Find Dispersed Camping Sites From Home - Gaia GPS + Google Earth Pro

well hey guys welcome back to wasting time in the woods today we are talking about how to find beautiful free dispersed camping spots from the comfort of home what is dispersed camping well it's kind of like campground camping except instead of this view you get this one in this video i'll show you how to find beautiful and isolated spots from home we'll look at the different public lands that are accessible and the various rules that govern their use for recreation we'll go through the software tools web resources and techniques i use to find spots like this now if you're too busy to watch this video i totally understand maybe you can just keep camping with these guys maybe they can help you pitch your tent [Music] all right guys before i get started i want to thank expedition essentials for sponsoring this video expedition essentials is your trusted off-road and overland outfitter providing a whole range of bespoke mounting solutions for comms tablets and more and you're gonna need all that stuff when you drag your family down 75 miles of blown out fire roads to the world's sweetest campsite they make a range of vehicle specific dash mounting options so you can cleanly wait is it cleanly that's better so you can cleanly add radios phones ipads and everything else it takes to navigate to beautiful and remote places outdoors they make the mount that i'm using in our gx460 so please check them out i'm glad you did all right guys i love camping and one of the things that i love most about it is the sense of solitude and adventure but it's hard to get that sense of adventure when you're in a campground sitting on a concrete table listening to a bathroom door slam every 15 minutes that's where dispersed camping comes in dispersed camping just means camping outside of a developed campground we tend to disperse camp in national forests but people disperse camp in all sorts of places welcome to camping with steve we're going to camp in a culvert tonight the problem is that well there's a whole world out there and most of the places that the dart hits might not be the best place to set up shop with family for the weekend hey girls get your sleeping bags we're going to salton c national refuse pond the hell is that you'll want to focus your search on public lands that are approved for recreation and there is a lot of it about half of the western u.s is public federal lands and a lot of it's open for recreation about two-thirds of the public land in the west is split between the forest service and the form of national forests and the bureau of land management or blm blm land tends to be a lot of the desert landscapes but you can camp on blm land anytime anywhere for up to 14 days in one spot you can stay there so long because a lot of it looks like this and some of it has a lot of this stuff laying around there's also some really amazing areas managed by blm they manage national monuments nature preserves and other undeveloped places that could make an amazing crowd free experience and there are a ton of overlanding routes that go through wildlife preserves managed by blm it's also a great place to look in winter since most of it is at lower elevations national forests tend to be the higher elevations and come with trees and shade we're from phoenix and we've probably seen enough desert for one lifetime so we tend to stick to the forests when we get away but we do run the occasional blm trail in the winter like where my gx went into check engine limp mode last year near the mexican border national forests have a ton of resources there's usually field offices some of which have water refilling and it's pretty easy to get somebody on the phone to ask about the latest conditions flagstaff ranger district how may i help you hey i am uh headed up to the kachina peaks area uh this weekend i just had a few questions if you got a minute sure i can definitely help you out with that what is your question they also have a fairly comprehensive websites designed when bill gates was the ceo of microsoft our favorite local forest coconino national forest covers about 2 million acres including large parts of arizona's moguian river it's our favorite because it's only a couple hours away and it's full of pine forests and little hidden meadows camping on the edge of a meadow means that we can leave the dogs and the kids off leash without worrying too much the rules for dispersed camping can vary depending on what national forest you're in so you'll need to check with the specific forest and field office that you're headed to for their specific regulations but in general most national forests are pretty welcoming to disperse campers in coconino you can camp almost anywhere there is a road and in some designated areas you can drive off the road up to 300 feet and still be legal seriously a football field you can drive your truck off the road into the woods a football field and still be legal now coconino is on the more permissive side some are a lot more restrictive make sure that you check with the forest services website for the restrictions in the specific area that you're headed to to identify a good dispersed spot ahead of time you'll need three things you'll need an idea of where you're going an accurate off-road trail map and some sort of satellite imagery like you can get from google maps or even better gaia gps or even better than better got a gps for the premium membership i think that was stupid i'm gonna rewrite that gaia has become the standard for off-road navigation because it has so many different map layers you can use it on the web or on a tablet or even the phone and best of all it's free to use it offline on the trail or to combine map layers you'll need a premium membership but even the free version will work for finding campsites from home and at around 40 bucks a year i think it's well worth it to just go for the premium version i'll put a link in the description below so that you can uh check it out on your own all right now let's take a look at how i use gaia to find campsites at one of my favorite areas grab my ipad here i probably start by looking at gaia's satellite with topo map that would give me roads and toppo info as well as pretty pictures from space then i would come in here and i would add the motor vehicle use map which you can see are these little snaky looking lines it might be easier if i turn down the topo roads now this is the official motor vehicle use map in the area what is the motor vehicle use map well it's the national forest map that shows which roads are still in use and which ones you're allowed to drive on it's also the only thing stopping your kids from skull bashing you from their booster seats if you drag them through friday night traffic and down 20 miles of forest roads only to end up staring at a locked gate in the dark now if you don't have a gaia premium