Top 10 States for Winter Camping
Researchers from Outdoorsy have put together a list of the top states for warm weather winter camping. Though winter is now creeping around the corner, that doesn’t mean Americans want to stop going outside to enjoy a nice campfire.
Camping tends to follow seasonal patterns, but Outoorsy’s research shows you can still enjoy warm weather winter camping if you go to the right place. It looked at weather statistics from the NOAA and land area statistics from the USDA to rank states based on a variety of factors including average maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and monthly precipitation from December to February, as well as total land area devoted to parks and wildlife.
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Without further ado, these are the top 10 states for winter camping:
- Florida
- Arizona
- Texas
- California
- Louisiana
- Nevada
- New Mexico
- North Carolina
- Georgia
- Alabama
Florida won on account of its temperature. With an average high of 70 degrees and an average low of 47 degrees from Dec-Feb, it is by far the warmest winter state. It also has an average amount of rainfall and excellent park coverage, one of the highest in the U.S.
California has even more parks, beaten only by cold northern states or Hawaii, while Alabama has the least and experiences the most rain out of the top 10. The driest state featured on the list, unsurprisingly, is New Mexico.
Of course, one could also have drawn a line straight through the southern border states and arrived at nearly the same list, with the exception of Mississippi, which has some of the lowest park coverage of any state in the U.S. (then again, so do Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia).
In other words, if you’re looking to go camping in the winter: go south. You probably didn’t need a study to tell you that, but it never hurts to have some science to back it up.
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.