About Wild Pitch Camp

Wild Pitch Camp is an independent, ad-supported directory built around one simple idea: most great camping in the United States is free, and you don't need a reservation system to find it.

Why we exist

The big camping sites are built around private and state-park campgrounds where you book a numbered site months in advance. That model serves a real audience, but it leaves out the millions of acres of federal and state trust land where the rule is the opposite: pull off a forest road, find a clearing somebody else has already used, pitch a tent, leave it cleaner than you found it. We built Wild Pitch Camp for that audience.

Where the data comes from

Our campsite directory is generated from OpenStreetMap Overpass API (ODbL), a global, open-data project licensed under the Open Database License. We filter the firehose of tourism=camp_site tags down to sites that meet a working definition of "free and dispersed" — public access, no required reservation, and either no fee or a fee field intentionally left blank by mappers (because dispersed sites generally have no fee).

OSM coverage is uneven. States with active local mapping communities (Colorado, California, Oregon, Arizona) tend to have rich data; states with smaller communities can be sparse. Our index will only ever be as complete as the upstream source, but it improves every time someone adds a site to OpenStreetMap. If you find a site that should be listed and isn't, the fastest way to get it indexed is to add it to OSM directly.

What we are not

We are not a reservation platform. We don't sell permits, take payments, or operate any of the campsites in this directory. We're an aggregator and an editorial site — we organize public information and write field guides on top of it. The land managers (BLM, USFS, NPS, and state agencies) are the only authoritative sources for current rules and conditions, and you should always check with them before you commit a long drive.

Editorial independence and ads

We run unobtrusive display advertising to keep the lights on. Ad placements are clearly marked in the page templates and never influence which sites we list or how we describe them. We don't accept sponsored campground listings, and we don't take fees from any landowner or operator. If we ever do, we'll mark it clearly as advertising.

Acknowledgments

This site stands on the shoulders of the OpenStreetMap mapping community, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's open data efforts, the U.S. Forest Service's recreation atlases, and decades of work by Leave No Trace advocates. Thank you, all.