Morefield Campground

Great campground. Wonderful amenities with campsites offering plenty of shade and privacy.

$25/night tent camping

We found a great site. There IS wifi here in the tent camping sites, stronger as you get closer to the bathrooms.

As other reviews have said, the reservation systems is different that most other places. If you make reservation, it only gives you the right to camp at Morefield. You are not assigned a site, nor can your secure a specific site number.

The campsite is managed by Aramark. I immediately had flashbacks to being in college during the 70's when Aramark ran the dorm food at my university.

I called Aramark to make a reservation. I called twice. The first time for general information and the second time to make the reservation. Both individuals were working off of a script. I said I wanted an RV site and gave them my size requirements. The standard reply was all RV sites can accommodate 46'. I disagree. If you have a towable less than 25', some of the sites work to park your tow vehicle along side your trailer. Some sites were barely large enough to park a Yugo if you were tent camping. This is definitely not a large rig campground.

As mentioned above, the reservation only gives you right to camp at a site. When you arrive, if is basically first come, first serve. If you a see a site that works for you, then grab it before someone else does. Try not to arrive after dark. We got lucky with the site we secured.

The bathrooms were not cleaned during the duration of our stay. The handle of the faucet in the men's room was missing. They do not provide any paper towels or hand dryers. We did use the shower facilities. It would be nice to add a couple of garment hooks and improve the lighting.

Otherwise, Mesa Verde is a fantastic national park. You have to immerse your self into what you are looking at and what life was like during the time the Pueblos occupied this area.

We camped here in the off season, and for $20 a night we'd love to have at least water. Despite all the signs telling you the campground is closed, you can in fact stay here before the concierge officially opens. However, the dump station and all the water spigots are closed, although the bathrooms are open. It's definitely cheaper than the RV parks in town (those were closer to $45) and not having to drive 30 extra minutes into the park is a bonus.

There are some great hiking trails right from the campground, but the ruins and everything else are another long haul up the road (no trailers allowed).

There aren't many sites that can accommodate even a 27' Airstream, so we drove around for awhile until we found one we liked.

We pulled some magic with our directional antenna and cell booster and managed to pull in 3 bars of Verizon 4G, although it does vary a bit. Our cell phones roam to AT&T and its spotty, but we occasionally get coverage inside the campground.

I can imagine how green this place would be in the summer! We'll just have to come back!

We tore up the ground trying to get into our spot, though we've got exceptionally low clearance. I even broke the hitchball that secures our sway bar in place trying to maneuver into our spot.

That's right, I broke the hitchball and was still able to go hiking a few hours later. I'm just a man like that, what can I say.

Where is my spittoon again...?

Anyway, it snowed. That was unexpected. And it was then hot. That was welcome.

Mesa Verde is a gorgeous park but it's also crazy windy and while I figured it was just par for the course when our first child blew away, I started considering my retirement plan of mooching off of the youngsters as the second one disappeared into a cliffside dwelling hole never to be seen again. Still, I'd return, I think I might just wait until we've popped out 10 or 15 more younginz.

Oh, oh, oh though I should mention, in the "on season" (when all of those wild and crazy kids who live in the hills of southwestern Colorado seep out of the woodwork, leave their quads behind and come up here to get rowdy with a good, debaucherous ranger program) there's a gas station very nearby, and a camping store with everything from magnets touting the wonders of Mesa Verde's past to your typical gas station fare.

I knew going in that we couldn't expect any cell connectivity. I also knew that the $30 price was relatively high for a dry site in a national park. The trade-off was location. It's 15 minutes closer to the sights of Mesa Verde than anything else. What I didn't expect was the overgrown facilities. The campground had been laid out with asphalt roads and gravel pads. Many of the pads were now overgrown. Much of the grass was belly-high to a horse, making the place look like no one cared. Not what I'd expect for a $30 price tag.

Since we had our geezer pass in hand, the 50% discount got the price to about where it should be - $15.

They advertised WiFi in the campground. Many of the restrooms did have access points mounted on the eaves but even standing within 5 feet, signal strength was 3 bars at best but it really didn't matter since their router couldn't get to a DNS server. Other locations in the park did have good public wifi, but the campground wasn't working.

Many of the sites were artificially short with curb stops limiting the space. Even with our limited lenth, we wouldn't fit in 50% of the spaces. It was interesting watching the 28' TT or 35' Class A units circling the campground, trying to find something they'd fit in. Meanwhile, on July 5th, the campground was less than 20% (likely closer to 10%) full.

We enjoyed our stay here and visit to the park. It's a little run down side like a lot of the National Park campgrounds run by government contractors.

As others have noted, Morefield campground has areas that are overgrown and sites that appear abandoned. The Wifi is spotty but cell service is adequate, but if you are visiting a National Park you're not there for connectivity, you are there for beauty, quiet, stillness and night skies filled with stars. Even in July we were happily surprised at small crowds in Mesa Verde compared to the bigger parks such as Grand Canyon and Yellowstone.

Well, you can't beat the location. Being inside the park is probably the biggest thing going for this campground. Being 10-15 minutes closer to the tours than the next closest campgrounds makes a difference. We stayed at one of the 15 full hookup campsites and while it wasn't amazing, it met our needs for our 1 night stay. We were in the Ute Loop. Our site was level, back-in, graveled, sparce, shadeless and rather blah. But, we did have fantastic wifi, saw a bunch of deer, enjoyed a nice sunrise and all-in-all, it wasn't bad and for the price for full hookups inside the park, I felt it was fair.

The village area is pretty robust. Gas station (that didn't work when I was there in June), showers, laundry, restaurant (specialty seems to be all-u-can-eat pancakes for $8/pp), ranger station, gift shop and a pretty good grocery store are all offered at the entrance to the campground. I was most impressed with the grocery store as they had wine and craft beer which is a hard find on the road.

We got there at noon the first day and were able to get tour tickets to 3:00 Balcony House, 5:00 Cliff Palace and 9:00 the next morning Long House. I wouldn't have done it any other way and recommend this schedule if you only have 24 hours.

I'd stay here again but only to be close to the park...not because the park is amazing. Check out our blog in the link above for a much more thorough review.