Car camping

You park at or beside your site and sleep nearby — tent, van, or rig, doesn't matter. The Park Service calls this frontcountry camping and notes it's 'commonly referred to as car camping'; most camping in the parks is this kind, where you drive to an established campground. The name isn't about sleeping in the car — it's that the car comes with you, so a cooler, camp chairs, a six-person tent, and a week of food are all fair game.

A developed campground is usually laid out in loops — roads shaped in an actual loop — with numbered sites branching off. A typical site gives you a parking spot, a picnic table, a fire ring (sometimes with a grill grate), and often a gravel pad to pitch a tent on. Drinking water comes from spigots placed around the campground, not at each site.

Past your own site, many developed campgrounds pile on shared facilities: restrooms with flush toilets and running-water sinks, RV hookups and a dump station, wheelchair-accessible sites and paths, and sometimes a camp store or an amphitheater where a ranger gives an evening program. Not every campground has all of it — amenities vary a lot from one to the next — so the campground's own page is where you confirm what's actually there.

Car camping is the opposite end of the spectrum from backcountry or dispersed camping, where you leave the developed campground behind and nothing's provided. It's the easiest way in: you trade the solitude and self-reliance of boondocking for a level pad, convenience, and a toilet down the loop. e.g. a Friday-night site you reserved weeks ago — tent up in ten minutes, cooler on the table, marshmallows by dark. Popular campgrounds book up, so check availability before you go. We flag which camps are developed versus dispersed where we can, but the managing agency's page always has the final word.