How to read a camp page on this site

The confidence badge grades the record, not the campsite

Every found page carries one of two badges, and neither one means a human has been there. Researched — “The record is detailed and internally consistent, and the coordinates land where the managing agency says this site is” — sits on 1,523 pages. Likely — “The record is good enough to put a pin on, but thin in places. Treat the details as a starting point, not gospel” — sits on the other 11,997. That is nine out of ten pages on the thinner rung. Read the badge as a statement about paperwork quality: Researched means the agency's own inventory is detailed and the coordinate agrees with it; Likely means the record was good enough to place a pin and no better. The practical consequence: the badge tells you how much to trust the page's description, and nothing at all about the road, the gate, or whether the spot is occupied. The page's own “Field check” row says the quiet part out loud — the land manager inventoried the site, so its existence is not in question, current conditions are. The full ladder, including the Verified and Stale rungs that the hand-built pages use, is on How we grade.

“None within 31 mi” is a statement about the map, not the county

This is the single most-misread line on the site, so here is exactly what produces it. Five resupply categories always print a row whether or not anything was found, each with its own search radius: drinking water at 16 km (10 mi), fuel and groceries at 48 km (30 mi), propane and dump stations at 50 km (31 mi). When the search comes back empty you get “none within 31 mi.” That phrasing appears on 10,170 of the 13,520 pages — propane on 9,463 of them, dump stations on 5,382. “None within 10 mi” for drinking water shows on 7,908. None of those numbers is a survey. The search runs against OpenStreetMap, which is volunteer-contributed and admits it: its own wiki says levels of completeness “do vary widely across different areas of the map, at all scales.” A single fuel pump at a crossroads, a seasonal resort with a propane cage, a spigot behind a ranger station — those exist in quantity and are mapped in nothing like their real numbers. Where our own data is thin enough to be misleading, 875 pages print a plain-language warning saying an empty row means nothing is mapped within that radius, not that nothing exists. The practical consequence: treat an empty row as “do not count on it,” never as “confirmed absent.” Arrive with the propane you need. Then, if the row is wrong, you have lost nothing; if you had believed the row and it was right, you would be fine either way. The asymmetry runs one direction only.

The topo and the aerial are the same window — flip between them

Both images on a found page are cut from the identical box around the coordinate: roughly two miles on a side, the pin dead centre in each. That is the whole trick. Features line up between the two pictures, so you can read shape off one and substance off the other. The topo is the USGS National Map topographic basemap, which by its own service description “combines the most current data in The National Map (TNM), and other public-domain data, into a multi-scale topographic reference map,” carrying “Boundaries, Geographic Names, Transportation, Contours, Hydrography, Land Cover, Shaded Relief, and Bathymetry” — and its credits name “USFS Road data” among the sources. So the topo answers: how steep, which way does water run, is there a numbered forest road. The aerial is the USGS orthoimagery basemap, largely the USDA's National Agriculture Imagery Program, flown “during the agricultural growing season, or ‘leaf on’ conditions” — 1-metre ground resolution through 2017, 0.6-metre since 2018, on roughly a three-year refresh. So the aerial answers: is there actually a clearing, is there a two-track, how thick is the canopy. Reading the aerial well is its own note. Use them as a pair: pick a candidate clearing on the aerial, then check on the topo whether it is on a bench or in a drainage.

The catch, and it is a big one: neither image is current, and the topo leaves out exactly the roads you care about. USGS says plainly that the modern topo omits feature classes the old field-surveyed sheets carried — among them recreational trails and remote or unimproved roads — because “The USGS no longer does field verification or other primary data collection for these feature classes” and “there are no national data sources suitable for general-purpose, 1:24,000-scale maps.” A blank patch of topo is not proof there is no way in; look at the aerial. And the imagery basemap's own credit line reads “Data refreshed June, 2024” — with NAIP on a three-year cycle behind that, the frame under your pin can easily predate your trip by several years. It cannot show you a washout, a new gate, a burn scar, or the six rigs already parked there. For what the road is rated to ask of you, that is the MVUM and the maintenance level, not the picture.

