Ten wilderness campsites in the US, and how to actually get a night at one

You can't drive to Isle Royale, and that single fact explains most of what's good about it. It's an island in Lake Superior reached by boat or seaplane, and once you're on it you travel on foot or by paddle. The Park Service runs 36 campgrounds across the island. Every one has a water source and an outhouse, and some of the ones on the Lake Superior shoreline add screened shelters. A roof over a backcountry site is rare, and in blackfly season it's a gift.

The permit side is refreshingly plain. Every overnight stay needs one, but a party of six or fewer faces no lottery, no eight-in-the-morning click and no camping fee at all. Groups of seven or more do have to reserve ahead and pay $25 per permit. The park's daily entrance fee is charged separately either way. What you should be booking months out is the crossing.

Big Bend keeps 42 designated backpacking sites in 14 campsite areas along the High Chisos trails, and your permit names the exact one you sleep at. Each has at least one animal-proof food storage box, which tells you plainly what the park expects to come past in the night. Parties are capped at 15 people. The South Rim, where the mountains simply stop and the view on a clear day runs across the Big Bend country to the mountains of northern Mexico, is the reason anybody carries a pack up there.

Water first: there's nothing reliable in the high country, and the park publishes a separate page telling you never to stake your life on a backcountry source. Then the toilets. The South and East Rim sites have had no vault toilet since the 2021 South Rim Fire destroyed it, so human waste has to be packed out from those two. A stretch of the East Rim Trail and campsites ER-4 to ER-9 close from 1 February to 31 May each year to protect nesting peregrine falcons; for the 2026 season the park found no evidence of nesting and left them open.

There are three ways into a Glacier permit, and most people only ever try the first. The early-access lottery is one application window, 15 March in 2026 for standard groups of one to eight, a $10 non-refundable fee, and 3,000 advance reservations drawn from everyone who applied. General sale is the second: it opened at 8 a.m. Mountain on 1 May with whatever the lottery didn't take. The third is the one worth knowing about. The park holds roughly 30% of all sites parkwide back for walk-up campers.

Gunsight Lake itself sits in a bowl below the pass, and on a still morning the whole headwall lands upside down in the water. It's a small campground, six sites, and it doesn't open until 15 July. Camping is $7 per person per night on top of the lottery fee, and be clear about that $10: it's a non-refundable application fee whether you win or lose, and it doesn't count towards the camping.

The Rae Lakes Loop is 41.4 miles from Road's End and crosses Glen Pass at 11,978 feet. The lakes are the reason people walk it, not something they pass on the way somewhere else. Fin Dome stands over the basin, and the water is the color that makes people distrust photographs. Check the park's own page before you commit, though. The South Fork Kings River bridge above Paradise Valley washed out in the winter of 2016-17, a replacement isn't due to start before 2027, and the Park Service says the ford can be extremely hazardous and may force you to backtrack.

A bear canister is required on the Rae Lakes Loop from 1 May to 31 October, and the park is blunt that hanging food generally doesn't work in these mountains. Camping at Rae Lakes is also limited to one night per lake, which is how the Park Service stops the basin turning into a village. Outside the quota season permits are free and self-issued, and that's a real option for a settled week in late September.

Crater Lake sits directly under the Maroon Bells, a short walk up from the Maroon Lake parking lot, and it's the shortest approach to a permitted wilderness site here by some way. Which is exactly why the Forest Service rations it as hard as it does.

It's one of three zones, with Conundrum Hot Springs and Capitol Lake, where the permit names a specific campsite and you're required to sleep in that one. Campfires are prohibited at every designated site in those zones and anywhere above 10,800 feet, an IGBC-approved bear-resistant container is required of every backpacker in the wilderness, and dogs are banned outright from the Conundrum zone. The fee is $10 per person per night from 1 May to 31 October, children 16 and under free, plus $6 to make the booking. Permits themselves are required year-round, but from early October to late June the sites, passes and trail are under snow and the trailhead may not be drivable at all.