How to find FREE CAMPING In National Forests & Public Land in Michigan | Dispersed Car Camping

[Music] welcome back to the channel and as you can probably tell by the last few videos we've been doing a lot of car camping lately and with everything going on with the virus i haven't really been too excited or really wanted to stay in hotels too much so our preferred method of travel this year has been car camping specifically dispersed camping which is actually free and one question i get asked all the time lately is how do i actually find these spots in this video i'm going to do my best to explain where you can camp in michigan for free how i specifically find those spots and what apps we use and then we're also going to take you out in the field where we actually go out and find a spot to camp for the night and the reason that i don't just respond to everybody and give them a bunch of camping spots is because people are kind of secretive about their camping spots i understand for good reason and i know if the upper peninsula has actually been getting hit really hard this year with a bunch of campers that they're not used to i think that's probably due to the virus everybody's looking to get out and camp locals are complaining that their spots are getting ruined because once a photo and a location is posted online everybody flocks to it some access roads have even been closed due to overcrowding and people being stupid and leaving their garbage i definitely don't want that to happen and there's more than enough public land especially in michigan for everybody to enjoy so i'm going to show you guys how easy it is to actually find your own spots so i guess let's just get right into it so some of you might not even know that you can legally camp for free i know i didn't until a few years ago and i'm actually gonna link up in the corner if you guys haven't seen it our first time car camping in marquette back in 2019. but in michigan you can actually camp for free on any state-owned land or national forest land which is technically called dispersed camping and basically you just kind of find your own spot in the middle of the woods and obviously there are a few restrictions so there is tons of state land in michigan and we have three national forests so the state land is actually ran by the dnr the department of natural resources and the national forest land is ran by the forest service and the rules vary a bit between the two but there's a few general rules that apply to all of them i'm going to link in the description all the resources you'll need for the rules for camping on state land and then all three national forests here in michigan and if you're not michigan all this information does apply to you you just have to look it up based on your state and your national forest so now that we've determined where you're able to legally camp now we actually just have to figure out how to find these spots i know that when i was first starting i would look at this map and be like okay so where'd you even start to begin looking now first off there are sites that do post public campsites like i think ioverlander and freecampsites.net but honestly i try to avoid using those because usually they're not legitimate spots or if they are they're very popular very crowded spots most of them in michigan actually are just where people have just kind of pulled over on the side of the road and find a spot to camp for the night which isn't necessarily legal but i know that some of those websites are a lot better out west this is just my experience with it using it in michigan so feel free to check it out if you want but i would definitely recommend finding your own spot and the whole point for us about getting out and wanting to be off the grid and disperse camp is to be as far away from people as possible and that's usually what you're going to find on national forest or state land okay so the apps that i primarily use when i'm scoping for these spots is google maps and google earth and land grid all of them are actually free there are other paid apps that you can get but i just prefer to use this because it's free alright so we are going to actually hop into the computer for a second and i'm going to attempt to record my screen and show you guys what i'm doing here all right so here we are um we have google earth google maps and then this is land grid and land grid is actually an app that you're able to search for all parcel data so basically to see who owns the lan that you're on so we'll find the spot on google map and then we'll actually verify in land grid who owns the property before we go out there so the first things first is this is a huge map of michigan and obviously you can see right away the hiawatha national forest in the upper peninsula is very clearly marked and the reason i like using google maps is because you're able to see here the dark green um kind of outlines the national forest and state forests if you go in the lower peninsula kind of where we're going to be at later in this video is um the dark green parts in here is also considered state land so it's kind of hard to tell on google maps but like you can see the state forest this whole area right here so actually we might use that as our first okay yeah so let's just say that we want to go all the way up to mackinac island and we want to find a camp spot somewhere in the middle here right here so we can camp um before we get to the bridge so what i would be doing is basically looking along we're going to be coming up 75 most likely but we'll just say we're going to look for this see all of this dark green this is all areas where we