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In light of increasing demand to camp along Colorado's front range, planners of the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests are studying ways to add campsites and to make reserving sites more equitable.
The planners acknowledge, however, that there must be a balance between establishing more campsites and maintaining the natural state of untouched forestland. “I don’t think we’re ever going to meet all the demand for people who want to camp on the Front Range,” said 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.”
The Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests have 59 total campgrounds with 1,400 campsites which can be reserved up to six months in advance, meaning campsite reservations for the summer are snatched up as early as January. In order to make campsites more accessible to folks who cannot get vacation approval that early in the year, forest officials are brainstorming ways to incorporate a rolling reservation system that provides opportunities to reserve sites as summer gets closer.
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.
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It's just an incredible landscape. For folks who haven't been to that corner of Oregon, they'll be surprised to see thousand-foot cliffs, deep rushing rivers, and expansive sagebrush plains. We focus in on some of these key places like the Owyhee because they're worthy of that intensive effort to give them the protection they deserve.”
