Palomino Campground

Palomino Campground is a newer state park facility with FHU, bathhouse with showers, level sites, mountain and lake views with little pavilions + picnic tables at each campsite. There is pretty prickly pear and ocotillo landscape, plus lake access is within walking distance. All for $18/night— best deal going! We used this campground over Labor Day to visit the Hatch Chile Festival. Also took inner tubes down to the lake for an afternoon swim. Best sites in Palomino are #4 and #5 for views.

(This review covers Caballo Lake State Park: Palamino Campground is the part of the park we stayed in)

Even though this campground is just a short hop from I-25, it feels isolated, and you don’t really hear any road noise from the interstate. The campground has four loops: three loops (Stallion, Appaloosa, and Palamino) located beyond the entrance kiosk, and the Riverside loop which is in a different area south of the dam. All of the first three loops have completely gravel surfaces (except for one or two handicap-accessible sites with concrete pads), and every site comes with a patio with a metal roof, a waist-height rock wall, and a picnic table. Some sites have fire pits, others have a BBQ grills, and a few have both. We stayed in the 7-site Palomino loop, which has full hookups: the other loops were just water and electric. We stayed in site 6, a pull-through site with a tree on each side of the rig and a clear view of the lake from our rear window.

The campground sits about 60 feet above Caballo Lake, with mountains on the opposite shore. The paved main road of the campground continues past the campsites then turns and descends to the lake, ending in a boat ramp. A set of stairs on the edge of our loop connected to the road, making it easy to walk down to the shoreline, where a narrow strip of sand and stones separates the water from the vegetation (though I wonder if that shoreline exists during wetter years). There are flat gravel clearings on either side of the road before the boat ramp where apparently people are allowed to boondock: the clearing on the south end even had some picnic tables. The official boondocking areas ($8 a night) are reachable from a dirt road that starts at the northern gravel clearing, and there is a lot of available space. There are a few dumpsters along that road as well as one small bathhouse and a horse corral.

Both the Stallion and Palamino loops have bathhouses with both bathroom and shower stalls. The Palamino loop had two dumpsters and two recycle bins (one for aluminum cans, the other for plastic bottles), plus the dump station. Other than the one overhead light above the stairs, there were no other lights, but there was a full moon during our stay so I can’t say how dark it gets.

Dogs are welcome at the campground, and you can have dog fences in and around your RV, but our dog wasn’t thrilled about all the gravel, and he got a number of goatheads stuck in his paws whenever he ventured into the desert grasses and vegetation along the road and the edges of the campground. Even the walking trails that wander through the vegetation were gravel. The best place to walk dogs is in the sand along the shoreline.

In terms of cell service, the best speed I got on my Verizon Jetpack with MIMO antenna was 17Mbps down and 11 up, and we had no trouble streaming video except for a few rare moments of buffering The best speed I got on my AT&T smartphone was 146Mbps down and 9 up.

We would stay here again if we were in the area.

There is undeveloped dispersed camping here, a large RV can use the parking area near the boat launch, but the few shady spots are on a spur of a dirt road where you need high clearance or a 4x4. The park could be nice if staff cared. Rangers don't do squat except drive around in pickups with blacked-out windows like wannabe feds, they don't stop if you try to wave them down. They cover 2 small parks- what do they do with their time? Same with maintenance, they don't really clean restrooms, they take the same filthy bucket and toilet brush from stall to stall. They won't even do that if you're in the restroom or outhouse. I don't know what the camp hosts do, they don't use the restrooms so they never notice when lights burn out or toilet rolls are empty. The management here hires hosts for Percha Dam, too- see review... Goathead thorns are everywhere, watch out for your pet's paws and bicycle tires. The lake water is brown and funky. Weekends are noisy and crowded with locals but midweek is quiet. Birding is better at Percha Flats or Riverside. Watch your stuff, someone destroyed the sidewall of one of my tires when I parked near the boat launch. As I said, the rangers don't care. Welcome to rural southern NM- a desert version of Mississippi? You decide.