One of the things that I’ve puzzled over for for some time, is the practice of hiding officially designated roadside camp sites and primative camping areas from their website and from offical signage on primary roads.

The DEC never puts a sign up along a road saying “Camping Area”, although they do often designate individual sites along the roads with smaller markers. It’s always signed as “C.C. Dam Assocation”, “Moose River Plains Wild Forest”, “Mountain Pond Fishing Area” with no information on camping activities, despite having dozens if not hundreds of designated road-side camping sites.

It’s not like people can’t figure out where primative campsites are located by searching the Internet for other web sites, driving around on state truck trails, checking topographic maps, studying Unit Management Plans, and talking to people who have been their previously. Things are not really hidden, it’s that DEC just doesn’t make it obvious.

To make matters worst, the DEC varies greatly in their policy towards putting campsites on their online interactive mapper. Some camping areas are not included in their interactive mapper at all, while other are in part or whole. Some designated camping areas on the mapper, require a free permit from the DEC, although you would never know it from the website.

The DEC also does not provide public access to the shape files used to draw the data in the online interactive mapper. Despite one’s repeated attempts to contact the Department for acess to that shapefile, the GIS director has never responded. If you wanted that incomplete shapefile, you would probably have to FOIL the agency, and no guarantees that the department would provide access.

There are probably a couple of rationals for this disorganized policy towards primative camping:

• Discourage over use by keeping camping areas known to a limited number of people who’ve spent the time discovering them on their own
• Discourage ‘casual’ use by youth who seek simply places for partying and generally making a mess with beer cans and other unburnable trash, damage to vegetation, and generally getting themselves in trouble
• Competition from State-owned DEC Campgrounds, many of which are money makers for the DEC and help fund other activities of the department
• Disorganization in the DEC regional offices, which may not sychronize their data with DEC Headquarters in Albany.
• Regional DEC Offices desire not to share with the DEC in Albany, a list of campsites that do not comply with wild forest guidelines due to spacing or frontage issues.
• Regional DEC Offices would prefer people contact the forest rangers directly about camping opportunities, so they can better control use of their lands and maintain a kind of fiefdom over them.

Regardless, it would be nice if the Department of Environmental Conservation, in the form of it’s regional and state offices, would be honest with the public about camping opporunties across the state. The public owns the land, and the public has the right to know about how it can be used, without directly having to contact individual forest rangers, which may or may not be honest or helpful.