can we can look so since this is actually labeled roscommon state forest area i'm just going to zoom in and now that we know this is the green area we can kind of use satellite to actually see what it looks like um okay so it actually looks like this is all two tracks back here which is actually perfect we might have found a perfect example here so okay so the first thing is you want to find the opening in the two tracks so this is actually like i said pretty easy so right here is the opening so if you go here this looks like it's all pretty open here um it's all state forest what i'm going to do is i'm just going to click right here and i'm going to take this here and copy it and then we're going to go over to land grid and we're going to try to paste that in here and there it is okay so i'm gonna zoom out a little bit and all right so we can see this water here and how big this parcel is so this is basically showing us this entire area is basically all of this so it's a huge area and the owner named state of michigan dnr so that checks out so that is good to go that shows us that this is campable land all of this back here is state of michigan dnr so this is really the most important thing is the owner name right here so once you verify that the land that you're on who it's owned by and that it's legal to camp there you can kind of scope all around this area and see if you find any other more camp spots so here is a ton of like openings and stuff right here so you would have to just verify that those are still state-owned land but you might be able to find a better spot and that's kind of what i use google maps and google earth for all right so that's kind of just an example if you don't really know what you're looking for you want to just look for underdeveloped areas that have tons of trees and you want to look for those two tracks and then once you find the two tracks you just have to find the openings to the main road but now i'm actually going to show you on the computer and scope out a spot that the first spot that we went to to kind of show you how you can kind of get an idea of what the landscape is going to be like on google earth all right so when we were with roman we were in lake anne um and this is the area around the pearl lake area so there's a bunch of like hills and two tracks and stuff back here but you can't really tell from this so what i like to do let's just see let's put up let's just put a random we're going to take this and we're going to copy the coordinates and we're going to take it into google earth and let's see all right and here we are so reason i use google earth is because it gives you like you can zoom in like let's say we wanted to get hold on let me see here i think where we were was actually right up here so see how you can actually see the topography here and the hills let's see can i go any more flat but yeah you can actually see this is where we were and you'll see us in the video this whole entire area was really gorgeous and i like using google maps because you can actually like i said turn around and get a 360 degree view and you can almost see what it's going to look like being right there so you can zoom all the way out and kind of see how deep in this two tracks you are but you can also use this to kind of judge with the land whether or not you're going to be able to make it in your vehicle and like i said i just like looking at it because it gives you a completely different view okay so now that you kind of see my process behind the scenes of how i actually scope these spots before we go out now i'm going to show you the first spot that we scoped out with my friend rome and we went camping in lake anne so the first spot that we went to was a spot that i just showed you guys on google earth it was a long two tracks that went through a piece of state land that was actually pretty hilly and a lot more scenic than i was expecting because i actually hadn't looked this up beforehand roman did and the two tracks ended up leading us to this perfect little camping spot on the ledge that i just showed you guys and these are exactly the types of places we were trying to find we didn't see a single person in the area and that's when we spur the moment decided to film this video because i know roman probably get asked this a lot more than me so i'll just cut to that footage that we filmed now we want to show you guys how we're actually trying to find these spots because it's not like we're just driving around aimlessly roman over here is like the perfect he's a professional map basically and he knows if i need to know anything about a map or anything about michigan in general he's the one i asked all right so what we're doing right now is we're going to scope out our next spot that we're going to check out we're still using the languard app we're right here now so we're going to go back out to the main road and see all these parcels yep department of natural resources so we're still good here with public land owner state let's see what it says private okay so i saw a little two track here but when you click on it obviously that has private ownership so we're not going to take that one and if we tried to drive down it i'm sure there would be a no no trespassing sign anyways so state of michigan looks like there's a two track right here probably not driven on too much i wonder where the entrance is to that oh looks like it's over here so we can see is this public yep state of michigan so we're gonna go drive down this two track maybe check out this opening down here if we can get there um yeah we're gonna look for some openings so hopefully we can do