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Free and paid camping in Idaho

2,491 camps in Idaho: 2,234 free, 257 charge a fee. Every camp that charges is marked fee in the list below — or press Free only to hide them.

This is a northern forest state, which is not the Idaho most people picture. Of the 2,491 camps we have found in Idaho, all but 109 sit on Forest Service ground, and two forests in the north carry 1,921 of them between them — the Idaho Panhandle (975) and the Nez Perce-Clearwater (946). The Boise, Payette, Salmon-Challis, Sawtooth, Caribou-Targhee, Bitterroot and Kootenai split most of what is left, alongside 95 BLM sites and 6 parcels of Idaho Department of Lands endowment ground. Read the unit heading before anything else. In Idaho the unit sets your stay limit, and the units do not agree with each other.

Most of this camping is lower than you would guess. Where we have an elevation, the median Idaho camp sits at 4,227 feet, 46% of them are below 4,000 feet, and only 4% are above 7,000. The Panhandle's median is roughly 3,196 feet. That is river and cedar country, and it opens and closes on a different schedule than the granite everybody photographs. The high ground is real, but it is the minority here, concentrated in the Salmon-Challis and the Sawtooth.

Snow sets the season, and the road sets it more than the elevation does. Idaho's back roads are long, single-lane and slow to clear. The Forest Service says the Magruder Corridor — the 101-mile primitive road between the Nez Perce-Clearwater and the Bitterroot — is often delayed by "snow, downed trees, and lingering wet conditions" until mid- to late summer, and that early winter storms can make it impassable with little notice. On that road there are no fuel stations, cell coverage is "spotty to nonexistent," emergency response may be delayed, high-clearance is strongly recommended and trailers are not advised. The Lolo Motorway is the same kind of road: most passenger cars are too low for it, towing is not recommended, and you need to be able to reverse a quarter mile to let someone past. Expect rain, wind and even snow early and late in the season, and thunderstorms in July and August. Pull the forest's road report before you commit to a route, because the road decides whether you arrive, not the calendar.

Your stay limit is fourteen days, not sixteen — and if you have just driven down from Montana, that is a change. One regional order covers the Forest Service in both states and splits them on purpose: national forests in Montana get 16 consecutive days and 32 cumulative days a year, national forests in Idaho get 14 and 28. The same order defines a "site" as your campsite plus all forest land within a half-mile radius, so moving a few hundred yards down the spur does not restart the clock. Then each unit adds its own rule on top. The Idaho Panhandle limits you to 14 days in any 30-day period across the St. Joe, Coeur d'Alene, Sandpoint, Bonners Ferry and Priest Lake districts, and from Labor Day through the Saturday before Memorial Day you have to move at least five road miles to earn a new 14 days. On BLM ground the move is 25 miles and you may not return for 28 days. On state endowment land it is 14 days in 28, and five miles to reset. Read the heading, not the state.

Two rules here are drawn tighter than you may expect. Bears first: the Idaho Panhandle's food storage order runs April 1 to December 1, but it applies only to forest land north of the Clark Fork River, Lake Pend Oreille and the Pend Oreille River — the Bonners Ferry and Priest Lake districts and part of Sandpoint. That is Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak grizzly recovery country. Inside it, food, garbage, carcasses and attractants must be in a certified bear-resistant container, hung 10 feet up and 4 feet out from the trunk, or shut inside a hard-sided camper, a vehicle trunk or cab, a hard-sided building, or an electric fence. South of that line you are in black bear country with no order over you, which is a reason to store food well anyway, not a reason to stop. Fire second: restrictions arrive by zone, not statewide, set jointly by the Department of Lands, BLM, the Forest Service, the BIA, tribes and local fire staff, and they bind federal, state, tribal and private land inside the zone. Stage 1 means no campfire or wood stove outside a developed site's provided fire ring — propane and liquid-fuel stoves stay legal — and no smoking except in a vehicle, a building, a developed site, or a cleared patch three feet across. Stage 2 ends campfires altogether, wood or gas, and closes motorized travel off designated roads and trails. Check the Department of Lands' restriction finder the morning you leave.

If you have not done this before, start on the Idaho Panhandle. It holds more free camps than any other unit in the state, it sits the lowest of them, and its rules are written out in a single order you can read in five minutes. Then expect what dispersed camping means everywhere here: no water, no toilet, no trash can. Carry what you will drink or a way to purify it, pack out every piece of garbage, bury waste 6 to 8 inches deep and 200 feet from camp and from any water, and keep your camp itself 200 feet back from lakes and streams. Do that and you have met the rule on nearly every acre linked below.

See all 2,491 on the map →

Showing 400 of 2,491. Idaho has more camps than fit on one page, so these are the ones we know most about first — of the 400 listed here, 394 are free and 6 charge a fee. The remaining 2,091 are all on the map.