Finding incredibly scenic boondocking spots for some amazing free camping
Our camping preference is for boondocking, and while it's already difficult to get a reservation for an RV spot in a
park or a campground we're finding that in popular boondocking areas it's also getting kind of tough to find a spot,
too. We first tackled the subject of how to find great boondocking spots way back in Grand Adventure Episode 6,
right around the inception of Grand Adventure back in 2017.
But a lot of things have changed since then and some great new tools have since been released, so we wanted to
update everyone. One method for finding great boondocking spots has long been to consult online directories like
campendium.com and thedyrt.com; however, with the popularity of RVing and the popularity of those online
directories we're now finding that a lot of those spots listed in the directories are full when we arrive. We've
actually had to resort to arriving on Sunday afternoons or even Mondays in popular areas if we're even going to
have a chance of finding a spot, and we always have to keep a plan B, C and sometimes even a plan D in our back
pocket just in case. We've found that we've had much better success finding the peace and serenity that we're
looking for in coming up with our own boondocking spots that you won't find in any directory. Now before we go
any further, let's define what it means to be boondocking. Now for some folks that simply means dry camping, so
that could be staying in a campground where there are no hookups. It might even mean asphalt docking at their
local Wally World. But as pleasant as those experiences can be, that doesn't define boondocking for us. As far as
we're concerned, boondocking means dispersed camping outside of an established campground on U.S. public
lands. These are some of the most beautiful, some of the most serene camping experiences out of sight and out of
earshot of any neighbors. This is the purest form of RV camping available.
So for us boondocking requires public lands, and in the U.S. nearly all of those public lands are in the western U.S.
Take a look at this map for a moment. Take a look at all the pretty colors. You'll notice that once you get east of
the Rockies there's really not a lot of color, there's not much public land, so very few dispersed camping
opportunities exist in the central and eastern parts of the U.S. There are exceptions of course, but that's pretty
much the rule. Now there are various agencies that manage public lands in the U.S. On the federal side you have
the Bureau of Land Management or BLM, you have the U.S. Forest Service, you have U.S. Fish and Wildlife, you
have the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others, and on the state side you have various fish and game
departments and state agencies, even including some states' trust land. That makes for quite the patchwork of
public lands.
1. So the first step in finding a great boondocking site is to identify the manager of the public land that you
want to camp on, and for that we're going to turn to this map of protected areas across the U.S. that we
showed you earlier from the U.S. Geological Survey. Let's say, for example, that we want to camp near
Boulder, Utah. So we'll zoom right into there. The white areas on this map are private land so those can't
be considered for camping; however, we're lucky there are lots of pretty colors surrounding Boulder,
which means lots of public land for camping. If we look at the map's legend, we will see that the medium
color green that we're seeing on this map is U.S. Forest Service, while the darker green denotes National
Park Service for the land it manages inside Capitol Reef National Park. The yellowish tan color is BLM land,
while these odd occasional squares of fuchsia-like color are state lands that we'll look at more closely in a
moment. Finally, this medium purple colored area down here right outside of the town of Escalante,
that's a state park. We'll link to this website, as well as all the other resources that we discuss in this video
in the video description down below. Realize that if you're watching this episode on a television, YouTube
doesn't currently provide the video description on its smart TV apps, so you'll have to pull up this video on
a PC or a mobile device to be able to access the video description. Typically, state parks and national parks
both prohibit dispersed camping. So for this exercise we'll focus on U.S. Forest Service, BLM lands and
state lands. Now we want to learn more about these state lands, so we'll click on one of these fuchsia
squares. You'll see that this opens more information about the land manager. In this case, it's managed by
the Utah State School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, and those lands are typically available
for dispersed camping unless expressly prohibited. Now we can zoom in ... let's close this little window,
this little informational window. We will zoom in, and then we eventually we lose the overlay if we zoom
in too far. So let's go over here and we're going to turn off the layer so we can just see the topographic
map. And we can see that in this case there are no roads leading into the square of Utah School Trust
land, so as far as camping is concerned, we've kind of reached a dead end. So it's time to go back to the
drawing board. So because we're starting all over again, let's go back over here above the legend and click
to once again reload the land use overlay, and zoom back out to where we can actually see the different
land managers and the different colors overlaid on this map. Now if we're going to consider any of this
green Forest Service land we need to consult a Forest Service Motor Vehicle Use Map, or MVUM, to see
along which roads it's legal to boondock and what special restrictions apply. Now clicking anywhere on
this broad swath of green once again brings up land manager information. You'll note that it confirms the
owner's name as Forest Service, and down here under the unit name it specifies the specific forest:
Dixie National Forest. So now it's time to consult another website and again, we'll link to this next
resource also in the video description this is a U.S. Forest Service list of links to Motor Vehicle Use Maps
by state. Now we've already confirmed that the forest in question is Dixie National Forest, so down here if
we scroll down under Utah, we see Dixie National Forest. Click on that, this opens up a sub-page, and
we're going to go down and see "Maps Available for Free". And scroll down again ... we'll eventually
get there .. sure enough, there we go ...there's firewood ... Motor Vehicle Use Maps. Voila! Alright, now
we know that we're looking right outside Escalante, so we're going to choose the Escalante ranger district.
