Credits

California Camping Guide is the work of a lot of people and places, most of whom will never know they made it possible. This is an attempt to name them.

Team

The site was created by Julian Bialowas and Daniel Tomko. Julian handled the product design, art direction, and editorial voice. Daniel built the methodology — the Bayesian scoring, the shelter-type normalization, and the review pipeline that turned 16,000 reviews into 84 picks. Both work at Hipcamp and built the guide in the hours around that.

Data

Every pick in this guide is downstream of data generously made available by the following sources.

• Hipcamp — Private-land campground data, reviews, and the shelter-type booking data that made our scoring methodology possible
• National Park Service and California State Parks — Public-land campground information and review data
• OpenStreetMap contributors — Base geometry for every map on the site
• CARTO — Map tiles for the California overview and destination maps
• Open-Meteo — Live weather conditions on every destination page
• NOAA — Tide and sea-level data for coastal destinations
• iNaturalist — Wildlife observations feeding the species context on destination pages
• US Naval Observatory — Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and lunar phase data

Inspiration

The look and feel is a direct reworking of the 1970s California State Parks pocket guides — one bold color per destination, clean type, no photographs, the same restraint that government designers practiced fifty years ago. The full story of how those brochures became the design system of this site is at /about/design.

The organization of this page, the methodology writeup, and the legal documents all borrow structure from field.directory, Julian's travel-logging project and the closest thing this guide has to an older sibling.

Typography

• BN Axel Grotesk — The workhorse display and body face, by Brandon Nickerson
• BN Pelican Script — The warm cursive used in the site wordmark
• Lydian Bold — A nod to the vintage field guides the site is built on top of

Stack

• Next.js 16 with React 19 — Framework
• Tailwind CSS v4 — Styling
• MapLibre GL — Interactive maps
• Framer Motion — Page transitions and subtle motion
• cmdk — ⌘K / Ctrl+K command palette search
• Vercel — Hosting, edge network, analytics
• Porkbun — Domain registration

Tools

• Figma — Design
• Warp — Terminal and development environment
• Notion — Documentation and editorial drafts
• Linear — Project management
• Claude (Anthropic) — AI pair for code, copy, and research

Thanks

To the rangers of the California State Parks system, whose pocket brochures from the 1970s are the reason this site looks the way it does. To the hosts on Hipcamp who open up and share their private land for campers to experience. To everyone who has ever written an honest campground review. To campfires, granite, and dirt roads.

Contact

Something we forgot to credit? Email hello@californiacamping.guide and we'll fix it.