some astrophotography tonight and if you have noticed we're pretty close to empire about five minute drive so right next to sleeping bear dunes hardly any campgrounds up here the ones that are up here are really expensive all right here is our two track here here's that piece of land we're just looking at two track let's see anything that says no motor vehicles nope this is a street sign so this is all stateland state forest land so you can camp anywhere here as long as you're away from the road and away from other campgrounds looks like it's a little bit overgrown for maybe a you know more full-size pickup truck which tells me this road probably doesn't get too much traffic which is a good thing if you're camping yep because we want to camp as far away from people as we can we don't want to see any people you want to get lost in the woods something tells me this is going to be a really nice spot too motorized use prohibited that's funny because uh it's like people must have ripped out the signs at the start of the road or something but yeah so this is a no-go probably better safe than sorry to follow the rules there's plenty of other beautiful places here so that's what happened so that's actually a perfect example of how it's not always super easy i've actually never seen the motor vehicles sign so that was a surprise to me so we went like a mile down the road and found another two tracks entrance and these are the roads that i'm used to seeing and that's how you know you're good to drive down all right so this is the second spot and plenty of camping here for multiple people there's a fire pit right in there and we saw somebody camping in a van on our way in here so this is another great spot which was maybe less than a mile down the road from the last spot and i think this is where the van guys have a pretty nice fan sign up yeah 22 secret jealous and we're only about what 500 feet 200 feet off the main road yeah and here that is the main road there so you don't have to go super far off the main road so we're just looking at the languard app all right so we are let's see just you know stone's throw from empire sleeping bear dunes some state-owned land owned by state of michigan and yeah like there's two tracks everywhere here look at all these potential spots you could draft any of these there's another good spot right up here go check that out right now let's see and yeah here is another potential spot i think we like the other one better but yeah got a fire pit here secluded it's very very windy on the other side of these trees and being tucked in here you have no wind to worry about and if i'm honest with you most of these two tracks that you've seen us go down today i think pretty much any car maybe you might need like all-wheel drive or some type of suv that's lifted a little bit but if you have some clearance on your vehicle you can get to any of these spots yeah there's not too many rocks in the lower peninsula it's mostly sand that'll get you so if you have all-wheel drive you're you're pretty much going to go anywhere so so we ended up going back to that second spot that was tucked away in the pine trees because that first spot was awesome but it was super windy so the pine trees definitely helped block the wind planning to make one video explaining all of this and then showing us camping but this video is already super long i can already tell so i think i'm just going to cut it up into two videos which you guys will see next week so bear with me this was technically my first like tutorial i don't know if i did everything correctly um but really i hope this was helpful for you guys i know that when i wanted to go out and start finding my own camp spots i was really overwhelmed and didn't really know where to start so shout out to roman for the idea and wanting to film this video but if you don't follow him on instagram already definitely go check him out because he not only does he post amazing photos but he's super knowledgeable with anything in michigan especially camping and anything outdoors he's actually supposed to be making a youtube channel soon so if he's already started it or if there's anything i can link in the description i definitely will go check him out you won't be disappointed i'm sure he's gonna have tons of outdoor camping stuff on his channel as well but yeah like i said hopefully this is helpful for you guys let me know down below if there's any questions you have i'm happy to answer them i'm gonna try to answer all the questions in the comments and again please make sure if you do go out camping that you follow the leave no trace rules and you leave things better than you found them and if you did use this information and you do find a cool spot let me know i would love to know if this actually helped you guys but yeah so stay tuned next week for the rest of this video where we actually camp and roman cooks a super gourmet meal over his wood burning stove that he brought out thank you guys so much for watching and i will see you in the next video [Music] peace

Channel: Felicia Fullwood

Views: 49,343

Keywords: how to find free camping in national forests, free camping michigan, how to find dispersed camping, dispersed camping michigan, Dispersed Car Camping, how to find free dispersed camping, dispersed camping national forest, how to find free camping, national forest dispersed camping, landgrid, michigan camping, car camping, suv camping, felicia fullwood, michigan public land, national forest free camping, free camping, michigan car camping, michigan dispersed camping rules

Id: XtMepnvT_48

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020