We'll click to download the map, and it's going to open up the map as a PDF. Now you'll notice that
there's not a lot of detail on these maps; they're very basic maps containing only the bare minimum of
information. Now each National Forest has different rules, so we're first going to come over here and look
at the map legend. You can see that we've gotten really lucky. Dispersed camping is permitted within 150
feet of the center line of any road within the entire National Forest, and permitted all year long. Now
that's not normally the case. Now for just a moment I'm pulling up a Motor Vehicle Use Map for another
National Forest to illustrate what you'll more commonly see. If we look here at the legend you'll see that
roads that are legal for dispersed camping have little dots alongside the road, shown here in the legend
along the side of the road upon which boondocking is allowed. Now as always, check the allowable
distance from the road center line for that particular forest, and also make note of which side of the road
that camping is permitted on because it's usually both sides but not always, and you want to make sure
that you're camping on a legal side of the road. Now let's go over here in the map, let's scroll over a little
bit and I'll show you an example of what this looks like. Here we're going to zoom in on this road just west
of Strawberry Reservoir, and you can see how there are those little dots lining alongside Forest Road 150.
Now there dispersed camping is legal on both sides of the road as denoted by those dots. The fact that
the road is shaded indicates a seasonal road. Now let's return to our example back in Dixie National
Forest. We also want to take note of what type of traffic is permitted on these Forest Roads, for that gives
us a really good indication of just how accessible that road is likely to be for most RVs. The best roads are
typically designated open to highway legal vehicles, which is designated on this map by two parallel black
lines and a white center as you see right here on the legend. Now when you start getting into roads or
trails accessible to all vehicles, not just highway vehicles, now that starts including ATVs and sometimes
those roads are not the best for travel in an RV. But more on that in the moment. It's not always the case,
it's just a rule of thumb. So let's scroll right back to our preferred area surrounding Boulder. Head on over
here... should be seeing Boulder in a moment ...there it is, there's the town of Boulder. And you can see
that we have Forest Roads 153 and 1431 just outside of town. Now we could go back to using the
Protected Lands Viewer for this next step, but we'll get far better resolution by using Google Maps
instead. Now here we've located those same Forest Roads 153 and 1431 on Google Maps right outside of
the town of Boulder. Now we're going to want click here once again, down here where it says "satellite"
to switch to satellite view, and we're going to zoom in again. On those same roads ... there, they are right
there. Now you can see the 1431, which is the one that runs north and south, ends up on that Boulder
Landing Strip. It seems to dead-end there. It's probably not the most peaceful place to camp sandwiched
between this airstrip and Utah Route 12. I kind of doubt that airstrip sees much activity, however. And
now what we're going to do is see if we can find a good campsite using satellite view. I'm going to zoom in
even further /and we can see that this is actually a pretty good, looks like a fairly heavily traveled dirt road
it almost looks like there is a berm along either side. A small berm, which indicates that it's probably well
maintained and likely to be graded, which will make it easier with an RV. Now take a look at this little
section right up here, right in amongst these juniper trees. You can see that this area is well-worn and it
appears to be a really good campsite nestled right in amongst those trees, and we already know from the
forest Motor Vehicle Use Map that it's perfectly legal for camping there. Now we're going to zoom out
and take a look down the road a little bit further. I'm going to now, at first I would think that little loop
might actually act like a little pull-through campsite, but if I zoom in further, look: it looks like there's a
wet spot there in the road, and people use that to circumvent that wet spot. So i think we can safely rule
that out as a potential campsite. So that's how we find a legal campsite on Forest Service land. However,
returning now to the USGS Protected Lands Viewer, what about this massive swath of BLM land?
Fortunately for us, BLM lands have far fewer camping restrictions than Forest Service land. Now we don't
need to consult a Motor Vehicle Use Map as the BLM permits boondocking along almost all of its roads
unless expressly prohibited. So we could see from the Protected Lands Viewer that once we're south of
Boulder it's pretty much everything is BLM land. So let's zoom in and scout out and see if we can find any
side roads upon which to camp. Now down around this really kind of weird turn in Route 12 I see this "Old
Sheffield Road" on the map. And clearly everything around Old Sheffield Road is definitely BLM land, so
we're going to head back to Google Maps. Now back in Google Maps it should be relatively easy to find
that road. And sure enough, if we go south of Boulder there's that kind of weird jog in the roadway, and
coming right off it is that side road. But if we zoom in on Google Maps it's called Spencer Flat Road, but
that is absolutely, definitely the same road. Now once again we're going to click here on the left corner,
lower left corner of the map and switch to satellite view so we can get a closer look at the road. Now
again this looks to be a fairly heavily traveled road. I'm guessing because of that it's fairly well maintained
and again, look -- we can almost see those little berms on the side of the road. That tells me this road is
probably graded. So now that we know that it's probably negotiable by RV, let's scroll along the road a
little bit and see if we can find any obvious campsites. Now ... there's a little side road that goes off to the
east. It's kind of short and it ends in what appears to be some rock cliff areas there, but at the dead end of
the road we're seeing that same sort of pattern in the dirt. See how it almost looks like a little parking
area? It's clear, it's pretty obvious to me that that's been used as a campsite. Now sometimes when you're
wandering around Google Maps in satellite view you'll even see an RV sitting in a spot like this right on
your screen, so that only confirms your assumptions that it makes a good campsite. Now if we want to
know a little bit more about the lay of the land we can go up here in the upper left corner to the
hamburger menu and switch to terrain view, which is what Google Maps calls their topographic maps.
Now we sometimes have to zoom out a bit to be able to see the contour lines. which we'll do right here.
I'm going to have to zoom a little more, and zoom a little more... Now we're starting to be able to see
terrain features -- ah, there we go, there are the contour lines. Now you can see that the area we've
identified for camping appears to be relatively flat, and it does in fact reside right along the top of an edge
of what appears to be some small cliffs, although they don't look horrifically steep. And that's how we
found this absolutely stunning campsite for our Episode 104 from Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument. So as you can see it's not terribly hard to find your own stunning boondocking campsite. Yes
it takes a little bit of effort, but you're likely to be rewarded for that effort with the campsite of a lifetime!
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