Terms of Use

California Camping Guide is a curated editorial guide to the best camping destinations in California. These terms explain what the site is, how you can use it, and what we expect in return. By visiting the site, you agree to these terms.

What This Site Is

This site is an editorial guide, not a booking platform, not a database, and not a service you log into. There are no accounts, no uploads, no posts. Everything you see was written, designed, and selected by us. You browse, you read, you go camping. That's the whole relationship.

We are not a government agency, a reservation system, or a ranger station. When we recommend a campground we are pointing you at a place — we do not run it, maintain it, or control whether you can get a site there on the night you want one.

Camping Is Not Risk-Free

Wildfires, floods, road washouts, bear encounters, hypothermia, dehydration, poison oak, mountain lions, falling trees, and closed roads are all things that happen in California. We do our best to keep the guide accurate, but conditions change faster than we can update pages, and the final call on whether it's safe to camp somewhere on a given day is always yours.

Before you go, check the relevant agency directly — NPS.gov for national parks, parks.ca.gov for state parks, the local BLM or Forest Service field office for public land, and the park or host's own page for reservations, fire bans, and closures. We provide context, not clearance.

Intellectual Property

The editorial content, design system, photography, code, and overall feel of California Camping Guide are our intellectual property. You are welcome to read, share links, and quote short passages with attribution. You may not copy the guide wholesale, scrape it, republish it, feed it into a commercial dataset, or present it as your own work.

The underlying data has its own licenses. Private-land campground data comes from Hipcamp and is subject to their terms. Map tiles and geometry come from OpenStreetMap and CARTO. Weather data comes from Open-Meteo. Tide data comes from NOAA. Wildlife data comes from iNaturalist. Each of those sources has its own attribution requirements, which we honor and which flow through to you.

Acceptable Use

Use the site the way it was built to be used — read it, plan a trip, share a link with a friend. A few things we ask you not to do:

• Don't scrape the site, crawl it with bots, or bulk-download pages outside the rules in our robots.txt
• Don't attempt to break, overload, or reverse-engineer the site or its infrastructure
• Don't republish our picks, methodology, or editorial copy as your own
• Don't use the guide for commercial republishing without our written consent

Affiliate Relationships

Julian and Daniel both work at Hipcamp, and private-land campground data on this site comes from Hipcamp. We are open about that relationship because it shapes what we have access to. It does not shape which campgrounds we recommend. Our methodology is published. If Hipcamp ends up with more picks than public-land campgrounds, it is because the private-land data is significantly richer, not because anyone is paying us for placement.

What We Provide

The site is provided “as is.” We do our best to keep it running, accurate, and up to date, but we cannot guarantee:

• That the site will always be available or free of errors
• That every recommendation is current, since conditions, closures, and ownership change
• That third-party data sources (weather, tides, reviews) will always be accurate
• That any particular feature will keep working the same way forever

We are a small project run by two people on the side. We will do our best, but we have limits on our liability. To the fullest extent allowed by law, California Camping Guide and its creators are not liable for any damages resulting from your use of the site or your decision to go camping based on what you read here.

Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms. If we make significant changes we will update the “last updated” date at the top of this page. Continued use after changes means you accept the new terms.

Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California. Any disputes will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in California.

Contact

Questions about these terms? Email hello@californiacamping.guide.