This just happened to me the other night.
I’m in a dispersed camping spot in a National Forest. It’s not crowded. I go to sleep around 9:30PM and wake up at 4:30AM to someone parked right next to me. There’s no trees between us and no possible way that they did not see my car.
As I drive out of the forest I pass dozens of empty spots.
This has happened to me twice. Who are the people who do this? There’s no rational explanation for it.
Am I crazy or is the weird thing actually where you drive to a national forest and “dispersed” camp in your car?
In my mind dispersed camping is when you maybe drive to a trailhead but then actually camp after hiking several miles into the forest.
If I saw a car parked in a parking lot I would not assume anyone was sleeping in it.
Maybe it’s a regional thing?
Yeah, depending on where I’m going, there are specific areas you can bring your car around to if you’re deciding to camp in the car lol parking lots, in my experience, are for day trippers and people looking to drop their car off and hoof it to the stream for fishing or go deeper to camp/backpack.
Edit: West Coast/Rockies and foothills mainly for me.
Dispersed camping is any designated campsite that allows you to show up and go as you please. In Montana, they’re everywhere and frequently have spots to put your RV or car. “Dispersed” is a designation by the NFS for these sites
Not to quibble but technically dispersed camping, according to the USFS, is camping anywhere outside designated sites. The distinction is important because people believe they can’t camp on USFS (or BLM) land for free, almost anywhere they want. In fact with relatively few exceptions and with a bunch of rules like time limits, proximity to water sources, fire restrictions etc etc, you can.
Yeah that’s totally fair, I felt weird writing that because that was how I was brought up thinking of it. I suppose where I live, the dispersed camping is very clean cut and does show up on NFS listings, so I’ve learned to think of it differently recently. I suppose at the very least me and many other people just call any first come first serve camping “dispersed” because of this 🤷♀️
Whatever the case, it certainly doesn’t need to be a backpacking spot.
I don’t see where they said they camped in their car. They could have easily parked the car at the site and then set up a tent, or like we do, towed a pop up camper there.
After rereading they do mention they’re at a campground. I focused on the ‘dispersed camping spot’ phrase.
The only conclusion I can come to is OP uses different camping terminology than I’m familiar with. For me ‘dispersed’ can have a broad range of meanings but always means ‘not at a campground’.
Even with dispersed camping (which is not at designated sites) you can still drive to them. We do so all the time. They’re very popular here in Colorado. We literally take a 27 foot popup camper there, my brother in law brings his toy-hauler, my in laws bring their class c. And you just drive right up and camp. There’s no marked site, it’s just dispersed.
Just yesterday I got back from a trip at a designated campsite, which was marked, and you were not allowed to camp outside of 100ft of the marker. Notably this was a bit further up the road from an actual campsite, which had rules about hours, restroom use, no equines, no dogs off leash etc. and the sites were maintained spots with gravel etc.
So there’s three levels, and dispersed is just the ‘free-est’ of them all, but it has no bearing on whether you can drive up and plop down a camper or not.