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Free and paid camping in Colorado

584 camps in Colorado: 301 free, 283 charge a fee. Every camp that charges is marked fee in the list below — or press Free only to hide them.

Colorado is a national forest state with a large BLM minority, and the two do not sit at the same altitude. Of the 584 camps on this page, 261 are on Forest Service ground spread across 7 national forests — the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison carries the most at 88, then the Rio Grande (46), the San Juan (44), the Pike and San Isabel (40), the Arapaho and Roosevelt (19), the White River (17) and the Medicine Bow-Routt. Another 68 sit on BLM ground under a single heading. Where we have an elevation, the median BLM camp here is 5,886 feet and the median forest camp is 9,139 feet. That gap is not a detail. It is a different season, a different stay limit and a different move-on rule. Read the unit heading before anything else on this page.

Nobody in this state will give you a season, so take your dates off the roads instead. The two best-documented roads in the Colorado high country are both paved and both have plow crews assigned to them, and they still barely clear May. The Park Service has kept the opening and closing dates of Trail Ridge Road, through Rocky Mountain National Park, since the 1920s: the earliest it has ever opened is May 7, and the average winter closing date is October 23. CDOT shuts Colorado 82 over Independence Pass — two lanes, 12,095 feet — "on or near Nov. 7" and reopens it "almost always ... on the Thursday before Memorial Day each May," and says plainly that it does so "for the safety of the travelling public and CDOT maintenance crews." Now look at where you are actually going. The median camp on this page sits at 8,883 feet, 47% of the ones we have an elevation for are above 9,000, and the road in is dirt with nobody assigned to it at all. It opens when it melts and dries, and no Colorado forest we read publishes a date for that. Pull the forest's road conditions for the specific road the week you go, and have a lower second choice.

There is no Colorado stay limit. The six units we read publish six different answers, and the number that varies most is not the days — it is how far you then have to move. The Rio Grande is the simplest: "Camping is limited to 14 days in any 30 day period." The White River also gives 14 days in 30, then wants you outside a 20-mile radius, and notes some locations are cut to seven. The San Juan is the loosest, at 16 days followed by a 5-road-mile move. The GMUG runs a standing order, GMUG-2017-08, in force to July 2027, that stacks three limits at once: no more than 14 consecutive days in one location, no more than 28 days on any one national forest within 60 days, and no camping within 3 road miles of your last camp for more than 14 additional days — with Horse Ranch Park and the Cliff Creek Trailhead dropped to seven consecutive days in 30. The Arapaho and Roosevelt's order ARP-2024-02 allows 14 days in 30 and caps you at 30 days in any 365. Then there is BLM, where the move is the sting: 14 days in any 30-day period at one location, after which you must go "at least 30 air miles away from the previously occupied location," and you may not leave property unattended more than 48 hours. Thirty air miles is not a different pullout. It is a different valley.

Four things here will not match the habits you brought with you. The first is the air. The Park Service's line for Rocky Mountain is that "when travelling above 8,000 feet, everyone is susceptible" to acute mountain sickness, and 75% of the camps we have an elevation for on this page are above 8,000 feet. Its guidance is to spend at least one night at a moderate elevation before going above 10,000, never to sleep more than 1,000 feet higher than the night before, to drink before you are thirsty, and never to carry a headache uphill — "if you can't treat it, you're already too high." Going down is the treatment. Plan the first night lower than the best-looking dot on the map. Second, fire restrictions arrive by unit and by district, and neighbors do not match. In the first week of August 2026, when this was written, the GMUG sat under forest-wide Stage 2 restrictions running July 1 to October 1 — no campfire, charcoal barbecue or grill anywhere on the forest, gas and liquid-fuel stoves with a shut-off still legal in a patch cleared three feet around, no smoking outside a vehicle or building, no driving off an established road — while on BLM ground the Uncompahgre and Gunnison field offices were at Stage 2 and Tres Rios, in the southwest corner, had stepped back down to Stage 1 on July 22. County sheriffs issue their own on top of both. Check the unit and the county you are actually driving to, the morning you leave.

Third, bears are paperwork here even without grizzlies. Colorado Parks and Wildlife is blunt — "Grizzlies no longer live in Colorado" — and the food storage orders exist anyway. The GMUG's order runs annually from March 1 to November 30 over all of its forest land; the Rio Grande's runs April 1 to December 1 through 2029, and breaking it is a Class B misdemeanor carrying a fine up to $5,000; the Arapaho and Roosevelt's covers scented products like toothpaste and deodorant, not only food. Read them for where they bite, because the GMUG's and the Rio Grande's are written over developed campgrounds and designated sites rather than every acre. Compliance means a certified bear-resistant container, a closed hard-sided vehicle, trailer or building, food hung at least 10 feet up and 4 feet out from the trunk, or food attended by somebody awake and within 100 feet in line of sight. Fourth, "dispersed" is shrinking. Around Crested Butte the GMUG has converted seven drainages to designated sites — Kebler Pass, Slate River, Washington Gulch, Gothic, Brush Creek, Cement Creek — where camping is only allowed in a designated site, most of them free, 14 days maximum each; Tincup and the Taylor Canyon and Reservoir corridor carry their own restrictions, and the Arapaho and Roosevelt's order ARP-2024-03 does the same thing in the areas it names. At the Caribou area you must "camp only at clearly marked campsites within 50 feet of a numbered marker." Where free-form camping is still open the setbacks are per unit: the Rio Grande wants 150 feet from water with your vehicle within 300 feet of the centerline of a designated road, the White River wants no more than 300 feet from the centerline and at least 100 feet from water, and the San Juan wants 100 feet from water, within 150 feet of a roadway, and a full mile clear of any campground.

If you have not camped Colorado before, start on the Rio Grande. It is not the biggest unit here, but it is the one that writes its rules in plain sentences on one page instead of making you hunt down an order: 14 days in any 30, camp 150 feet back from water, keep the vehicle within 300 feet of the centerline of a designated road, dig your pit 150 feet from water and cover it before you leave, and put the fire out — "Drown, Stir, Feel!" There is no fee, and the forest is honest about what that buys you: the sites are "not maintained, tracked, or reservable." The San Juan states the baseline for the rest of this page in one line — "No amenities are provided; such as water, restrooms or trash cans" — and expects you to be self-contained. There is no drinking water at any of this. Carry what you intend to drink, treat anything you take out of a creek, bury waste in a 6- to 8-inch hole well back from water, and pack your toilet paper and everything else out with you.

See all 584 on the map →

Showing 400 of 584. Colorado has more camps than fit on one page, so these are the ones we know most about first — of the 400 listed here, 301 are free and 99 charge a fee. The remaining 184 are all on the map.