About TentSpots
TentSpots is a map of places to pitch a tent in Oregon and Washington, put together by a few people who went to them.
How it started
It started with us and our friends struggling to find a place for the tent: on road trips, and even more on summer weekends.
So in 2019 we started writing it down. We walked campground loops and photographed the sites one by one, often in 360°. We flew a drone over the campgrounds and stitched the pictures into high-resolution maps. And we pinned the places in the forest where people pitch a tent outside any campground: along the Clackamas, the Collawash, the Cispus and the Wind River, some of them up forest roads where you leave the car at a gate and walk the last quarter mile.
By the end of 2020 there were more than 1,600 spots on the map.
What is on the map
- 1,695 spots, 1,110 of them outside any campground
- 683 photographed on the ground, 350 with a 360° view
- 34 campgrounds mapped site by site
- 49 drone maps
Most of it is within a few hours of Portland: Mt Hood and the Clackamas, the Santiam and the McKenzie, the Cascade lakes, Mt Adams and the Gifford Pinchot, and the Olympic Peninsula.
The place to start is the campground guides, which say which site to take at 22 of the campgrounds, or the sites by the water near Portland. For a night outside any campground there are pages for the Sandy River near McNeil, the Clackamas River before the 2020 fire and the Nisqually River below Mt Rainier.
The 2020 fires
On Labor Day 2020, the Riverside Fire burned down the Clackamas, and the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires through the Santiam Canyon. They burned over campgrounds we had photographed site by site the year before. In August 2026 the Clackamas burned again, in the Austin Fire.
- Sunstrip Campground: closed since the 2020 fire
- Roaring River Campground: closed since the 2020 fire
- Lazy Bend Campground: closed since the 2020 fire
- Fish Creek Campground: closed since the 2020 fire
- Armstrong Campground: reopened after the 2020 fire; closed for a time by the 2026 Austin Fire
- Ripplebrook Campground: reopened after the 2020 fire; closed again by the 2026 Austin Fire
- Lake Harriet Campground: closed for 2026 after the Austin Fire
- North Santiam State Recreation Area: reopened after the 2020 fire
We kept them. Each page says what happened, what the land manager says now and when we checked, next to the photos from before: for anyone who remembers them, and for the day they open again. What happened to each of them.
How old this is
Most of the photos are from 2019 and 2020, and three in four of them we can date to the minute: the phone wrote it into each file's name. On two Fridays in July 2019 we photographed eight campgrounds up the Clackamas, one after another, from Promontory Park at 10:14 in the morning on the first to Lake Harriet at 4:35 in the afternoon on the second. Two Fridays on the Clackamas.
Forests change: trees come down, roads wash out, campgrounds get redesigned. Where we know a place has changed, its page says so. Before you go, check with whoever runs the land: the Forest Service, Oregon State Parks, or Washington DNR.
Tell us
If you have camped at one of these places since we did, we would love to hear what it is like now: support@tentspots.com. The same address works for anything wrong on the site. And if you want to know what the places were like when we were there, read the notes we left.
Earth is a big place, and there is always a tent spot for everyone.