For us, backpacking has been how we boondock. Front country, we prefer to be in a campground, primitive though it may be. At least there, among other things, there is some maintenance. Some of the boondocking sites we pass regularly tend to resemble a moonscape. Weird as it sounds, it seems like, in many places, we leave less impact by using a campground.
On that trip where we got shut out of Needles, we'd been in the Moab area for a week or two, so that was our last stop on the way home. We went back a year or two later, for Labor Day weekend, starting out as some unearthly hour from ABQ - and the campground never filled. Go figure.
as someone has already commented, the surge in people camping has had a big impact on boondocking too, at least in NM and CO. AZ closed one area for a couple of years, to dispersed camping (& hiking, IIRC) because of wear and tear on the area. CO has closed some areas, and is going to designated boondocking sites in some (with fire rings). The Gila region in NM has a huge trash problem last year. Camping in a campgrounds 30 years ago in the Jemez (NM), there were folks camping at large down the road, who walked tot he campground, to use the vault toilets and get water. That was a bizarre weekend Memorial Day, the campground we were in never filled but we woke up in the middle of the night to a raucous party in the next site - no one there when we went to sleep, no one there in the morning. We don't camp in the easily accessible areas from Sante Fe and ABQ much any more. Took us a long time after that trip to even think about camping on holidays - even now, we go somewhere that is a good 6-8 hours from a large city.
