Altitude decides more about a night out than almost anything else on the map. It sets the temperature, the length of the season, how your engine breathes and how you sleep. Yet most campground listings leave it out, and the ones that give it often give a round number from a sign.
So we checked. For every federal campground with coordinates of its own we read the ground elevation from the US Geological Survey’s national elevation model, and we read what the managing agency says in its own description. This is what 2,576 drive-up campgrounds look like, stood in order of height, and what we learned about trusting either number.
The top of the list is one state
Two campgrounds in the record stand above 11,000 feet, and both are in Colorado’s San Isabel National Forest. Cordova Pass, in Las Animas County, is at 11,259 feet by the elevation model. North Fork, in Chaffee County, is described by the Forest Service as "the highest elevation campground on the Salida Ranger District" at 11,000 feet, and the elevation model puts its mapped point higher still, at 11,456.
Behind them come Guanella Pass, which the Forest Service gives as 10,900 feet, Sugarloaf in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest at 10,800, Fourmile at 10,722 and Echo Lake at 10,600. In all, 39 drive-up campgrounds carry a figure of 10,000 feet or more: 28 in Colorado, 7 in Utah, 3 in Wyoming and 1 in Nevada. Eight of those are an agency’s round 10,000, among them Wheeler Peak Campground in Great Basin National Park, which the Park Service describes as "nearly 10,000 feet" and the elevation model reads as 9,904.
Lower the bar to 9,000 feet and there are 163, of which Colorado has 101 and Utah 39. Above 8,000 feet there are 325.
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And the bottom
The lowest campground in the record is Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park, 198 feet below sea level. The park’s backcountry roadside camping record is mapped at 189 feet below. Then comes the coast: Assateague Island at sea level, and a long run of Gulf and Atlantic campgrounds within a few feet of it. In all, 82 drive-up campgrounds stand at or below 100 feet.
A typical campground tells the same story as the extremes. The median drive-up campground in Colorado is at 8,652 feet, in New Mexico 7,942, in Wyoming 7,776 and in Utah 7,400. In Texas it is 517 feet, in Alabama 129 and in Florida 33.
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Two numbers, and when they disagree
We expected the elevation model to settle every question. It does not, because the model is only as good as the point you ask it about, and the database’s point for a campground is sometimes the entrance, sometimes the lake beside it, and sometimes a mile up the mountain.
Where an agency’s own description states the campground’s elevation and we also have a model reading, which is 1,185 campgrounds and cabins, the two agree closely: half are within 59 feet of each other, and 958 are within 200. But 88 differ by more than 500 feet. One Utah campground that the Forest Service describes at 8,800 feet is mapped at a point the model reads as 10,394.
So the rule on this site is: the agency’s figure where it gives one, the elevation model where it does not, and no figure at all for those 88, because one of the two is wrong and nothing in the record says which. Each campground page says where its number came from.
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What height does to a trip
High camps are cold camps. Expect frost in any month near the top of this list, and a season that opens when the snow lets the road open and ends with the first autumn storm. The managing forest posts opening dates, and they move from year to year.
An engine that breathes air makes less power as the air thins, a loaded vehicle feels it on the climb, and stoves and people both work harder. If you live near sea level, give yourself a night at a middle elevation before you sleep high, drink more water than you think you need, and go down if a headache will not lift.
Height is also the best air conditioning there is. When the desert is unbearable in July, the campgrounds on this list are why people keep travelling.
What we left out
Coordinates are each campground’s own. We never borrow a parent record’s point, because a ranger district office can be forty miles from its campground. A Bureau of Land Management recreation area’s point marks the area and not a camp in it, so areas get no elevation at all.
The ranking is limited to campgrounds for which Recreation.gov lists at least one drive-up site, 2,576 of them with a usable elevation. That leaves out lookouts, cabins, hike-in camps and the first-come campgrounds the record knows little about, some of which are high. A campground missing from the top of this list may simply be missing from the database.
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Questions people ask
What is the highest campground you can drive to in the United States?
In the federal record, two Colorado campgrounds in the San Isabel National Forest stand above 11,000 feet: Cordova Pass, at 11,259 feet by the USGS elevation model, and North Fork, which the Forest Service gives as 11,000 feet. Campgrounds that are not in the Recreation.gov database are not in our count.
How many campgrounds are above 10,000 feet?
We count 39 drive-up federal campgrounds listed at 10,000 feet or more: 28 in Colorado, 7 in Utah, 3 in Wyoming and 1 in Nevada. Eight of them are given by their agency as a round 10,000.
What is the lowest campground in the United States?
Furnace Creek Campground in Death Valley National Park, California, at 198 feet below sea level by the USGS elevation model.
Where do the elevations on your campground pages come from?
From the managing agency’s own description where it states one, and otherwise from the US Geological Survey’s 3D Elevation Program, read at the campground’s coordinates in the Recreation.gov database. Where the two differ by more than 500 feet the page gives no elevation.
