We Built a Free Alternative to AllTrails. Here's Why.
We Built a Free Alternative to AllTrails. Here’s Why.
AllTrails wants $36 a year now. The Dyrt wants $35. Recreation.gov takes a $3 transaction fee on top of a campsite you already paid for with your taxes. The outdoors — the actual dirt and trees and water that legally belongs to all of us — is getting repackaged and sold back piece by piece.
We built Trek4Free because we got tired of it.
It Started in 2015
In 2015 I was trying to plan a camping trip in the woods. Nothing exotic. I wanted to camp near a good trail run — sleep somewhere close to whatever I was there to actually do. Spent two hours jumping between five different websites. One for trailheads. One for dispersed camping rules. One for BLM land. One for weather. Another one to figure out if there was a swimming hole anywhere near the route.
Five tabs. Two hours. One trip.
I built a site called OutsideMyWay to solve that problem. Get the data into one place. The federal stuff — the public land information that’s technically free and publicly accessible but buried so deep in government databases that most people give up before they find it.
It worked. Then 2019 happened, technical problems caught up to me, and I lost the site before the 2020 COVID camping explosion — when suddenly half the country wanted exactly what I’d spent five years building.
Now we’re back. This is Trek4Free.
What We Are
We’re not a subscription. We’re not asking for your email address to show you a map. We’re not running ads next to the trailhead you’re looking at. We built this because we needed it to exist, and we kept building because other people needed it too.
What we have: national forest dispersed camping, BLM sites, Army Corps lakes, trailheads, swimming holes, hot springs, petroglyph sites, dinosaur trackways — across the entire country. The data that doesn’t come up in a casual Google search. The places that are genuinely free and genuinely public but require either local knowledge or a lot of browser tabs to find.
What we don’t have: state parks. You can Google those in 30 seconds. The state systems have decent websites and they’re easy to find. We’re focused on the harder stuff — federal and municipal locations that most people never discover because they’re buried in government databases most people don’t know exist.
Camping Is Not an Activity
Here’s the philosophy behind all of it: camping is not an activity. It’s a place to lay your head at night, close to whatever the actual activity is.
The activity is the trail run. The kayak. The scramble to the ridge. The swimming hole. The campfire happens after.
If you want a platform that treats the campsite as the destination — pull in, set up the awning, plug in, done — we’re probably not your website. There are plenty of sites that review campground amenities. Go find one. We’re not judging.
But if camping is where you sleep so you can be somewhere useful when the sun comes up — if you want free dispersed camping that puts you close to a trail, within reach of a swimming hole, and far enough from the road that you can actually hear silence — that’s what we built. Find the campsite and then see what’s within 8 miles of it: trails, swimming holes, hot springs, local events. No other free camping directory does that. We do.
The Outdoors Is Getting Smaller
Here’s what actually motivates this: the outdoors is getting smaller.
Not literally. The land is still there. But access is getting harder. AllTrails locks offline maps behind a paywall. The Dyrt locks dispersed camping data behind a subscription. Recreation.gov adds transaction fees to campsites that cost nothing to build. State parks book out months in advance. Entry fees keep going up.
The land still belongs to everyone. The data about the land is getting fenced in.
We’re not going to fix that. But we’re not going to participate in it either.
Trek4Free is free. No ads. No email signup. No premium tier with the real features. If you want to support it someday, we’ll probably find a way to let you — but right now we’re just fighting for the idea that public land information should be publicly accessible without a subscription.
We Have the Scars
We’re not professionally sponsored. There’s no Monster Energy deal, no Red Bull contract, no marketing budget. Nobody’s cutting us a check to say we love the trails.
What we have is this: years of actual use. Trips where the plan fell apart and the backup was a forest road and a sleeping bag. The kind of trail falls that end with you looking at your palm under fluorescent lights wondering how deep it is.
We keep going back. That’s the credential.
The people who built Trek4Free are the people who use it. Not a marketing angle. Just true.
Who This Is For
If you’re a trail runner looking for a new loop and a free campsite to wake up near — we built this for you.
If you’re a van lifer who’s done with Walmart lots and wants real coordinates for legal dispersed camping near something worth waking up for — we built this for you. (We’ve written honestly about the parking reality nobody warns you about.)
If you haven’t camped since you were twelve and you want to try again without $300 in gear you don’t need and $50 for a site that looks like a parking lot — we especially built this for you. Start here: minimal gear, get outside more.
If you’re an RV person and the campsite is your activity — you’re going to want a different site unless you’re into serious boondocking in remote areas. In that case, come find us out there.
Open the Map
We started this in 2015 because someone needed to. We’re still here because the problem didn’t go away — it got worse.
No login. No paywall. No ads. Just the map.
Trek4Free covers free dispersed camping, hiking trails, swimming holes, hot springs, ancient sites, and outdoor events across the United States. Every listing links to nearby outdoor spots — no subscription required. Browse free camping by state →