The pin is a coordinate, and it usually lands on the road

The pin marks the exact stored coordinate — not the campsite, not the good spot, not where you should park. Two separate things push it onto the access road rather than into the clearing. First, the physics: GPS.gov states that “GPS-enabled smartphones are typically accurate to within a 4.9 m (16 ft.) radius under open sky,” and that accuracy “worsens near buildings, bridges, and trees” — and a forest camp is trees by definition. Second, the origin: these coordinates come from agency inventories and mapping records, and a record for a dispersed area is generally logged from the drivable access, because that is where somebody with a receiver stood.

Some pages tell you how the pin was checked, in a row labelled “How it was placed.” That audit looks for a drivable way within 120 m of the coordinate and a foot path within 200 m, and writes down what it found. Across the published set: 1,843 pages read “auto: drive (road/trail right there),” 263 read “auto: hike,” 130 read “likely OHV (only a rough 4wd track in) — confirm,” and 224 read “no road or trail found nearby — check manually.” Read that last one correctly: it means OpenStreetMap has no way within 120 metres of this point. Given how thin track mapping is out there, that is a flag to go look at the aerial yourself, not a verdict that the place is unreachable. The practical consequence: read the pin as “start looking here,” and expect to find the actual sites as open ground on and just off the track, within a few hundred yards. How to size one up once you're rolling is picking a spot from the truck.

The rules on the page are the unit's rules, and they vary

A found page tells you the land manager and links the unit. It does not tell you the rules, and that is deliberate, because there is no national answer to give. The Forest Service's own Intermountain Region says it flatly: “Rules listed below may vary by forest, some additional restrictions may apply and your stay maybe day limited, so check with the forest you plan on visiting for their restrictions and stay limit,” and on stay length only that “You may camp in a dispersed area for a limited number of days set by the forest.” Two real forests show the spread: Fishlake allows “up to 16 days,” caps it at no more than 16 days of any 30-day period at the same dispersed area, and then requires you to “move at least 5 road miles”; Olympic states that “dispersed camping is allowed for 21 consecutive days.” Sixteen versus twenty-one, both correct, neither transferable. The bits that travel more reliably are the siting rules — camp “at least 200 feet from any stream or other water source,” stay within about 150 feet of the roadway to keep from tearing up ground, and keep well clear of developed recreation areas — and even those are stated per-forest. Check the unit, every time. How long you can stay works through it, stay limit and dispersed camping are the short versions, and what dispersed really means by agency covers how the answer changes between the Forest Service, BLM and state land.

Where people go wrong

Reading a blank as a finding. Every empty row, missing image and absent feature on these pages is a hole in somebody's dataset. Nothing on a found page was checked by walking out and looking. “Not mapped” and “not there” produce the same blank and mean completely different things, and the whole page is built so you can tell which is which.

Reading “Researched” as “verified.” It means the paperwork is good. Those 1,523 pages have exactly as many boots on them as the other 11,997: none.

Taking the forecast as the camp's weather. The strip is a live National Weather Service area forecast on roughly a 2.5 km grid, and the page's own footer says it is not elevation-corrected — while the elevation in the facts table is a real USGS point value at the coordinate. If your camp sits well above the grid cell's average, the forecast is reading somebody else's afternoon. What altitude costs you in season is when the high country opens and closes.

Treating the restroom and water rows as plumbing. A mapped restroom is usually a vault toilet, which may be locked, full or seasonally closed, and a mapped water point is not a promise of potable water. We never claim natural water is drinkable — treat everything. Finding water when the camp has none is the honest version.

Skipping the “What we don't know” list. It is on every found page and it is not boilerplate: road surface and last-mile access, how many rigs fit, cell coverage by carrier, seasonal access, current fire restrictions, whether any water is drinkable, shade and wind, who else shows up. That list is the actual trip. Nothing above it answers any of it.

What to do tonight

Open the page and read it in this order. Badge first — Likely or Researched, and either way nobody has been there. Then the aerial, for a clearing and a track; then the topo over the same window, for slope and drainage. Then “How it was placed,” so you know whether to expect a road at the pin or to hunt for one. Then the resupply rows, reading every “none within” as unknown rather than absent, and top off before you turn off the pavement anyway. Then the unit link — and this is the only step that can actually change your answer — for stay limit, seasonal gates, road status and today's fire restrictions. Screenshot the page before the signal goes, because it will. And pick a second camp from the “Other camps nearby” list, because the most common way a found page turns out wrong is not that the spot doesn't exist, it's that somebody else got there first.