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Free and paid camping in California

1,555 camps in California: 902 free, 653 charge a fee. Every camp that charges is marked fee in the list below — or press Free only to hide them.

California is not one camping state and you should stop treating it as one. Of the 1,555 camps on this page, 1,325 sit on Forest Service ground and 187 on BLM, with the rest scattered across other public land. What matters more is that the Forest Service share is split across 18 separate national forests rather than concentrated in two or three — the San Bernardino, Tahoe, Sierra, Shasta-Trinity, Sequoia, Los Padres and Angeles all carry real numbers, and the list runs from the Modoc on the Oregon line to the Cleveland above San Diego. The elevations say the same thing: where we have one, these camps run 221 feet below sea level to 11,481 feet, the median sits at 4,974 feet, and 34% of them are above 6,000. Read the unit heading before you read anything else on this page. The forest sets your stay limit and your fire rules, and in California the forests disagree with each other more than they agree.

In the mountains the season is roughly May to October, and the road sets the edges of it. The Sierra National Forest states it plainly — "the ideal camping time in most Forest areas is May to October, prior to winter storm activity" — and adds that chain control on that forest can apply any time, usually November through April, with state law requiring every vehicle including four-wheel drive to carry chains in a control area. The gate date is per road, not per forest. The Sierra's own seasonal closure table lists roads opening anywhere from January 1 to June 7 and closing between November 15 and December 31, several of them simply marked "closes with snow," and the forest tells you to get those dates off the Motor Vehicle Use Map. For scale, the Park Service begins plowing the Tioga Road across Yosemite about April 15, it usually takes one to two months, and the Park Service says outright that predicting when it will open is not possible even in late spring. That is a paved highway with a plow crew assigned to it. Your forest road has neither. The desert half of the state runs the opposite calendar: BLM's long-term visitor areas down on the lower Colorado take permits from September 15 through April 15, and between April 16 and September 14 they are free and back on the standard 14-day limit. That tells you which half of the year that country gets used.

The rule that catches everyone out here is the campfire permit. A California Campfire Permit is required for open fire on federally managed land — and the Forest Service means wood campfires, charcoal barbecues and portable gas stoves alike, not just the one you would call a campfire. It is free, you get it online in about five minutes, and it runs from the day it is issued through December 31, so it expires every New Year whether you used it or not. Get it before you leave, because you will not have signal where you need it. Then understand what it is not: the San Bernardino puts on record that the permit "does not permit you to have a campfire anywhere you want." It does not cover a fire built on bare dirt where somebody obviously had one before. It does not cover wood or charcoal at a dispersed site. And it does not outlive a restriction that bans fires outright. Under typical restrictions what you are left with is a gas stove or lantern with a shut-off valve, standing in a cleared patch — and even that distance varies by forest, three feet on the Tahoe, five in the regional guidance. Some places never loosen: only gas equipment is allowed year round in Desolation Wilderness and parts of the Mokelumne.

Everything else here is written per forest, with dates on it, and none of it is a statewide number. Fire restrictions come forest by forest and expire — Shasta-Trinity's 2026 order runs July 1 through December 31 forest-wide, and the Tahoe's Stage 1 restrictions began June 26 and run to October 31 — while BLM California keeps statewide year-round rules and stacks field-office restrictions on top. Stay limits are the ones that will bite you. The Inyo allows 14 consecutive days in one spot and 28 days a year, and after 14 days you must move at least 10 miles. The San Bernardino allows 14 days in any 30 consecutive days. The Tahoe allows 14 days per calendar year, per ranger district — a year, not a month. BLM's national default is 14 days in any 28 and varies by field office. Bears are black bears, and California has no single order covering them: the state wildlife agency estimates 49,000 to 71,000 statewide, distributed through much of California, about half of them in the North Coast and Cascade country and roughly 40 percent in the Sierra Nevada, and food storage is regulated forest by forest. The Inyo's current order runs June 18, 2025 through June 18, 2027 and requires a bear-resistant container across the areas it maps, allowing the 15-foot counterbalance only in certain wilderness. There are no bear boxes at dispersed sites anywhere. One last piece of paper: on the Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres and San Bernardino you need an Adventure Pass to park at a developed fee site — $5 a day, $30 a year, or any America the Beautiful pass. It is not required for dispersed camping, but three of those four forests are among the largest units on this page.

If you have not done this before, start on the San Bernardino. It is the largest block of camps on this page, and 38 of the San Bernardino camps we have found are yellow post sites — individual dispersed sites the forest has marked with a post. Take the Big Bear group as the pattern: one picnic table and one fire ring per site, no fee, first come, no reservations, eight people maximum, no restrooms and no drinking water. You drive to the post and the post is where you camp, which takes the guesswork out of a first trip. Bring the campfire permit — the forest requires a valid one there for the fire ring and for a gas or propane stove alike. Expect the road to ask something of you: at Big Bear the forest recommends high clearance, says four-wheel drive may be needed depending on conditions, and does not recommend RVs or trailers. After that, expect what dispersed camping means on the rest of this page: no services at all. The Inyo writes the general rule out cleanly — camp at least 200 feet from water on a cleared, durable surface with no vegetation, stay on established roads and do not drive off-road to reach a spot, bury waste in a 6- to 8-inch hole 200 feet from water and from any trail or road, and do not leave toilet tissue behind. There is no drinking water at these sites. Carry what you intend to drink.

See all 1,555 on the map →

Showing 400 of 1,555. California has more camps than fit on one page, so these are the ones we know most about first — of the 400 listed here, 373 are free and 27 charge a fee. The remaining 1,155 are all on the map.