The Center for Western Priorities, in their newsletter today, pointed me to the below story, but they also added this.
Increasing amounts of campers on public lands is a phenomenon that is not unique to Colorado. From 2014 to 2020, there was a nearly 40 percent increase in reservable campsite occupancy in the Lower 48, with a particularly significant increase in weekday camping. Recent reports demonstrate that these trends show no signs of slowing down—over the last four years, the share of campers who report having trouble finding an open campsite has skyrocketed.
The AR has some interesting ideas; there should probably also be a story on dispersed camping and its future on various forests. Also the idea that if camping spot supply is less than demand, should people who pay federal taxes to support them have an advantage? Is that a philosophical question or a practical one?
Making summer camping plans in parks and forests along the Front Range has become increasingly exasperating in recent years due to surging demand and unforgiving reservation policies. But take heart, campers, a modicum of relief may be in the offing.
Planners at the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests are studying ways to add campsites. They’re also considering ways to make selecting and reserving them a little less onerous.
The Arapaho and Roosevelt forests, which are jointly administered, stretch along the Continental Divide from just south of Interstate 70 to the Wyoming border. They include Clear Creek, Gilpin, Grand, Boulder and Larimer counties. They have 59 total campgrounds with 1,400 campsites.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to meet all the demand for people who want to camp on the Front Range,” conceded forest spokesman Reid Armstrong. “We have a limited amount of land, and we want to protect it. We want to preserve it for future generations.”
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This is the first I’ve seen of the concern about non-motorized recreation; however, instead of talking about closing campgrounds, they are talking about not adding more. Of course, they wouldn’t be adding them in Wilderness nor Roadless, which are conceivably already preserved. Of course, in a sense all recreation that requires vehicles to get there or tow trailers is motorized in some sense.
Still, public officials feel your pain, and some are exploring creative solutions.
“We have more than five million people along the Front Range, many of whom live in Colorado because they love the outdoors and the access to camping opportunities,” Armstrong said. “In addition, this is a destination for a lot of people. A lot of our camping opportunities are serving people who come from across the country, and even internationally, to visit Rocky Mountain National Park and other well-known sites in Colorado.”
Addressing the supply side of the problem can be difficult because of budgetary and environmental constraints. There are no plans to build new campgrounds in Rocky Mountain National Park, for instance, which attracts more than four million visitors annually, in part because it has a deferred maintenance backlog in excess of $200 million, said park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson.
Nor are there plans to add campgrounds in the White River National Forest, which stretches across the central Colorado high country from Summit County to Glenwood Springs and beyond. White River is the busiest national forest in the nation.
But over the past three years, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has added 181 campsites statewide, bringing its inventory to 4,403. This year, about 40 new sites will open soon at Boyd Lake State Park near Loveland. CPW spokeswoman Bridget O’Rourke said revenue from Keep Colorado Wild passes, which are sold through motor vehicle registration renewals, will help cover the cost.
Arapaho and Roosevelt officials also are thinking about more equitable ways to roll out reservations. Under the current system, campground reservations become available six months in advance, meaning people begin grabbing them for the summer in January and February. But many people don’t get vacation approval from their employers that early in the year, and by the time they’re ready to book reservations, popular campgrounds are fully booked.
“We recognize that many people are booking up all the campgrounds in January, and they don’t necessarily know when they’re going to go, so maybe they’re canceling at the last minute — or they’re eating the (no-show) cost,” Armstrong said. “We want to make the opportunities more equitable for people who work in careers where they don’t necessarily know they’re going to have that particular week off until they get closer to it, and they want to be able to make reservations more last-minute. We’re looking at how we can design more of a rolling reservation system that maybe issues some opportunities in January, and then more as we get closer to the actual date.”
Forest officials are also brainstorming with other public land agencies in the Front Range including Rocky Mountain National Park, CPW and county land managers, through their partnership in a coalition called NoCo Places, to find ways of making the process less confusing. NoCo Places was created specifically to address the impact of Front Range population growth on public lands and the visitor experience.
Under the current system, camping reservations for Rocky Mountain National Park and national forests are made through recreation.gov. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has its own site for camping reservations. Each agency has web pages and maps for locating their offerings with thumbnail descriptions.
“When people look for campgrounds, they know they want to go camping along the Front Range but they don’t necessarily understand all the different agencies and the different camping opportunities,” Armstrong said. “Right now they have to search up camping on state lands on one site and reservations for the forest service on another site. Counties may have opportunities on a different site entirely. So, something we’re talking about is, is there a way for us to create one portal across all public lands where people can find camping opportunities in the northern Front Range of Colorado?”