membership you can always use the gaia base layer which is a pretty good topple map with roads and then you can get the mvmus digitally from your local national forest coconino publishes one not every forest does publish one but if there is one available make sure that you get it the nice thing about gaia premium is that they've gathered all these free and paid maps for you all together in one spot and you can kind of cross-reference and you know refer to one or the other now whatever you do don't rely solely on the gaia topo-based layer for your roads it's full completely full of old 4x4 roads that are either overgrown or don't exist anymore and some of them even have one of these at the end of them wait sorry i meant one of these now back on the map i can see that there's a ton of promising little meadows around this area this one right here is actually one of our favorite there's actually nothing calling out this spot at all on the national forest website i just kind of stumbled across it using this exact same process but this is one of the coolest places to camp in coconino national forest here's some shots of my kids and dog frolicking in the meadow but it's essentially a private meadow and then you have another private meadow right around the corner that you can walk to it's just a beautiful pristine little meadow at the end of a high clearance 4x4 road and there's a few people back there from time to time but not that many people know about it it's one of the sweetest places to camp in coconino and i found it using this exact same method just cruising satellite data looking for areas that overlay next to a road i'm probably ruining it for everybody who goes there by telling you guys about it but it's worth it all right so let's take a look at another example if i wanted to camp say i wanted to camp with a view like a an escarpment zone or a cliff i would turn on the satellite with toppo and crank up the resolution or crank up the transparency on it and then just kind of look around for different cliffy areas now with the satellite with top of you you can see just immediately where the cliffs are because of how close these lines are so you can start thinking that you know if you're on the edge of a cliff and there's not another mountain right in front of you oh wow you might have a really cool view right so this actually is an area that i've been to before i love this little meadow and it's about an eighth of a mile back from this really cool cliff on the mogeon rim now once i found my spot what i can do is add i'm gonna add google earth over here side by side with google earth you can see down to the fire pit level it's a handy way to look around the area for established camping spots it's also a great way to preview that epic view that you just found when you're trying to convince your family why they should drive through the night on friday to get a good start on that three day weekend you're about to ruin all right so once you've got them open side by side what i like to do is just kind of drop a pin of where i'm going and then you can see the latitude and longitude that's in gaia now i'm going to switch over to google earth here and unfortunately i actually have to type in the latitude and longitude because you can't copy and paste that anyway that i found anyways maybe you guys can help me out and help me figure that out but here it is on google earth so you can see i mean we can get way down here and say you know is there an established camp spot is there a bunch of camp spots in the area if we see you know a bunch of motorhome roofs in there probably not our spot right probably too high of use of an area but if i come down here let me get rid of this so you can see on gaia the road actually comes down right to the edge of the cliff and [Music] if we follow that oh there's the road right there so i'm going to make google earth a little bit bigger you can kind of see the road in there and as we get around we can see oh there's a circle right there that's probably an established camp spot right on the edge of a cliff now we can get in here and go oh hey that's going to be our view right so there's our camp spot right oh let me try and get it there there's a little meadow that we could camp on if we weren't comfortable camping at the end of the road but if you see this little road comes all the way down here all the way to the edge of this just immense valley it goes all the way back down i mean it's like 100 miles across so anyways that's how i combine google earth and gaia to kind of preview the different areas before we get there with the desktop version you can even preview the sun path and figure out the best places for shades throughout the year alright that's pretty much my whole process sometimes i use a little bit more google earth sometimes i use you know go back and forth a little bit more and sometimes i just stick to gaia depending on if it's an area i've been to quite a bit but before you drag your family off into the bush you're going to want to check a few more boxes start by going to the national forest website and making sure that there aren't any fires in the area or new road closures now you're also going to want to figure out the weather for the exact location that we're going to just typing in nearest town doesn't really do you much good if you're on a cliff 2000 feet above and 15 degrees cooler than that town i use the national weather service website which allows you to click where you're going to go on the map and it'll develop a specific forecast for that small area anywhere in the country now you can't plug in latitude and longitude so you have to get to the general area first by typing in zip code or finding the closest town but then you can kind of scroll around click the map and it will update to that location well that's pretty much my entire process for finding dispersed campsites from home i usually pick two or three sites in advance and that way if i get there and one's occupied i've got a backup going so that i can just redirect to plan b now i might do a video specifically on gaia down the road but there's a ton of overview videos and resources on that already to get you started all right guys if you have tips on finding great spots from home drop a comment in the description below make sure to hit like subscribe and share while you're down there we'll see you out there

Channel: Wasting Time In The Woods

Views: 60,930

Keywords: BLM camping, boondocking camping, boondocking car camping, car camping, dispersed camping, dispersed camping arizona, free camping, free camping in arizona, gaia gps, gaia gps basics, gaia gps for beginners, gaia gps ipad, gaia gps offroad, gaia gps overland, gps tutorial, how to plan an overland trip, lifestyle overland gaia gps, national forest camping, off road navigation, offline maps, wilderness navigation

Id: rlYM4OHfdtY

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021