Thor Forums

[Pureguava68]

I live in Eastern Oregon. The dispersed camping ban only affects State Forests, which is a small part of Oregon public lands. Eastern Oregon is dominated by National Forest and BLM land, with quite a few Oregon State Parks, where all the campgrounds are still closed. Dispersed camping (non-campground) has always been a problem and it's really bad now because A) Lots of people have been off work and have time to camp, and B) There's not much else open to do, and there's spillover from established campgrounds being closed. So all over the backroads in the Blue Mountains of NE Oregon, anywhere that's reasonably flat accessible by a road has a camp set up, usually with a multitude of UHV's; four wheeler ATV's, side-by-sides, and motorcycles. Add to this a redneck mentality that's shared by many around here and a steady flow of alcohol and...there you go. I should add that we've had a lot of unseasonably great weather, but that's over with now.

I'm sort of surprised the Feds haven't shut down dispersed camping in all the National Forests. The site we occupied a few weeks ago had fresh human waste with toilet paper all over the place, even right next to the road that's been getting a lot of traffic. It took some shovel work to make the site habitable. There were a lot of broken beer bottles we had to clean up to the best of our ability; the penalty for putting broken glass into a campsite should be public pistol whipping in my opinion.

There are a lot of good people out too that leave there sites better than they find them, so hopefully things are settling out with workplaces opening and a whole lot of very wet weather!