Websites of the Week

Campsite Photo Websites

Photo courtesy CampsitePhotos.com

http://www.parkcampsites.com/ 

http://www.campsitephotos.com/ 

A couple years ago, my friends and I traveled to Rocky National Mountain Park and camped in the Moraine Campground. We were on the top of a hill, overlooking a large river valley filled with elk, with snow-topped Long’s Peak in the distance. Sometimes deer would come within a few feet of our trailers and graze. Other campers stopped by and invariably asked us, ‘how did you get those magnificent campsites?’

Just before the trip, I discovered there are websites which show you a photo of every campsite in a particular campground. Using these campsite photo sites, along with other resources such as Google Earth, I am often able to select the best places to camp in a particular campground.

Of course, no one website lists all the campgrounds everywhere, but the following two websites have quite a few of them.

• http://www.parkcampsites.com/  This website leads you to campsite photos on Google’s Picasaweb.com. Although only a few parks are listed, it is where I found Rocky Mountain National Park, and it does fill in some of the gaps left by the more robust website I found below. 

• http://www.campsitephotos.com/ This website is more comprehensive, including both private and public parks, as well as those campgrounds on BLM land and in the National Forest. Although it has parks listed at the bottom of its homepage, the campground directory on the photo page is searchable by state, region, or by park name. This website also has campground reviews, a park ranger blog, and a page listing campground resources, which includes both articles (‘How to plan for a camping trip’) and links (live webcams in parks, camping clubs, etc.) One caution, this site is sponsored by CMJ Media LLC and does have a lot of ads.

Review by Ann Willard, SWC Librarian