Campground rules, fires, and the firewood commandment

2026 season. Park-specific rules (especially alcohol) live on each park’s page — check yours.

The firewood commandment

If you remember one rule from this entire site, make it this one: don’t move firewood. Emerald ash borer, oak wilt, hemlock woolly adelgid — the invasive insects and diseases that have killed tens of millions of Michigan trees travel in firewood, invisibly. The fix is simple: buy it where you burn it, from the park, a store, or the roadside stand near every campground, or buy certified heat-treated wood. Your home woodpile stays home. Rangers and foresters don’t beg about much; they beg about this. (Want to gather wood instead? Dead-and-down fuelwood from state forest is its own legal, permitted tradition — the foraging hub explains.)

The rules of the campground

• Quiet hours, 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. — generators included. Headlamps down at night; sound carries on a lake.
• Pets: welcome at campsites on a 6-foot leash, under control, waste picked up; not in buildings; pet-friendly cabins exist with a nightly fee.
• Fires in the rings only, attended, and drowned before bed — and check for burn bans in dry stretches.
• Alcohol: allowed at most campsites most of the year, but a number of parks ban it seasonally (roughly spring through Labor Day) in some or all areas, day-use beaches most commonly. There is no universal answer — check your park’s page before packing the cooler.
• Two vehicles max per site; visitors 8 a.m.–10 p.m.; check-in 3 p.m., checkout 1 p.m.
• Stay limit: 15 consecutive nights. And a campsite needs an actual camper — a tent “holding” a site for friends arriving “eventually” is the classic ranger conversation.

The neighborly layer

The unwritten rules are simpler: don’t walk through occupied sites, take the long way to the water spigot, keep the dish station cleaner than you found it, and if you arrive after quiet hours, set up like a burglar — quietly, lights low, introductions in the morning. Rangers enforce the printed list; your loop-mates remember the rest.

The signpost

The full rules live at Michigan.gov/StateParks; fire conditions at Michigan.gov/BurnPermit. Start with Camping in Michigan, explained.