California Camping Guide

This is a curated, opinionated guide to the best camping in California. Not a database. Not a directory of every site in the state. Just the places we think are genuinely worth your time.

We built it because we kept giving friends the same camping advice over and over. This is that advice, organized.

The guide covers 24 destinations across every region of California—the coast, the Sierra, the desert, the north woods, the central valleys. Each one is a place we have spent real time in, not just researched from a distance.

Alongside the destination guides, we have put together a set of topic guides for the questions that come up most: where to camp for free, how to actually get a reservation, the best spots if you are bringing a dog, family-friendly options, and where to go when you decided to go yesterday.

Every recommendation is backed by data. We read over 16,000 reviews, applied Bayesian scoring to separate signal from noise, and normalized demand by shelter type so the best tent campground isn't dragged down by its RV numbers. Read about our methodology.

The site was created by Julian Bialowas and Daniel Tomko. Julian is a designer at Hipcamp and a photographer who has spent years documenting the wild edges of California. Daniel is a data analyst at Hipcamp with an instinct for finding the spots that are worth the drive. Together they make a decent camping research team.

The look and feel is a direct reworking of the original California State Parks pocket guides from the 1970s, reimagined for the screen. One bold color per destination, clean type, no photographs—the same restraint those government designers practiced fifty years ago, now driving every page of this site. Read about the design.