A perfect camping spot cleanses the soul—provided the soul can survive the despair-inducing project of actually booking the campsite. Two-thirds of campers in West Coast states now struggle to book sites, according to The Dyrt, a campsite booking platform—no surprise to anyone who’s ever awakened at dawn to rapidly click refresh on, say, recreation.gov. Even nabbing a random site on a random Wednesday can prove out of reach. Booking a public campsite in northern California is, as the New Yorker once put it, a “blood sport.”
A new state law, the Low-Impact Camping Areas Act, or AB 518, aims to meet some of the surging demand for camping by streamlining the approval process for the small private campgrounds that dot rural lands. The law’s supporters contend that more of these campgrounds will expose more people of all backgrounds to nature, ease pressure on public lands, and provide an economic lifeline to struggling farmers, ranchers, and other rural landowners. “It’s at this intersection of outdoor access, conservation, and economic development,” says Cassandra Prenn-Vasilakis, senior manager for government and community relations at Hipcamp, the San Francisco-based campsite booking platform that sponsored the bill.
“We’ve been really worried about camping access in California,” says Lexie Gritlefeld, director of California Outdoor Recreation Partnership. “[This law] expands access to nature. That’s honestly why we supported it more than anything.”
The new law comes at a tenuous moment for public campgrounds. In March, months before the federal government shut down, nearly 4,000 U.S. Forest Service campsites in California faced potential summer closures due to Trump administration budget cuts and layoffs, according to a New York Times report. Now, in the shutdown’s fifth week, campgrounds that remain open lack staff to maintain them, manage them, or collect revenue—at Yosemite National Park, for instance, campers can drive right in for free, and staff are “very, very limited.” “At a time when outdoor access is under threat, and I would say harshly curtailed at the federal level … you want to be giving local governments the ability to expand and manage recreational and camping opportunities,” Prenn-Vasilakis says.
Private lands of the kind that might host small campsites are also the “new frontier of conservation,” as Bay Nature has reported. Often they’re not pristine wilderness but working lands like ranches and farms. Still, such places do provide habitat for an array of creatures, some of them rare—western pond turtles hang out at livestock ponds, for example. Campgrounds can help landowners fund conservation efforts. And if the sites are maintained in an eco-conscious way, they can also inspire visitors to be better environmental stewards.
Previously, private landowners in California with more than one campsite had to get both local approval and a permit from the state Department of Housing and Community Development. According to Hipcamp, the permitting process—which was meant for mobile home and RV parks, not small campgrounds—could take years, cost up to tens of thousands of dollars, and leave landowners confused about what they could and could not do.
Now, while local rules, such as county ordinances, still apply, a state permit will no longer be needed for private campgrounds that:
- Reside on rural parcels of at least two acres, with no more than one campsite per acre. (This does not limit sites from being near each other, but rather establishes a maximum number of sites.)
- Have no more than nine campsites, including no more than four RV sites.
- Limit stays to 14 consecutive nights, or 28 nights per year.
- Comply with local rules regarding human waste disposal, trash, noise, and fire.
- Don’t allow on-street parking.
- Ensure that a host or property manager is always available by phone.
It remains to be seen how the new law will affect the Bay Area. Counties have to opt in to eliminate the state permit requirement. But it raises the possibility that more private Bay Area campsites could be on the way.
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Gritlefeld acknowledges that private campsites are generally more expensive than public ones. “Not every Hipcamp campsite is equitable,” Gritlefeld says. “But I do think it will level the playing field a bit more.” She points out that sites listed on Hipcamp, the so-called Airbnb of the outdoors, are usually far cheaper than non-camping alternatives, such as a hotel room, especially in touristy places.
AB 518 was backed by environmental groups like Audubon California, outdoor equity groups like Latino Outdoors and the Black Surfers Collective, outdoor retailers like REI, and various farm bureaus and local governments. It sailed through the state Legislature, passing in the Assembly unanimously and in the Senate by a 35–1 vote before Governor Gavin Newsom signed it on October 1.
Its critics raised concerns about wildfire risks. The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors expressed its opposition in February, with the board’s chair writing that the bill would stress already overburdened local fire districts, and that some residents feared it could jeopardize their home insurance. The Solano County Board of Supervisors, meanwhile, worried the bill “would impose unfunded administrative and enforcement responsibilities.” The Sempervirens Fund, which advocates for the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, wrote in a letter that AB 518 does not provide basic fire, wildlife, and habitat protections.
At a public meeting in September, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors discussed what kind of private camping it would allow in line with AB 518. Supervisor Ted Williams didn’t object to camping in general, but moved to restrict campfires. “Imagine we authorize it and in the first month somebody lights a fire and takes out one of our communities,” he said. “We’re all going to feel really foolish that we allowed it.” Williams added that just one irresponsible party could “burn us down.”
Hipcamp representatives note that campfires very rarely cause wildfires; they say campers who booked on their site spent 1.7 million nights outdoors in California from 2014 to 2024 without ever causing a fire emergency. Prenn-Vasilakis says a campfire is no riskier than a backyard barbecue or fire pit, and that “there’s no one more invested in fire safety than the property owner.”
Some new private campsites have been known to strain neighborly relations. In 2022, a Paso Robles vineyard owner told the San Luis Obispo-based New Times about how, without additional revenue, he’d probably have to sell. In the article’s comment section, people who said they were his neighbors objected to the way he’d altered the land to put up camper trailers—one person wrote that the farmer couldn’t be too strapped for cash since he drove a Maserati SUV and another compared the “unzoned trailer park” to a “particularly ugly fungus.”
Still, extra revenue gleaned from tapping into California’s roughly $81.5 billion outdoor recreation economy can be a lifesaver. A Sonoma County ranch owner who preferred to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns tells Bay Nature that rural landowners in her area are constantly solicited by real-estate developers, and that the six campsites on her redwood-laden property help her and her husband pay off their multiple mortgages. “We want to keep it as natural as possible,” she says. “But it’s difficult to do that without being independently wealthy, which we are not.” She’s also part owner of a separate, southern California ranch that in recent decades has become surrounded by housing and light industry. “It’s extremely sad to see,” she says. “And it was all economic pressures.”
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Near Muir Beach in Marin County lies Slide Ranch, a 134-acre nonprofit outdoor education center, that offers a vision of how small private campgrounds can benefit not just ranchers and farmers, but also land trusts and nonprofits. (It isn’t subject to AB 518, because it’s inside the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.) So far this year, revenue gleaned from its 10 or so walk-in campsites has funded 521 full-day visits for students from low-income communities, says Myla Marks, Slide Ranch’s executive director. “For a lot of the youth we serve, it’s their first time seeing the ocean, milking a goat, pulling a carrot out of the ground,” Marks says. Youth groups always have priority, she says, but outside campers are welcome, too, to pitch their tents, explore the tidepools and trails, enjoy tranquil views of the coastal bluffs and Pacific Ocean. And the next available booking was, at the time of writing, just three days away.
