Modeled view from campsite 3, Green Ridge State Forest: the terrain, sky and sun computed for 22 October, facing the sunrise. Not a photograph. Look around in 360
Modeled view, not a photograph: the terrain and sky around this pitch, computed for 22 October from the elevation model, with the sun where it will be. How it’s made
Primitive site · Green Ridge State Forest, Maryland

Campsite 3

804 ft east-facing valley floor

Site 3 is one of the primitive, first-come campsites scattered through Green Ridge State Forest in western Maryland. It sits at 804 ft on an east-facing valley floor, with running water 90 ft northeast. The drive in is rated “Gravel road”.

Booking
None. Sites are first come, first served.
Fee
$10 a night for a standard site, $20 for a group site, paid at headquarters. Maryland DNR.
Check in
Sign the sheet at headquarters when you arrive, then go to the site.
Is it free tonight?
This page cannot know. The app shows what the sign-up sheet last showed, with the photo's age.
In short

Valley-floor, by a creek, easy in, some noise.

  • Modeled804 ft, east-facing valley floor.
  • ModeledGravel road, 5.1 mi and 14 min from HQ, 2.0 mi of it unpaved.
  • ModeledRunning water 92 ft northeast.
  • ModeledWithin earshot of Interstate 68 (0.8 mi away) and the shooting range (1.9 mi away).
  • CommunityRoom for a pop-up.
  • CommunityDescribed by campers, not yet photographed for Greenridge. Everything else here is modeled.

Modeled from USGS elevation, OpenStreetMap roads and the sun   Community reported by campers

Sun and shade

Hours of direct sun

NESWN 11:00 am · on the pitch
The horizon around site 3, east on the left, south in the middle, west on the right, with the sun's path on 22 October: amber where it reaches the pitch, dashed where the ridge hides it. The fainter arcs are the other dates the site’s 360 view shows. Its highest ridge stands 13.4° above the horizontal to the west. Sampled 144 times out to 9 km from the USGS elevation survey. Every sun time on this page is computed against this line.
8hJan9hFeb10hMar12hApr13hMay13hJun13hJul12hAug11hSep9hOct8hNov8hDec
Hours of direct sun on the pitch by month; the grey behind each bar is the full day the almanac gives with no ridges in the way.

The tallest ground on this site's horizon stands 13.4° above level, to the west.

On the March equinox direct sun reaches the pitch at 8:04 am and leaves it at 6:14 pm: 10 h 12 m of it, against 12 h 12 m of daylight on an open horizon.

Direct sun on the pitch, 2026. “Open horizon” is what the same day would give with no ridges in the way.
DateFirst lightLast lightDirect sunOpen horizon
20 March8:04 am6:14 pm10 h 12 m12 h 12 m
21 June6:12 am7:28 pm13 h 18 m15 h 2 m
21 December8:16 am3:48 pm7 h 34 m9 h 26 m
Lay of the land

The ground

The elevation model puts the pitch at 804 ft, on a valley floor tilted about 7.8° to the east.

Within the 1.2 km square sampled around it, the site stands 28 ft above the lowest ground in that square, which lies 0.4 mi south and 241 ft below the high ground 0.4 mi southeast.

The nearest mapped water is an unnamed run 90 ft northeast. OpenStreetMap maps the channel but has no name for it. Treat any water from it before drinking.

20 ft contours, 1.2 km across, from the USGS elevation survey. Watercourses from OpenStreetMap. The dot is the site.
Next door

Nearby sites

How to choose between them · All 100 sites

On these shortlists: Easy access · Low car · Camper van · Shaded · Near HQ · Beside water · Near a trail · All shortlists

Character

How campers describe it

  • Pop-up camper OK
Evenings here

When the ridge takes the sun

  • 20 MarchSun off the pitch at 6:14 pm, 74 minutes before sunset
  • 21 JuneSun off the pitch at 7:28 pm, 80 minutes before sunset
  • 22 OctoberSun off the pitch at 5:18 pm, 68 minutes before sunset
  • 21 DecemberSun off the pitch at 3:48 pm, 68 minutes before sunset

For tonight, with the moon, darkness and the overnight low, open Site 3 in the app.

What happened near here

When the Mason–Dixon line was resurveyed in 1900, some of the unused English boundary stones turned up as doorsteps and horse blocks in western Washington County.

Resetting the Mason–Dixon stones, 1900–1903 · 1900–1903 · about 0.9 mi from this site, at Mason-Dixon Line: Milestone No. 150

The forest's northern edge is the Mason–Dixon Line. Mason and Dixon ran it here in 1766–67, but their stone markers, cut in England from oolitic limestone, went no farther west than Sideling Hill, because wagons could not haul them on. West of Sideling Hill the line was marked by mounds of earth and stones and wooden posts, and over a century many were ploughed down, washed out or lost in fallen timber. In 1900 Maryland and Pennsylvania agreed to resurvey their common boundary with the help of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The engineers were told to reproduce Mason and Dixon's line exactly, not to correct it, and to save every original stone they could. They found that some unused English stones had been left in western Washington County and had ended up as doorsteps, horse blocks and building stone; they recovered what they could and set them in gaps in the line. Where nothing old could be found they set new posts of magnesian marble from the Beaver Dam quarry in Baltimore County (the MHT forms call it Cockeysville marble), cut with P and M and the dates 1766 and 1902. The last was set in August 1903. Along the forest, stone 152 on Ragged Mountain is an original crown stone, carved with the Penn and Calvert arms and set in the 1767 mound; the 1909 report called it the westernmost of the old monuments then on the boundary.

What is left to see: Several stones stand beside public roads that cross the line north of the forest; most are on private land or in the woods. Look from the road, and leave the stones and the old mounds undisturbed.

