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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

In the US, you can just go camping on islands if you want to get away.

Where I live, there's islands which are not owned by anyone in the rivers. (Check your county's GIS map for which ones) You can just go camp on those, no problem.

In the Great lakes, there's islands which offer ferries to go camping backcountry-style. I highly recommend visiting North Manitou Island, which is an abandoned farming/logging/vacation community where you can see the ruins of old houses and homesteads. There's also a south island which I haven't visited, which is a little less wild. Ferry runs from Leland, MI. Probably one of the best camping trips I've ever taken, beautiful.

My advice: Download Google Earth Pro (now free!) and just scroll around until you find something. Then search for info about said island, and see if anyone owns it (if not, you can probably just find a way to get there and camp).

As always: Leave the place cleaner than you found it!

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Beware traveling to Northern Michigan to camp! It's very crowded, noisy, and generally unpleasant. ;)

All seriousness though, as a local I've found it impossible to get into many campgrounds during the summer because of the tourism. Sleeping Bear gets booked months in advance. North Manitou is dispersed camping though, so you can just kind of show up. I'm not sure the ferry was running this summer though, because when we showed up on my buddy's boat they were saying something about the water being too low. South Manitou is very much a regular campground.

> Beware traveling to Northern Michigan to camp! It's very crowded, noisy, and generally unpleasant. ;)

And filled with yoopers, eh?

> as a local I've found it impossible to get into many campgrounds during the summer because of the tourism.

COVID revenge has made this problem much worse in recent years. Maybe next summer will be better.

I thought northern MI was full of trolls (people that live under the bridge to the yoopers)

I grew up in Michigan (lower peninsula) and was delighted to learn that the term for people like myself living beneath the Mackinaw Bridge (lower peninsula) are referred to as trolls.

It’s a nice bit of local color.

It's gotten pretty bad lately. I don't remember it being so busy when I was a kid.

> Where I live, there's islands which are not owned by anyone in the rivers. (Check your county's GIS map for which ones) You can just go camp on those, no problem.

Oh, you have to care about who owns the land in order to camp in the wilderness? Bummer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

Now listen. You can try camping on land which is owned by someone, and which is otherwise completely uninhabited. People do that all the time for various reasons without any issue.

But that is technically trespassing, and could get you shot or arrested. So you know, if you're going to do that, make sure you assess that risk carefully.

Sounds like yet another interesting survival challenge.

That depends on the state, many states are default open to travel in open land and require posting / signage to block free access. Pretty much all trespassing laws require notice first (of which adequate signage counts as notice) and you are not trespassing until you have been told to leave and don't.

Having been homeless and stealth camped extensively I can assure anyone reading that with no car and greater than .25 mi from a road or home you are invisible to 99.99% of population and 100% of local cops. The only guy that ever found me out was a forest ranger who wildly I randomly met on foot several miles away from nearest road in rugged terrain (and that was way too far for him to mess with hauling me to jail).

In my long career of first hitchhiking the world and then bicycle-touring/bikepacking it, I have spent hundreds of nights outside stealth camping, but I have been caught more often than you suggest happens. Farmers in some places do daily rides around their land to check for squatters or illegal tree-felling. Male friends so often like to walk into the woods and drink (and fire off weapons, which can be unnerving to one sleeping). And I’ve been told by forest rangers that they are increasingly using drones to surveil forests instead of having to go down every trail themselves.

Interesting. Your experience is wildly different than mine, although i admit I always restricted stealth camping to at night with a bivy the same color as the terrain and I have a pretty good sixth sense of good cover. I would have definitely avoided areas worn enough to suggest daily ride around or worn enough to be the no-thought default path of a drunk, which probably shielded me largely from your noted encounters.

> Oh, you have to care about who owns the land in order to camp in the wilderness? Bummer.

Downvoted because of the obnoxious tone of your comment. You could have made the same point in a more-engaging way.

I've lived and camped in countries with freedom to roam, and I've lived and camped in the US. I think that freedom to roam is a really cool notion, and also I think it's great that so much of the United States is owned by federal and state governments, rather than by individuals -- 40% according to one source [1].

In the UK, for example, only 8% of land is publicly-owned [2].

[1] https://www.summitpost.org/public-and-private-land-percentag...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-engla...

Within the overlanding and bicycle-touring community, there are frequent complaints that so much of the federal-owned land in the United States (BLM land) is out west. If your travels are towards the east of the country, it can become very challenging to camp. In the Nordic countries that have freedom to roam, that freedom to roam is everywhere, even right outside the major metropolitan areas.

With family roots in ranching, one of the concerns with freedom to roam in the US for landowners (in particular for land used for livestock and agriculture) is a lack of respect for others/natural resources. Existing public use areas in the US already regularly get trashed in some parts of the country by those who fail to practice leave-no-trace. And my family has had existing issues with poachers and trespassers cutting fences, leaving gates open (which becomes a liability when livestock enter roads), and even shooting livestock. I personally like the idea of FTR, but putting on my ranching hat to see from that perspective, we might need additional legal protections to protect landowners from damages and liability.

Yet the BLM land is mainly distributed precisely in those western regions where also ranching is done. Campers don’t feel such a need to roam on ranching land, because they could plan a trip around the BLM land. Out east where there isn’t much BLM land, there isn’t much ranching either.

I definitely understand the harm that inconsiderate travelers can do. Throughout Latin America ranchers are quite accepting of cyclists crossing their land, but the one thing you hear them complaining about is those cyclists not closing gates behind them.

>Within the overlanding and bicycle-touring community, there are frequent complaints that so much of the federal-owned land in the United States (BLM land) is out west.

Not only that, but much of that land is basically uninhabitable; there's a reason it's all managed by the BLM. It's not really a good place for hanging out in nature unless you can haul a LOT of water with you. It's far from civilization, much of it is arid, there isn't much cover if any. Even the roads aren't really fit for riding a bicycle (or even driving a car); you could use a full-suspension mountain bike I suppose, but that's not what bicycle touring is about.

> you could use a full-suspension mountain bike I suppose, but that's not what bicycle touring is about.

But it is what “bikepacking”[0] is about, a term that over the last decade has started to crowd out “bicycle touring” among younger generations. People are intentionally searching for rough roads, even singletrack and hiking trails, and especially in North America! (But you overestimate the need for suspension.)

Water is indeed something one has to plan around. I have cycled several hundred km of rough roads in the American West and met quite a lot of people living in vehicles on BLM land, just moving every two weeks. They of course were able to haul in all the water they needed for days on end, while a cyclist on rough roads can carry no more than about 15 liters at a time.

[0] http://bikepacking.com

> Downvoted because

You’re an American national?

I like how you take offense to my banter tone (obnoxious) and then bring up a national park squarage comparison out of nowhere. Just embrace the pissing contest.

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