CampsiteFit

Notes

What the data says about campground lengths, written from the same corpus the site measures. Every figure links back to where it came from.

  1. Late snow on the Cabinet Mountains in western Montana, above a valley of conifers and open meadow.

    Altitude does not shrink campsites

    Sort federal campsites by elevation and the share taking a big rig halves. Sort within one agency and the effect disappears — height stands in for something else.

    · 4 min · methodology · elevation · lengths

  2. Two identical wooden campsite marker posts standing side by side in an empty gravel clearing — an illustration of one record counted twice, not a photograph of a place.

    How 232 campgrounds were counted twice

    A federal API returned some campgrounds twice, this site wrote each copy as a separate campground, and every figure it published was inflated for two days.

    · 3 min · methodology · corrections

  3. A paved campground loop at Lake Arrowhead State Park in Texas, a fifth wheel backed onto a pad on one side and travel trailers on the other.

    Pull-through against back-in

    Across every federal campsite a pull-through barely beats a back-in for a big rig. Inside each agency the gap is large, and at the Corps it runs backwards.

    · 4 min · methodology · lengths · fifth wheel

  4. Snow over the loop road and campsites at Mather Campground on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, tents pitched between ponderosa pines.

    Season is the field nobody publishes

    Season is the question this audience asks most, and the federal data answers it for 6.8% of campgrounds. Here is why, and what we refuse to do about it.

    · 5 min · methodology · season · sources

  5. A walk-in tent site at Mowich Lake Campground in Mount Rainier National Park: a levelled gravel pad, a picnic table and two steel bear boxes, with no road in sight.

    The campsites you can only walk to

    4,196 bookable federal campsites are reached on foot or by boat. The source says so in a field almost nobody reads, and 193 of them were publishing a rig limit.

    · 3 min · methodology · access · corrections

  6. A single small tent pitched among ponderosa pines and granite boulders at Marion Mountain Campground in the San Bernardino National Forest.

    The sites that take no rig at all

    16,129 bookable federal campsites permit only tents or horses. Most of them publish a driveway length anyway, and that number is not a rig limit.

    · 4 min · methodology · lengths · tent-only

  7. Three different kinds of rig parked side by side at a Bureau of Land Management recreation site — a Class A motorhome, a fifth wheel and a travel trailer.

    When the RV number is not your number

    Federal campsites publish a length per equipment type, and they disagree on 5,872 of them. Three times out of four the RV number is the generous one.

    · 3 min · methodology · lengths · fifth wheel

  8. Campsite 27 at White Spar Campground in the Prescott National Forest: a paved driveway spur in the foreground, and beyond it the gravel pad holding the picnic table and fire ring.

    Why a driveway is not always a parking pad

    Only 3% of federal campsite answers come from a driveway measurement, and getting that 3% wrong is how a cabin came to advertise room for a half-mile rig.

    · 3 min · methodology · lengths

  9. The wooden entrance sign for De Motte Campground in the Kaibab National Forest, aspens turning yellow along the road behind it.

    What "max RV length" actually means

    Two in five campgrounds that publish a maximum RV length are describing exactly one site out of hundreds. Here is where that number comes from.

    · 3 min · methodology · lengths

  10. A long fifth-wheel trailer set up at the edge of a mown field at Tolt-MacDonald Park in Washington, a suspension footbridge crossing the river behind it.

    Where a 38 ft fifth wheel actually fits

    The share of federal sites taking a 38 ft fifth wheel runs from 0% in Vermont to 91% in Iowa. Who runs the campground predicts it better than the state does.

    · 7 min · states · lengths · fifth wheel