Free Legal Camping in NY State Forests

More on this excellent advice:


For those that want to go "Into The Wild", but with 1) smaller bears (and ZERO POLAR BEARS), 2) milder winters (that are still pretty hard, but not Alaska-hard), and 3) stores you can get to in a couple days walking, should check out the 2,928,000 acres of Forest Preserve land in the 6.1 million acre Adirondack Park where primitive camping is allowed. This park is 52% private land, but the public parts are HUGE.

Timothy Englert said:

IF you are traveling across southern NY/PA border, be sure to check out the NY-DEC website list of numerous state forests.
Most allow free camping up to 3 days with groups up to 10 persons.
The DEC has state forests all over NY but there are 100s of them along the southern counties.
List of State Forests - https://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/34531.html
DEC Campgrounds & Day Use Areas - https://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/7825.html

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Thanks for this info. If you ride your bike to one of these state forests, is there an entrance fee?

LuckyMinnie said:

Thanks for this info. If you ride your bike to one of these state forests, is there an entrance fee?

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Not generally; however, be careful to not ride on hiking trails. People will bitch and the DEC cops will find you and give you a ticket. The only other issue is tweakers cooking in certain areas, so the cops watch places known for that pretty close.

I wouldn't recommend the Adirondack area unless you stay far away from the high peaks region. I've camped and hiked through there, it's loaded with assholes, and the forest cops actively patrol the trails in that area. I had to camp several hundred yards away from any trails to have some peace from them. They will roll up your tent and leave it in a pile if they find it setup out of bounds from a designated campsite in certain areas. Alleghany national forest would be much better, but towns are pretty far apart there. Also, there are tons of state forests all over that you can pretty much camp anywhere for free, but there is absolutely no vehicle access. So they are very much like a national forest, but you can't drive in them. If you are in foot, that's not a problem.