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Free and paid camping in Oregon

996 camps in Oregon: 478 free, 518 charge a fee. Every camp that charges is marked fee in the list below — or press Free only to hide them.

Oregon is two camping states with a mountain range between them. Of the 996 camps on this page, 204 are on BLM ground and 777 on Forest Service — BLM carries more than a third of this state, which is not how Montana or Idaho break down. The forest share is spread wide rather than stacked on two or three units. The Siuslaw, out on the coast, is the largest single forest here with 115 camps, then the Fremont-Winema (63) on the eastern plateau and the Umpqua (83), and behind those the Rogue River-Siskiyou, Ochoco, Willamette, Mt. Hood, Deschutes and Malheur. The elevations say it faster. Where we have one, the median Oregon camp sits at 2,763 feet, 25% of them are below 1,000 feet, and only 15% are above 5,000. The Siuslaw's median is 35 feet. The Fremont-Winema's is 5,343. Read the unit heading before you read anything else on this page. It tells you which of the two Oregons you are driving into, and it sets your stay limit.

Snow sets the season, and it holds on later than the latitude suggests. The Willamette publishes its campground opening and closing dates a season ahead, and that table is the clearest answer anyone in this state gives you: for 2026 the openings spread from March 19 to July 1 — Elk Lake, on the Detroit district, is the July 1 — and the closings run from September 7 to November 1. Two of its campgrounds are simply listed as opening when Highway 242 is passable, and the forest puts one line over the whole table: "All dates are subject to change." Learn that highway by name. Oregon 242 is the paved road over McKenzie Pass, it tops out at 5,325 feet, and ODOT closes it from November to mid-June every year because "weather conditions, logistics and cost make it impractical to maintain for travel year around." The earliest it is allowed to open is the third Monday in June. ODOT has logged the gate dates since 1925, and across the record it published through 2016 the earliest opening was March 21, 1934, the latest was July 29, 1999, and the longest unbroken closure ran 263 days, from October 25, 2010 to July 15, 2011. That is a state highway with a plow crew assigned to it. Your forest road has nobody. The east side runs the same way with a shorter window — BLM opens the Steens Mountain Loop Road in segments, roughly mid-June to early November at the bottom and early July to mid-October for the full loop, and tells you to check TripCheck or call the Burns District office rather than trust a date. The coast is the exception to all of it: the Forest Service lists the Oregon Dunes sand camping sites as available year-round.

There is no Oregon stay limit. There are four of them, on four neighboring units, and they all start with the number 14. The Siuslaw allows "a maximum of 14 days out of every 30 on the Forest," and tightens dispersed camping to no more than 14 days in any 60 consecutive days. The Willamette allows "up to 14 days in a 30-day period." The Deschutes runs a standing order, in force from November 14, 2024 to November 15, 2026, capping you at 14 consecutive days in one location and 28 calendar days on the whole forest in a calendar year, and it defines that location as "the occupied area, the occupied campsite, and the National Forest System lands in the immediate vicinity thereof." BLM's default is 14 days in any 28-day period, and on Steens it adds that you may not leave personal property unattended for more than 10 days. Same number on the front of all four, four different denominators behind it. The Deschutes also carries a second order that closes ground rather than counting days: effective April 1, 2026 through April 2, 2031, it names corridors — the Cascade Lakes Highway, Whychus Creek, Tumalo Creek, Three Creeks Lake, Newberry Caldera, the Bend municipal watershed, stretches of the Deschutes Wild and Scenic River — and inside them either bans camping outright or confines it to developed campgrounds and existing dispersed sites, with campfires prohibited in the riparian corridors. The forest's reason is written on the order: the prohibitions are "necessary to protect forest resources on the Deschutes National Forest from adverse impacts caused by dispersed camping and campfires in areas with sensitive forest resources." Fines run to $5,000. Fire restrictions land on top of all that by district rather than statewide — the Oregon Department of Forestry publishes them on an interactive map and expects you to zoom in on where you are actually going.

Two things here will not match the habits you brought from the Rockies. The first is bears. Oregon has one species. The state wildlife agency puts the black bear population at 25,000 to 30,000 and says there are no longer grizzly bears in the state, the last one recorded having been killed in the late 1930s. That changes the stakes, not the routine — the agency's line is still that bears should never be allowed at human food or garbage, and food storage requirements are written per forest, so that is one more thing the unit heading decides. The second is the winter permit. If you park in a designated Oregon Sno-Park between November 1 and April 30 you need a state Sno-Park permit on the windshield: $4 for a day, $9 for three consecutive days, $25 for the season, issued through DMV rather than by the forest. In the same stretch of year the pass that gets you into a Forest Service day-use site here is the Northwest Forest Pass — $5 a day or $30 a year, good across Oregon and Washington, and an America the Beautiful interagency pass covers it.

If you have not camped Oregon before, start on the Willamette. It is the unit on this page that hands you a plan: a published open-and-close date for every campground a season ahead, a stay limit stated in one sentence, and a dispersed-camping page that tells you exactly what you are getting — "no toilets, no picnic tables, no trash cans, no treated water, and no fire grates." Camp 100 feet back from water, wash and dump waste water 100 feet back, bury waste in a 6- to 8-inch hole 100 feet back, and burn only dead and downed wood off the ground, wrist size or smaller. Between June 15 and October 15 its wilderness areas need a permit, either a Central Cascades Wilderness Permit or a free self-issued one you pick up at the trailhead. What you should not do is default to the Oregon Dunes just because 80 of the 115 Siuslaw camps on this page are numbered sand camping sites. Those are reservation-only through recreation.gov, $10 a night for a standard site and $20 for a group site, and the forest states it flatly: "All sites can only be accessed by 4X4 vehicles." There is no potable water, the sites are primitive, and the forest recommends you bring a portable toilet and a fire pan. It is a good trip. It is not a first one, unless you already know how to drive sand.

See all 996 on the map →

Showing 400 of 996. Oregon has more camps than fit on one page, so these are the ones we know most about first — of the 400 listed here, 238 are free and 162 charge a fee. The remaining 596 are all on the map.