During my working-stiff years in a major city, I used to watch the masses take off on holiday weekends. They went to the other end of the state, where the lakes, rivers, and forests were. Meanwhile I stayed put in the metro area, and did my favorite bicycling of the year. The traffic was so light!
This technique worked so well it makes me wonder if a camper is more likely to find peace and quiet in a Walmart parking lot, on a holiday weekend, rather than heading for the "backcountry." People can be forgiven for getting discouraged and deciding that there is no such thing as backcountry on a holiday weekend.
But in fact, there is. In summary if you allow yourself to think like everybody else, you will end up camping with everybody else. (And you know what that means.) You just have to be assertive in breaking certain bad habits, such as going to "free campsite" websites and apps. Avoid anyplace that can be recognized as a tourist-brand-name: if it has a brown carsonite sign or a blurb on the internet, you want to stay away from it.
In the desert Southwest you are out to avoid noisy motorsports morons. They are looking for freeway access to large flat easy-to-camp areas where they can congregate and generate noise pollution. They feel some wind chill on their high speed machines, so they tend to get started late in the morning. That leaves mountain bikers and hikers the first couple hours of daylight to enjoy their sport.
It is easy to forget that the ATV ("Quads") industry is virtually dead. Everybody drives a side-by-side these days, and they prefer to drive at high speed on major dirt road loops. That means that there are lots of dead-ends and faint two-tracks that don't get much traffic; nor do the side-by-sides go into arroyos that much, leaving you to have an enjoyable hike in them.
We might get some rain on New Year's Eve and Day. Let's hope that sends hordes of DEPLORABLES back to the city or wherever they come from. Rain and fog can make for some marvelous scenery. I know of no greater contrast than that between fog and lunar mountains.
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