layer (EDW_RecreationOpportunities_01/MapServer/0) still publishes NO point feature for any Hoosier NF dispersed campsite -- the nearest recreation feature to this pin is kilometres away -- so there is still no USFS point data to anchor these sheets to. OpenStreetMap could not be used as a fallback: overpass-api.de was unreachable from this host all night and two mirrors returned 500/502. VERDICT: kept at 'later'. THE REASON IS THE SAME FOR ALL EIGHT INDIANA ROWS TOUCHED THIS FIRE AND IT IS NOT ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR SITE: the one document that actually places these campsites -- the USFS roadside-area map sheet -- could not be opened tonight (HTTP 502 on every attempt), and this row's coordinate is a +/- ~250 m georeferenced derivation from that sheet which the row itself flags VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING. Approving a pin a stranger would drive to, on the strength of a source I could not read, is exactly the shortcut this queue exists to prevent. TO RESOLVE, IN ORDER: (1) re-try https://www.fs.usda.gov/media/241271 , /241272 , /241273 and /241275 when fs.usda.gov's media endpoint is healthy again -- local copies from the 2026-08-14 fire also sit in the project root as _in_disp_moganridge.pdf, _in_disp_oriole.pdf, _in_disp_germanridge.pdf and _in_disp_birdseye.pdf, but those are OUR old copies and re-reading them proves only what we already recorded, not that the live sheet still says it. (2) Check the pin against the road and ownership findings recorded above. (3) Only then approve. --- REVIEW 2026-08-20 (nightshift, leftover-backlog fire, GA/IN/AL pass 5) --- [THIS IS THE CURRENT VERDICT. It was written after, and supersedes, the same-day review block above: that block is dated 2026-08-20 as well, so the dates alone do not tell you which came last. The single blocker it names -- the USFS map sheet being unreachable -- has since cleared.] THE BLOCKER FROM THE PREVIOUS FIRE IS CLEARED. That fire kept this row unapproved for one reason only: fs.usda.gov's media endpoint returned HTTP 502 on every attempt, so the one document that actually places this campsite could not be read. Tonight it answered HTTP 200. The sheet was re-fetched from https://www.fs.usda.gov/media/241273 and is BYTE-IDENTICAL to the copy taken on 2026-08-14 (MD5 e4ad56a775ffcd2034ab78c9849ae814). So this is not a re-reading of our own old file: the live sheet still says exactly what this row records, down to its 9/5/2024 revision date and its rules text ("first-come-first served and free of charge"; "Campsite may be occupied up to 14 days in a 30 day period but no more than 30 days in a calendar year"; "Campsites are marked on the ground with a small post and tent symbol viewable from the roadway"; "Use existing impacted campfire pit and dead and downed wood only; do not cut live trees"; "Bury human waste at least 200 feet from campsite and water"). RULES PAGE RE-READ TOO. https://www.fs.usda.gov/r09/hoosier/recreation/dispersed-camping was read 2026-08-20 and carries "Last updated July 6, 2026". It still says "There is no charge for dispersed camping", "Stays are limited to 14-days in a 28 day period, and 28 days total per calendar year", "Personal property must not be left unattended overnight", "All dispersed camp sites must be at least 200 feet away from trails, trailheads, roads, water sources, rock shelters, caves, and historic structures, unless in a designated campsite", and "Firewood restrictions apply throughout the Forest." It still lists the Mogan Ridge Area among its "Roadside Designated Dispersed Camping Area Maps", and still describes these as "drive-in designated dispersed campsites along roads". Its water sentence is unchanged: "Bring enough water for the duration of your stay." No water is provided at these sites and no natural water near them should be treated as potable. THE +/- ~250 m COORDINATE CAVEAT THIS ROW CARRIED HAS NOW BEEN MEASURED, NOT ASSUMED. The campsite symbols on these sheets are live PDF text in ESRI's ESRIUSForestry1 symbol font, not just raster ink, so their page positions can be read exactly instead of being detected off a rendered image. Extracting them and fitting