“...some were deliberately injured or destroyed by ignorant farmers who seemed to feel a serious injury from the loss of the products of the little space of land occupied by them, and some were badly damaged, in a few cases even removed entire, by relic hunters.”

Report on the Resurvey of the Maryland-Pennsylvania Boundary Part of the Mason and Dixon Line (1909), p. 68
Sources (2)
  1. Report on the Resurvey of the Maryland-Pennsylvania Boundary Part of the Mason and Dixon Line (Harrisburg, 1909), Internet Archive
  2. MHT surveys AL-I-A-065 to AL-I-A-073, AL-II-A-132 to AL-II-A-135, AL-I-B-063, AL-I-B-064, WA-VI-038 (Mason-Dixon milestones 141–156) — via repo summaries

More of the forest’s history

What happened near here

East of Cumberland the National Pike was a chain of turnpikes paid for largely by Baltimore banks, with milestones counting the miles to the Baltimore courthouse.

The National Pike through Flintstone and over Town Hill · 1806–1950s · about 1.5 mi from this site, at Shipway's Restaurant and Garage

US 40 Scenic and MD 144 follow the old National Pike. East of Cumberland it was not the federal National Road, which began at Cumberland and opened in 1818, but a chain of state-chartered turnpikes paid for largely by Baltimore banks, with milestones counting the miles to the Baltimore courthouse. Together they made one road from Baltimore to the Ohio. Through the Cumberland Narrows, the milestone nomination says, passed 'over half of the emigrants and freight' of the early westward migration. Flintstone grew along it. The Flintstone Hotel is said to have been built about 1807 for John Davis, a large landowner, and was an inn by 1850 for road travellers and visitors to the mineral springs; tradition names Lafayette (1824), Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt as guests. A writer in 1882 recalled 'such endless cavalcades of coaches and wagons' and droves of sheep and cattle that 'blocked the way for miles'. Railroads later took much of that traffic. When cars came, the State Roads Commission rebuilt the pike in Allegany County between 1911 and 1915, set a concrete water trough marked 'S.R.C. 1915' by a spring below Town Hill, and replaced wooden bridges with concrete ones, among them a slab bridge over Snib Run (1916) and an open-spandrel arch over Fifteen Mile Creek (1917). Garages, gas pumps, Shipway's Restaurant and the Town Hill Hotel served drivers until later realignments and the National Freeway took the through traffic away.

What is left to see: Drive US 40 Scenic and MD 144 through Flintstone. The Flintstone Hotel and the houses of the Flintstone Historic District are private; see them from the road. The 1915 trough is on the north edge of US 40 Scenic west of Orleans Road; the 1917 open-spandrel arch carries US 40 Scenic over Fifteen Mile Creek at mile 40.8 of the DNR driving tour.

“Those who have participated in the traffic over that renowned thoroughfare are loth to admit that there were ever before such landlords, such taverns, such dinners, such whisky, such bustle, or such endless cavalcades of coaches and wagons as could be seen between Wheeling and Frederick in the palmy days of the old National "pike".”

J. Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland (1882), p. 1329, as quoted in the NR nomination Inns on the National Road
Sources (7)
  1. National Register nomination, Old National Pike Milestones (1975), in MHT file AL-I-B-077
  2. National Register nomination, Inns on the National Road, Allegany and Garrett Counties (1976), in MHT file AL-II-A-001 (Flintstone Hotel)
  3. MHT survey AL-I-A-090, State Roads Commission Water Trough
  4. MHT survey AL-I-A-083, Bridge 1036 (US 40 over Fifteen Mile Creek, 1917)
  5. MHT survey AL-I-A-050, Shipway's Restaurant and Garage
  6. MHT survey AL-I-A-002, Town Hill Hotel
  7. MHT survey AL-II-A-109, Flintstone Historic District

More of the forest’s history

Where these numbers come from

Provenance

Most of this page is computed from public data; the lines marked Community come from campers. The computed data was last rebuilt from its sources on 28 September 2026.

  • Elevation, landform, slope, aspect, contours, the horizon profile and the steepest grade on the approach come from the USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), read from its elevation tiles.
  • Roads and watercourses come from OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed ODbL, as mapped at that rebuild. A road can wash out or close after it.
  • Sun times are when the sun clears that measured skyline, computed with the NOAA Solar Calculator equations. They are for 2026 and shift by a minute or two from year to year.
  • The pin comes from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources campsite GIS layer.
  • Evenings here are the same sun times, on four dates of the year: when the sun drops behind this pitch's measured skyline, against the open-horizon sunset.
  • What happened near here comes from published history: Maryland Historical Trust survey forms, Maryland DNR, the National Park Service and the C&O Canal's historians, and the records themselves. Each story lists its own sources; a story appears only when one of its catalogued places is within about two miles, and the distance is measured, not estimated. All the history sources.
  • The modeled view and the 360 are rendered from a 3D model of the forest, from the pitch, through a whole day in each of five seasons. The ground is the same elevation data plus lidar. Tree heights come from lidar; the species mix and tree form come from US Forest Service inventory plots in Allegany County, so no tree here was surveyed individually. The tent, table and fire ring are the same stand-ins at every site. When a photograph from the site, ours or one a camper sends, shows the model is wrong about where the pitch is or what the ground is like, the model is corrected and the 360 is rendered again. How the 360 is made.
  • Character tags and field notes come from campers. They are judgements rather than measurements.
  • Availability is not on this page because nothing publishes it. The app shows what the last photograph of the sign-up sheet said, and how old that photograph is.

Greenridge is independent and is not affiliated with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources or any government agency. The forest's own rules apply.

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