NoCo Places already has an interactive map that highlights selected public lands attractions in northern Colorado with information about those areas and links to the official information pages of the agencies that manage them.
Arapaho and Roosevelt will add a handful of sites to its camping options in the next two years or so. The Jack’s Gulch campground in the high country west of Fort Collins was heavily damaged in the Cameron Peak of 2020. It is being redesigned for a rebuild, and forest officials are hopeful they can reopen it in 2026. It would have 90 campsites.
West of Empire near Berthoud Falls, the small Mizpah Campground has been closed for more than a decade because of damage to an access road. Forest officials are hopeful Mizpah can reopen in 2026, but it would only add 10 sites.
One creative solution forest officials are considering is converting “under-utilized” picnic areas into campgrounds.
“They already have a lot of the stuff we need,” Armstrong said. “They have the picnic (table), they have the grill. What would it take to convert these places to new campsites? In some cases that might require a little bit of environmental assessment. I don’t have numbers for how many that will add, but there are some great opportunities across the forests to convert some of those sites.”
Armstrong said none of the solutions under consideration are likely to be implemented next summer. They could take from two to five years.
“We do want to create that diverse opportunity and try to have the most balanced approach we can to help people book reservations and get access to these places,” Armstrong said. “We also hope people will look elsewhere to discover camping in other parts of the state that maybe aren’t as well known.
“It’s all yours, go play!” I just watched a National Forest Foundation (NFF) video on just that: touting public use of National Forests. What timing; who knew the Covid exercise of 2021 would have such a profound effect on public use of public lands! Of course no one saw this coming but it it’s really hard to put that genie back in the bottle!
Just as the non-motorized trails story about impacts to wildlife, ecology and solitude addresses future conflicts, the question must be answered as to “what now?”. The PSICC has been in NEPA convulsions over how to limit dispersed camping in the Upper Arkansas. Their proposals to date have been a bit weird, and in violation of several alphabet laws. And, if they limit dispersed sites to 20% of current use, do you think the other 80% will just go away? 🤣🤣🤣. No, they’ll move higher up the mountain, making their own paradise, with the impacts to go with it.
And bike trails? They have proliferated to the point they are everywhere; both planned and user-created! They’ve built their own signs, bridges, travel systems and usage guidelines. And yet, they continue to have free rein. The race here in Leadville last weekend put 1,700 bikes over a 100 mile course, in about ten hours! Reckon what impact to wildlife de that had? Now it is a 12 week series of foot races and bike races over basically the same ground.
And what about motorized? Promises of the 2005 Travel Management Rule didn’t last until the ink dried. I picked up my “new” MVUM yesterday, dated 2018, listing roads open to travel that have been closed on the ground. I’m sorry, the map rules, right?
No, the FS instituted this mess and now want the true owners of public lands to fall in line. That ain’t going to happen!
So much of the campsite shortage is because the Forest Service and BLM have basically eliminated dispersed camping in many of the most popular areas, squeezing everyone into a developed campgrounds and the tiny fraction of former dispersed sites they leave open as designated sites. And then they go and close roads accessing dispersed sites in other areas because they are short spur roads that allegedly have no purpose.
As for the PSICC situation that’s even more messed up than usual, since in response to our lawsuit they apparently decided to go ahead and implement closures on the ground while the case progresses but not issue new MVUMs until the case is resolved.
Meanwhile they’re going ahead with dispersed camping management plans in some areas that may end up adding more roads that they didn’t even consider in the travel planning process while limiting camping to designated sites, but only in some ranger districts, while other ranger districts impose the same types of camping restrictions with no NEPA at all. I’m still trying to figure out why the South Platte ranger district was able to implement designated dispersed camping restrictions with just a Forest order but Leadville and Salida need an EA to do it.
A closure order could be done with a categorical exclusion. An EA could be needed if there’s more to it than that, but there’s no reason an EA couldn’t be done just because the agency wants to do it (especially an agency not known for being consistent across boundaries).
Closure Orders must have a “Civil Rights Impact Analysis” (CRIA) too. CE’s can be internal scoping, but one would argue something this controversial would need an EA, at least.
“Meanwhile they’re going ahead with dispersed camping management plans in some areas that may end up adding more roads that they didn’t even consider in the travel planning process.”
I’m not well-versed in recreation planning or travel planning, but wouldn’t this require an amendment of the travel management plan? (I’m not sure if “adding more roads” means more roads or more closed roads, but this is probably true in either case.) I also would assume that a “dispersed camping management plan” would be more than just closure orders, so would require a public/NEPA process where you can point these things out? (All of this of course has to be consistent with the forest plan.)
