22 Less Crowded National Parks
The Guardian: 22 Less Crowded National Parks Here's an interesting article I stumbled across listing 22 less crowded national parks. One of the first was The Dry Tortugas. No wonder it's less cro...
Forum Discussion
DallasSteve wrote:
I have no experience with National Parks/National Forests. Can you explain the difference? Do National Forests have paved roads or campsites with hookups?
From an RV standpoint there is no real difference between NP and NF. But the article had nothing to do with RV’s. Frankly RVs are not “camping” to most Europeans. They are caravaning. Camping implies carrying your tent, if any, on your backpack.
National Forests are under the Department of Agriculture. Their (DA) purpose is to manage the forests in a manner consistent with a goal of long term survival of a he forest. Except for designated wilderness areas, every part of the national forests is expected to be logged at some point. The DA is supposed the manage that so part of the forest is growing, part is near maturity, part is being replanted, etc.
The primary purpose of the Department of the Interior is focused on management of government owned lands outside of National Forests. The different agencies role goes from the National Park Service which allows almost no intrusive activity to the Bureau of Land Management which has goals of allowing and monitoring mining, cattle grazing, oil exploration and drilling on much of the government owned land.
Those are broad terms/ missions.
As far as management of campgrounds, the National Park Service has many. Most tend to be older, without utilities and have smaller sites. Even then, they are often among the most popular campgrounds in the country.
Frankly, the legislation which establishes each National Park makes it very difficult to upgrade many of those 60-70-80+ year old campgrounds.
The level of upgraded / RV friendly campgrounds varies by agency, but BLM in my experience seems to have many of the more RV friendly campgrounds within the DOI group.
(However, the infrastructure available greatly limits the ability to upgrade some of the most remote, most beautiful locations. It is simply impossible to get sufficient electricity or water or build large scale wastewater treatment plants in some locations).
National Forests have fewer restrictions, and given time and money, some forests are building upgraded campgrounds. Cagle and Double Lake campgrounds in the Sam Houston National Forest north of Houston are examples of excellent National Forest FHU campgrounds. They are also contract campgrounds, operated by a vendor, not NF rangers.
The largest agency in the US federal government that operates campgrounds is under the Department of Defense - the US Army Corps of Engineers. In some states like Texas and Arkansas, the COE operates dozens of campgrounds, many with FHU sites.
