A short history of dispersed camping in the USA

Dispersed camping on federal land grew out of a bigger decision: to keep millions of acres of the West in public hands instead of selling them off.

Key dates: national forests came first, starting in 1891. BLM land followed between 1934 and 1976. The rules you check before a trip today, like stay limits and motor vehicle use maps, came later, and most are set forest by forest and office by office.

Land the government meant to give away

For most of the 1800s, federal land was something to dispose of. The General Land Office, created in 1812, managed the public domain, and early policy used it to promote homesteading [1]. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened claims in thirty states, and the National Park Service notes that those areas were the traditional or treaty lands of many Native American tribes [2].

Forest reserves become national forests

In 1891 Congress started keeping some of that land. The Forest Reserve Act of March 3, 1891 let the president set aside forested land, and the first reserve, next to Yellowstone, followed on March 30 [3]. An 1897 law, now called the Organic Act, set out how the reserves would be run, and its rules allowed activities including camping and hunting [3].

The Forest Service took its name on July 1, 1905, with Gifford Pinchot in charge, and in 1907 the reserves were renamed national forests [3]. Today the system covers 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands, about 193 million acres [4].

Cars, campers and the first campgrounds

The Forest Service opened its first campground in 1916 at Eagle Creek, in the Columbia River Gorge on the Mt. Hood National Forest, and nearly 150,000 people used it in the summer of 1919 [3]. A 1918 report counted about 3 million recreation visitors a year, and described the recreation sites built so far as almost all automobile camps and picnic grounds [3].

By 1925 the national forests had some 1,500 campgrounds [3]. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps added much more: its 1933 to 1942 totals include 101,777 acres of campground development and over 700,000 miles of forest roads [3].

The leftover range becomes BLM land

Outside the forests, the remaining public domain was mostly open range with no grazing rules. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 ended unregulated grazing there, set up grazing districts and created the U.S. Grazing Service [3]. In 1946 the Grazing Service and the General Land Office were merged into the Bureau of Land Management [1]. The BLM now manages about 245 million acres, roughly a tenth of the country’s land [5].

Keeping the land for good

Two laws made recreation an official job of these agencies. The Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 listed outdoor recreation among the purposes of the national forests [3]. For BLM land, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of October 21, 1976 declared that public lands be kept in federal ownership and provide for outdoor recreation [6].

Where today’s camping rules come from

The BLM says dispersed camping is allowed on most of its land unless an area is posted closed, and is generally limited to 14 days within any 28-day period, with limits that vary by state and field office [7]. On national forests, stay limits and camping closures come from orders issued by each forest or ranger district [8], which is why the limits in our stay limits guide range from 7 to 14 days.

Driving rules changed in 2005, when a Forest Service rule required each forest to designate the roads and areas open to motor vehicles and publish them on a motor vehicle use map, listing which vehicles may use them and when [9]. Some forests also use the map to mark routes where you may drive a short distance off the road to reach a dispersed campsite; our MVUM guide explains how to read one.

Heavier use since 2020

In fiscal year 2020, national forests and grasslands had 168.2 million visits, 18 million more than in 2019, and the Forest Service said most of the increase was in dispersed settings outside developed campgrounds [10]. Some popular areas now allow camping only at marked sites. On the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests in Colorado, for example, an order in effect from May 2023 to May 2028 limits camping in the Winiger Ridge area to signed Forest Service campsites [11].

Rules like these change often, so check the forest or field office’s own pages and alerts before you go. Nomad Field Guide collects each researched area’s rules with their sources and checked dates; start with what dispersed camping is and how national forests and BLM land differ.