Sorry I wasn’t very clear. Yeah as currently proposed the Leadville and Salida districts are working on a joint dispersed camping management plan that will do two things: limit camping to designated dispersed sites in certain high use road corridors, and add campsite access roads to the travel plan to access those designated sites. That might be why they’re doing an EA, though the South Platte district basically did the same thing for the entire ranger district (not just certain road corridors) with just a forest order a couple years ago, with no amendment to either the forest plan or travel plan.
It’s all kind of silly because the whole PSI just did a forest wide travel management plan which only looked at existing system roads and refused to inventory non-system roads, and now just a few years later they’re going to have to go back and do another travel plan that inventories and designates non-system roads for campsite access in certain places. And the reason they have to do that is because parking for dispersed camping has technically been limited to one car length off designated roads forest-wide for decades, but the vast majority of campsites (most of which probably pre-date the one vehicle length limitation) are further than that and have their own little access spurs that have never been either closed off or considered for designation, but continue being used by the public. So if the forest had just been willing to do a proper inventory of non-system campsite access roads to begin with, they could have already settled all of this as part of the forest wide travel planning process.
Spot on Patrick! The Ouachita NF did do a complete inventory of all the “spur roads” as we called them, to access dispersed campsites. It was a pretty good plan for that. However, they got cross wise with a developed trail system (Wolf Pen Gap) that has caused much consternation amongst users and Feds alike.
Region 8 has an impressive Law Enforcement and Investigation team but even they have a hard time having much of control over off-road use. Most folks just do as they please; kinda like I see on the PSICC. In the eighteen years I’ve been coming back to the LRD, after leaving as DR, I’ve yet to see anyone actually patrolling, or even driving the roads in except for a couple of trail crews…
I think the guiding doctrine is “if you behave yourself and don’t tear crap up, you good!”
For 25 years the Forest Service has been locking gates and pushing boulders up onto the sides of roads to deny access to dispersed camping.
A couple years ago I returned to a meadow I’d camped at in 77. The meadow was probably 15 or 25 acres. There was now an official campground, all 26 sites full of course on a Thursday afternoon, and no camping on the meadow, or any of the roads leading to the meadow. They could have fit another 300 camping sites in that meadow.
All one really needs for a campsite is nothing. Permission is all. Porta potties at $100 a month are hardly anything to bust the bank. A self service fee system would more than pay for both the porta potties and someone to collect money, pick up trash.
Another place right along the front range a graded road is gated off. Parking for 15 cars, no camping. a quarter century ago people drove down that road and the multiple logging roads leading off of it and camped throughout the woods. The road is a mile long. I see all the old fire rings while hunting. The area is riddled with old diggings from mining and the tailings of those diggings. How much ecological damage can campers do compared to mining.
I understand, people are messy, people leave trash and put nails in trees and chop off bark and leave dog and human feces and leave campfires burning when they go. All of the hundreds of fire rings from that gated off road just above Arvada and Boulder, no sign of anyone unless you look very closely. Pine needles and trees. Time heals all scars.
For years official policy at the NPS was to not build campgrounds so that people would get hotels and eat at restaurants in the gateway towns boosting local revenue from tourism. Instead of waking up beside an alpine lake and the smell of woodsmoke, people sit in long lines of traffic mid day waiting to get in. Only now they can’t get in, because they need a reservation.
Get rid of that concessionaire that runs the campgrounds! I’d much rather pay federal employees with my taxes. No more visitor centers, we don’t need more offices for federal employees. There are office parks in town and business rentals are at bargain rates.
Instead of 1400 camping spaces along the front range we should have 6,000, or probably triple that. The only thing needed for a camp spot is a level place to pull off the road and number posted so you know what to write on the pay envelope.
Campgrounds used to have overflow areas. Places for people to simply park and sleep when the place is full.
If people don’t have an easy place to camp, without any reservations needed, the agencies who manage our public lands are failing in one of their most bedrock duties. Those are our lands, and all we want to do is use them to sleep.
Well said! It’s absolutely infuriating how much of our western heritage has been stolen by misanthropic bureaucrats. It’s the same in every area I’ve gone to after the Forest Service or BLM converted an area to designated sites. Wide open meadows or clearings everywhere that would make perfect campsites and they probably were in the past, yet some petty bureaucrat decided camping in the area was unsightly so decided to close 90% of the previously existing campsites despite them causing absolutely no harm.
The BLM recently decided to limit one of the most popular areas around Moab to designated dispersed sites in a camping management plan, and then proceeded to close the access roads to half of the existing officially designated dispersed sites in the same area in the separate travel plan. They haven’t fully implemented the camping plan yet, but when they do, it will penalize people who practice leave no trace camping because only camp sites with visible evidence of use like fire rings will be considered for designation. So ironically campsites where people trampled the crypto soil and built large fire rings will remain, while campsites where someone just parked a camper van or truck with a rooftop tent on a slickrock slab overnight will now be illegal to use. It’s pure madness.