an affine page-to-WGS84 transform against the coordinates already stored here gives, for this sheet: 5 symbols on the sheet vs 5 rows here; least-squares residuals 1, 0, 1, 1 and 1 m; implied map scale 94.2 pt/mile in x and 93.7 in y. For comparison, all three sheets that could be fitted agree on scale to within 0.5% and are near-conformal (shear terms ~1e-7, anisotropy under 1.1%), which is not something a wrong symbol-to-row pairing would produce. The 2026-08-14 raster georeference was therefore far better than the +/-250 m it claimed for itself. BE CLEAR ABOUT WHAT THAT DOES AND DOES NOT PROVE. A tight fit only shows our stored coordinates are a faithful affine image of the symbols on the sheet. It cannot by itself rule out a common-mode error in the original registration - if the whole sheet had been pinned 300 m off, the residuals would still be ~1 m. So absolute position was tested separately and independently, against the U.S. Census TIGERweb road network (https://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/arcgis/rest/services/TIGERweb/Transportation/MapServer, layers 6 and 8, queried 2026-08-20), by asking whether each pin lands on the road whose NAME is printed beside its symbol on the USFS sheet. Across the seven pins carried into this fire as pending, it did so seven times out of seven, at 9-59 m. Land status was checked against USFS EDW Basic Ownership (https://apps.fs.usda.gov/arcx/rest/services/EDW/EDW_BasicOwnership_01/MapServer/0) and Forest Service roads against EDW Road Basic (https://apps.fs.usda.gov/arcx/rest/services/EDW/EDW_RoadBasic_01/MapServer, layer 0 = open to motorized use, layer 1 = CLOSED to motorized use), both queried 2026-08-20. Note that EDW carries only Forest Service roads, so a large "nearest FS road" distance means only that the adjoining road is county-maintained; that is why TIGER was used alongside it. DEDUPE: checked against all 19,136 published and approved camps in the database. The nearest one to any Hoosier roadside pin reviewed tonight is 1,695 m away (German Ridge Campground). None of these is a re-listing of something already on the map. HOLDS UP, WITH ONE THING THE PAGE SHOULD SAY OUT LOUD. Land under the pin is USDA FOREST SERVICE, Hoosier National Forest, and the fit residual is 1 m, so the coordinate faithfully reproduces the sheet's southernmost Mogan Ridge symbol. But its access road is not a forest track: the nearest road is INDIANA STATE ROAD 70 at 31.7 m (TIGER, MTFCC S1200 secondary road, RTTYP S = state route), and the nearest Forest Service road is 345 m away. Camping about 30 m off a state highway is legal here - the Hoosier's 200-ft-from-roads setback is explicitly waived "unless in a designated campsite", and this is a designated campsite - but a stranger should be told they will be pitching close to a through road, not tucked away on a forest spur. Free. No water provided. DISCOVERY GAP FOUND WHILE DOING THIS (recorded here, NOT acted on - adding leads is not this fire's job): reading the campsite symbols as vector text shows the Oriole sheet carries 6 symbols against our 5 rows, and the German Ridge/Highwater sheet carries 5 against our 2. The Hoosier's own page confirms that last sheet covers "German Ridge/Highwater Areas" - two areas - which is why three of its symbols have no row here. Roughly four Hoosier NF designated roadside campsites are therefore missing from the database. See research/REVIEW_LEFTOVERS.md.

US Forest Service Motor Vehicle Use Map roads layer (EDW_MVUM_01, layer 1), Clearinghouse refresh Aug 30, 2026. Straight-line distance from the pin to the nearest mapped segment within 1 mi; surface type, maintenance level and open dates are the agency's own values for that segment, expanded from its codes and otherwise unedited. Nothing here says which road reaches the site.

US DOE Alternative Fuels Data Center station locator, snapshot 2026-09-16. Straight-line miles to the nearest public, open, unrestricted station; restricted and planned units are shown but never counted.

On the agency's books. The land manager inventoried this site, so its existence is not in question — current conditions are. Nobody from here has camped it recently.