An Idaho campground ranked on this outdoors site’s list of top 50 in the U.S.
An Idaho campground made the list of celebrated summer campsites curated by a company that helps people find and reserve spots.
Hipcamp, which lets landowners list private cabins or campsites for recreational vehicles or tents, announced its list of 50 Favorite Places to Camp in America Right Now in early June. It includes sites from 30 states and the Navajo Nation that Hipcamp said were selected through a mix of science and subjectivity — by weighing reviews and ratings alongside editorial discussion and regional trends.
Idaho’s City of Rocks Campground made the list. The site has 69 standard campsites and three group sites, according to the National Park Service, including several that allow RVs. The campground sprawls through much of the 14,400-acre City of Rocks National Reserve, which is co-managed by the National Park Service and Idaho State Parks and Recreation. The state manages reservations for the campsites.
“City of Rocks Campground is moated by the City of Rocks, an amassing of monoliths and escarpments towering sixty stories tall, and the campground itself should be equally as high on anyone’s must-camp list,” Hipcamp’s writeup boasts.
The granite surfaces have made the national reserve extremely popular and renowned for rock climbing, but it has plenty of other attractions.
There are hiking, mountain biking and equestrian trails through the reserve, as well as historical sightseeing spots from the California Trail, an offshoot of the Oregon Trail that took travelers to various parts of California. One short trail takes visitors around Camp Rock, which bears the signatures of California Trail emigrants that were left in axle grease in the mid-1800s.
The National Park Service notes City of Rocks is also a diverse bird habitat prized for bird watching, and in 2023 it was named a Dark Sky Park by DarkSky International, making stargazing another draw for would-be campers.
Though Hipcamp does not rent the campsites inside City of Rocks, it does have several partner sites directly outside the national reserve in towns like Almo and Oakley.
The camping app said in its news release that its campsite inventory reached 500,000 last month. The 50 Favorite Places to Camp list included a variety of locations from across the U.S., including an oceanside farm near San Francisco, a secluded waterfall getaway in Georgia and two drastically different camping experiences outside of Utah’s Zion National Park.
