BLM Long Term Visitor Areas: LTVA Permits, Fees, and Rules

A Long Term Visitor Area is a piece of BLM desert where you buy a permit and camp for the entire winter instead of moving every 14 days. That is the whole idea. It is a paid, legal exception to the stay limit, sold by the season, and it exists in exactly one part of the country: the Arizona and California deserts near the lower Colorado River. BLM’s national camping page puts the ceiling at seven consecutive months with a permit.

Before any of the numbers below matter: the posted sign at the LTVA entrance and the current guidance from the managing field office beat this page. Fee schedules and season rules get revised, and the host at the entrance station has the version that is in force today.

The permit season is fixed, and it is the whole rule

The LTVA season runs September 15 to April 15. BLM’s supplementary rules for LTVAs state it directly: you must have a permit to use a designated LTVA between those dates. Outside that window the area reverts to something closer to ordinary public land, which is covered further down and is not the same at every LTVA.

The season is why LTVAs exist at all. BLM started the program in 1983 to give winter visitors somewhere to park for months without spreading that use across open desert, and the brochure is candid that concentrating the impact was the point.

Two permits, and what they cost

Checked on BLM’s own LTVA pages on July 18, 2026:

• Long-term permit: $180. Valid for the entire season or any part of it, September 15 through April 15.
• Short-visit permit: $40. Valid for any 14 consecutive days from purchase.

Two things about those numbers. First, the short-visit permit is renewable without limit. BLM’s brochure states you can buy an unlimited quantity of additional short-visit permits, so nobody is capping you at 14 days. Buying five of them just costs more than the long-term permit does, which is the arithmetic the pricing is built on.

Second, individual LTVAs list their own extra tiers. The Hot Springs LTVA page in California also lists an $80 four-week stay alongside the $180 and the $40. So the two-permit description is the national frame, not a promise about the specific booth you pull up to.

One permit covers all of them. BLM’s brochure says both permit types are valid at any designated LTVA and that holders may move from one to another without paying again. If you want to spend six weeks in California and then move to Arizona, that is one $180 permit, not two.

Federal recreation passes do nothing here. The brochure states the Golden Eagle, Golden Age, Golden Access, and America the Beautiful discounts do not apply to LTVA fees, because an LTVA is a special permit area rather than a developed campground.

You also cannot buy a permit by mail. The brochure says permits come from LTVA host entrance stations or from the Yuma, Palm Springs-South Coast, or El Centro field offices in person.

Which LTVAs exist

BLM’s national camping page names seven: Hot Spring, Tamarisk, Pilot Knob, Mule Mountain, Midland, La Posa, and Imperial Dam. These are published federal designations, not anything sensitive, so naming them is fine.

We opened four of the seven pages individually and can confirm those. La Posa and Imperial Dam are in Arizona. Midland and Hot Springs are in California. We did not open the Tamarisk, Pilot Knob, or Mule Mountain pages, so we are not going to state their states or their services here.

How this differs from the 14-day rule

This is the part worth being precise about, because the 14-day rule is most people’s mental model of BLM camping and the LTVA is a deliberate carve-out from it.

Outside an LTVA, BLM’s brochure describes the standard: you may camp in one location on undeveloped public land for up to 14 days in any 28-day period at no charge, unless otherwise posted, and after 14 days you must move to a new site outside a 25-mile radius of the original campsite. Our stay limits guide covers how that rolling window actually counts and why field offices publish different numbers for it.

Inside an LTVA, during the permit season, you pay and you stay. The clock and the 25-mile move go away. What replaces them is a different set of conditions, and those conditions are the real trade.

The conditions that replace the clock

From BLM’s LTVA supplementary rules:

• Your rig has to stay mobile. Campers, trailers, and other dwelling units must remain mobile, and wheels must remain on all wheeled vehicles. Putting a rig on blocks for the winter is not allowed.
• You cannot hold a site by leaving stuff on it. Do not leave your camping unit or campsite unoccupied for more than five days unless a BLM officer approves it in advance.

Those two rules do the same job the 14-day limit does elsewhere: they keep the area recreational rather than residential, which is the line BLM enforces on public land generally. Our BLM camping rules page covers that distinction in more detail.

Services vary more than the price does

The permit price is flat across LTVAs. The services are not, and this is where people get caught.

BLM’s brochure sets the baseline low: in most cases running water, showers, and bathrooms are not available on site, and garbage and sewage must be transported by visitors to the nearest disposal site.

The published range at the three sites we checked:

• La Posa (Arizona): approximately 11,400 acres, 10 ADA accessible vault toilets, 8 water faucets, a dry dump station, a dump station with water, trash service, plus a dance floor and ramada.
• Imperial Dam (Arizona): approximately 3,500 acres, two restroom facilities with outdoor showers, trash service, grey water dump sites, a black water dump site with water, dance floor and ramadas.
• Midland (California): telephone and trash collection. The page states vault toilets are not provided, and that a host and services are not provided during the off-season.

Same $180 either way. Plan your water and waste around the specific LTVA, not the program. If you are working out haul distances, our dump station guide covers the general problem.

Self-contained, and what that word means here

BLM defines it numerically. A self-contained unit is one with a permanently affixed wastewater holding tank of at least 10-gallon capacity. That excludes a lot of tent and truck setups, and a bucket does not count.

The brochure states that non-self-contained units are allowed only at Mule Mountain, Imperial, and La Posa. Midland’s own page is blunter: campers must be 100 percent self-contained for waste and grey water to use the area, and short-term camping without self-containment is not allowed in the Midland LTVA campsites.

If you are in a car, a tent, or a van with no black tank, the LTVA list shrinks to three before you have even looked at a map.

Off-season is not one rule either

After April 15 the LTVAs do not all behave the same way, and this surprised us enough to be worth stating.

• La Posa and Imperial Dam publish off-season fees for April 16 through September 14: $10 per vehicle for day use, $15 per vehicle overnight, or $75 annually per vehicle, covering up to 5 people with $1 for each additional person. La Posa’s page states the off-season maximum stay is 14 days in a 28-day period.
• Hot Springs lists 14-day camping as free from April 16 to September 14.

So “free in summer” is true at one LTVA we checked and not at two others. Read the page for the specific area, or ask the field office. For where LTVAs sit in a broader winter plan, see snowbird routes, and for what else is legal nearby, the free camping state pages carry what we have verified per state.