Meadows “Why Are They Important?” https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5397692.pdf
I knew this would come up.
Yes meadows are important, and I think camping on one for a couple months a year less damaging than building cities and resorts on them, as we have done. Take for example those places we camped back 50 years ago, I doubt it’s possible to find the spot we parked a jeep and threw our sleeping bags on the ground. I also like camping next to creeks, aka riparian habitats. Creeks are blocked off with boulders and dead trees so you can’t get next to them. Every and anything is ecologically important, that importance needs to be balanced with being locked out of the lands what belong to us.
One of the quotes from the FS person Armstrong in the article includes “we want to preserve it” ie a dang preservationist. Like humans bad, except me and my buddies, and no humans anywhere in nature is best.
Everywhere people go there will be damage, the answer isn’t to lock us out.
History tells us that the most “ecologically important” elements of a healthy forest is a healthy human population. The “Nature knows best” movement is based on fiction and apparently invented by misanthropes and their allies. This nonsense should have ended decades ago, in my opinion.
If the goal in the forest plan is to minimize the damage caused by recreation, that could include trying to preserve the most sensitive sites by regulating how people use them. But the other half of this balancing is figuring out the best places to put more people.
Hi Jon: The goal of the forest plan should be to make recreation as safe and as enjoyable as possible for visitors. This “minimizing damage caused by recreation” focus is an arrogant cop-out by the planners. My BS degree was in forest recreation and we looked at these problems in detail — but from a proactive perspective, not a “human as pathogen” focus.
Just as misguided is the idea that these folks are in the best position to figure out “the best places to put more people.” wow. This should be the decision of local residents and visitors, not some distant USFS bureaucrats trying to define “damage” and tell the rest of us what we can and can’t do based on their personal biases.
There’s a reason the woods are on fire, wildlife are dying by the millions, rural communities and schools are going broke, and the air is so polluted that thousands of people are dying. USFS planners and environmental lawsuits seem to be in lockstep.
I guess there isn’t a problem that isn’t caused by planners and lawyers. (And maybe you missed the first word in my comment.)
I would call your proposal to not let the Forest Service (“bureaucrats”) manage national forests a little extreme.
Hi Jon: Local people managed the forests for thousands years. When USFS took over about a century ago, they were often staffed by local people. When I was a young adult, USFS employees were still local folks — sometimes multi-generational. Then in the 80s things began to change.
I would say the so-called “management” of our federal lands by the current crop of USFS is beyond “extreme” and should have been stopped and redirected 25 years ago. My opinion, based on experience and observation.
And no, the root problem is voters and politicians (many with a legal background) — the lawyers and planners and the bureaucrats who follow their directions are just the tip of the iceberg.
Saying the problem is “voters” sounds worse – kind of anti-democratic.
That’s why we’re republicans not democracy. Not sure why that is “worse.”
Why do the National Forests have to bear the brunt of hosting everyone who wants to recreate in a forested setting? Why aren’t other landowners/land managers providing recreation? Yes, in some places, the Forest Service is the dominant land owner, but in others it is not. What did the FS think would happen with their multi-year “It’s All Yours!” campaign?
This article at least is talking about the front range of Colorado, where basically all public land is Forest Service. Colorado doesn’t have much state land, or at least land that is open to the public. Unlike neighboring states like Utah, Colorado state trust land is closed to the public, and most of our state parks are relatively small and concentrated around reservoirs. BLM land is sparse on the eastern slope, with the largest pocket around Canon City. Otherwise most BLM land in CO is on the western slope around Grand Junction or around Silverton. So simply by virtue of public land ownership in the front range mountains, the burden falls almost entirely on the Forest Service.
I can’t count the number of campsites I’ve witnessed that remain unoccupied despite being “reserved”, while at the same time people are circling the loops looking for a site. No-Shows are a serious problem.
The recreation.gov website that handles camping reservations is seriously inadequate, because it has no way of properly managing no-shows, which according to some FS employees and campground hosts, is significantly high. So many campsites will remain empty, despite the website showing no availability.
The company- Booze Allen – has no incentive to fix this, since they have already been paid for the site. With today’s technology, including the ability for hosts to have internet service via satellite, there’s no excuse for the government to not free up sites if they’re unoccupied at the required check in time.
And critically, there is no penalty for no shows, who simply don’t have the courtesy to cancel their reservation, thus allowing someone else to enjoy the site. No shows should be penalized, and I propose that they be banned from the reservation system for a year.