A good campsite is chosen, not stumbled into. The difference between a comfortable night and a long, cold, wet one usually comes down to a few decisions made in the last hour of daylight: how far you are from water, what is hanging over your head, where the rain will run, and which way the wind comes through. None of it is complicated. It is mostly a matter of looking up, looking down, and giving yourself enough time to do both.
Give yourself time before dark
The single most useful habit is to start looking for a site about an hour before sunset, not at last light. A site that looks fine in the dark can turn out to sit in a drainage, under a dead limb, or on a slope you did not notice. Pitching in daylight lets you walk the area, check overhead, and feel the ground before you commit. If you are heading somewhere unfamiliar on public land, read up on what is allowed first - the dispersed camping guide covers the basics of where you can legally camp outside a developed campground.
Once you are in the rough area, slow down. Walk a few candidate spots. The best site is rarely the first flat patch you see, and the extra ten minutes spent comparing two or three options pays off all night.
Look up for what can fall on you, look down for where the water will go. Most bad nights come from skipping one of those two.
The 200-foot rule: water, trails, and other camps
Leave No Trace recommends camping at least 200 feet from water, trails, and other camps. Two hundred feet is roughly 70 adult paces, so you can step it off without a tape measure. The point is not arbitrary. Camping right on a lakeshore or streambank tramples the fragile riparian zone where most plant and animal life concentrates, fouls the water people and wildlife depend on, and blocks the corridors animals use to reach a drink. Backing off 70 steps protects all of that and gives you a quieter, more private camp.
The same setback applies to where you cook, wash, and dig a cat hole. Keep all of it 200 feet back from the nearest water. On heavily used public land, established sites that already sit closer than that are sometimes the responsible choice because concentrating impact beats spreading it, but the default you aim for is the full 70 paces. For more on the legal side of spacing and where these rules come from, see our notes on legal camping near you.
Flat, durable ground
You want ground that is close to level and that can take the wear without being damaged. A slight slope is fine and can even help drainage, but pick the direction: sleep with your head uphill, never across the fall line, or you will roll into the tent wall all night. Run your hand or foot over the spot and clear the obvious rocks and roots before you lay anything down. What feels like a small pebble through a sleeping pad at 9pm feels like a fist by 3am.
Durable surfaces matter as much as flatness. Camp on rock, gravel, dry grass, pine duff, or ground that previous campers have already hardened. Avoid fresh vegetation, soft moss, and in desert country the dark, crusty cryptobiotic soil that takes decades to form and crushes under a single boot. Choosing the durable surface is the core of low-impact camping, and it is the same logic whether you are in a tent, under a tarp, or in a natural shelter - the bushcraft shelter guide walks through matching your setup to the ground you find.
Look up: widowmakers and overhead hazards
Before you decide on a spot, look straight up. A widowmaker is a dead branch, a hung-up limb, or a leaning dead tree that can come down without warning, and they kill campers every year. Wind, a heavy dew, or nothing at all can drop one in the night. Scan the canopy directly over your sleeping area and a little beyond it for:
- Dead or broken branches still attached to live trees, especially large ones.
- Limbs already snapped off and hung up in the branches below, waiting to fall.
- Standing dead trees (snags) within reach of your tent if they topple.
- Leaning trees, trees with root plates lifting out of the soil, or trees with large dead tops.
If anything overhead looks questionable, move. There is always other ground. This check takes thirty seconds and is the one most beginners skip.
Drainage, flooding, and cold-air pooling
Now look down and read the lay of the land. Water runs downhill and collects in low spots, so a flat hollow that feels comfortable in dry weather can become a puddle in a night of rain. Avoid pitching in depressions, dry washes, gullies, or the bottom of a slope where runoff will channel through. A slight rise or a bench above the low ground keeps you dry. Never camp in a dry streambed in flash-flood country, even under clear skies, because rain miles away can send water down it fast.
Cold air behaves like water too. On clear, calm nights it drains downhill and pools in valley bottoms and hollows, which can run several degrees colder than the slope just above. If you are camping in cool conditions and have a choice, a spot partway up a slope or on a bench is usually warmer than the valley floor. The same low ground that floods in the rain is also the cold sink on a clear night.
Wind and sun exposure
A little exposure is good and too much is miserable. Some airflow keeps condensation down and bugs moving, but a fully exposed ridgeline or open flat takes the full force of the wind, which steals warmth and hammers a shelter all night. Look for natural shelter - a stand of trees, a low rise, or the lee side of a boulder - and pitch with the narrow, strong end of your shelter pointed into the prevailing wind. If you are tarp camping, wind direction decides everything about the pitch; our tarp shelter guide covers configurations that hold up when the weather turns.
Sun is the other half of exposure. Morning sun on the tent dries dew and takes the edge off a cold start, so an east-facing spot with open sky to the east is pleasant. In hot weather you want the opposite: afternoon shade to keep the tent from becoming an oven. Note where the sun will rise and set relative to your pitch before you stake out, not after.
Distance from game trails and wildlife
Game trails are the worn paths animals use to move between feeding, water, and bedding areas, and they are easy to mistake for a faint hiking trail or a tidy clear lane to camp on. Do not camp on one or block it. You are putting yourself in the middle of nighttime animal traffic, and you are disrupting the route they depend on. The same goes for obvious water access points and berry patches.
Keep a clean camp regardless of where you are. Store food and anything scented away from where you sleep, downwind if you can, and follow local rules on bear canisters or hangs. Backing off water, staying off game trails, and managing food smells together keep both you and the wildlife out of trouble.
Legal spacing for dispersed camping
On public land, low impact and legal often line up, but not always, so know the local rules. On most national forest and BLM land, dispersed camping is allowed away from developed areas, with common requirements to camp a set distance from water, roads, trailheads, and developed campgrounds, and to use existing sites where they exist. Many forests post a specific setback, frequently the same 200 feet, and some popular areas add designated-corridor or permit rules on top.
Stay limits also apply - typically 14 days in one spot before you must move on. Check the managing ranger district or field office for the exact distances and any seasonal closures before you go. Our guides to national forest camping and finding primitive camping near you cover how these rules vary by agency and how to confirm them for a specific area.
A quick checklist before you pitch
- Time: Are you choosing in daylight, with an hour to spare?
- Water: Are you 200 feet (about 70 paces) back from water, trails, and other camps?
- Ground: Is it flat, durable, and clear of rocks and roots?
- Overhead: Did you look up for dead limbs and snags?
- Drainage: Will rain run away from you, not into you, and are you out of the cold-air sink?
- Exposure: Is there some shelter from wind, and do you know where the sun comes up?
- Wildlife: Are you off game trails, with food stored away from your sleep area?
- Legal: Are you within the local rules for distance, stay limit, and closures?
Run through that list and the decision usually makes itself. Choosing a campsite well is a skill that gets faster with practice until you are reading the ground without thinking about it. Until then, the checklist does the remembering for you.
Affiliate disclosure: Some links in this article are affiliate links. If you buy through them we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It does not influence which products we recommend. Read our methodology.