County Road 48 Dispersed Camping

Let me start out by saying we pulling into Tabor campground only to find the sites are on asphalt... We don’t enjoy camping with people less that 20ft in front of us. This campground worked out! The roads back are a little narrow and bumpy but what can you expect for dirt roads. The height of the pine trees was my main concern as there were some low hanging branches that had me nervous. We were able to pull out 37ft 5er back in there no problem. Our kids could roam along with our lab.. this is our style of camping.. why anyone would want to pay to camp on blacktop with no hookups and right one top of each other is beyond me. If your heading up to Leadville this is the place to camp. Trust me! Enjoy fellow campers!

Looking for a free area just outside of Denver, this is it. After you make the turn south at the base of the dam, the road does get a bit rough. We took a 29’ 5er and it did well except a cabinet popped open and some plates fell out and broke. But small price to pay for some seclusion. Stayed at Sugarloafin two weeks ago when we found this. No reason to have neighbors 8 feet from you.

Definitely some atv and motorcycle noise. We had a group of tenterhooks with teenagers about 80 yards from us, but that’s ok. We can handle that.

About 4 miles to town for those that like the historic areas.

All in all, very good place to get away for a couple of days.

And we did this on a weekend. Got here at about 12:30pm and no issue having our choice of lots of areas with no neighbors.

As to be expected, some glass and broken bottles by the fire pit but we try to clean those up ourselves.

You can probably tell by the number of reviews on this site, this place was crowded.
We were still able to find a spot, away from others, but took a while. The main area where the coordinates send you was fully packed. We kept driving on the main dirt road and then made a left, went downhill for a while. Lots of spots... all taken. Maybe it was the Boom Days celebration at Leadville, I don't know, but we have been boondocking all over southwest CO and we have never seen so many boondockers in one place.
The road going down can sure turn into a mess if it rains a lot. The further in you drive, the worst it gets, and tight turns. To get out, we could either use momentum up the short hill to get back on the county road, I opted for 4WD (momentum is not a good idea with a 31' trailer and a ladder that hang low, and a sewer pipe that hangs even lower!).
Verizon showed 2 bars of LTE, but it was bad. Good for texts and calls, not good for streaming.

Nice and high for peak hot summer months without A/C! Right around 10,000'. Highest incorporated city in the USA.

The boondocking area is lower than the town of Leadville. About 500 or 800' so. The spot I stayed in was a turn just before you get to the big open field area on the left, a mile down 48 or so. I didn't want to stay in the open field as it was too crowded for my tastes.

So I looked around. The last turn on the left before that big field is not accessible for long, large motorhomes, I wouldn't guess. It's the angle of the little hill you have to go down to get back there. It's a bit bumpy as well, but hey, you're boondocking.

Once back there, there are a bunch of spots one can find to camp in. Test your internet, but I recall my Verizon doing fine anywhere back there that I walked.

It was relatively quiet back there. Really liked the area... lots of mountains around. I could work using my ATT and/or Verizon. Nice mountain views, depending on what spot you choose. I got back there easily with my 4wd truck pulling my 24' 4500lb travel trailer. Deep ruts in off roading spots suggest when it gets wet areas may become pretty slick/deep so watch the weather.

No road noise where I was. Great place!

After trying our luck with walk in spots at the lake we ventured over here and were glad we did. Great views, super quiet. Will be back year after year. Leadville has a special place in our heart as it was our first stop many years ago but I can see how most would not be impressed with it.

Stayed one night pretty close to the official coordinates. There were a lot of other campers - too many for my taste, but we still had way more space between rigs than a campground. Main dirt road in is great. The road at the coordinates is very rutted, but doable for any rig. For the number of campers, it was extremely quiet on a Thursday night. Although plenty of airplane noise in the morning.

It's very convenient to town, but the Verizon signal was pretty weak (AT&T was good). With the WeBoost it was just okay.

Wish I had read RVChickadee's review before finding a spot - would have gone farther out.

Not as crowded as some of the people here have said, at least when I stayed! (July 31, 2019)

I made a left maybe a quarter mile before the gps coordinates. Lots of campsites here with fire pits. I didn’t drive around all the loops but there’s maybe 5-10 people camped here and a few other open camp spots. Nice and wide open. Beautiful here!

Sipping an Ayinger Altbairisch Dunkel and enjoying the sunset. Decent amount of mosquitoes tho!

❤️❤️❤️

We stayed here for a little over two weeks in late July 2019. Excellent place to stay and explore the Leadville area. The max stay here is two weeks, but we did end up staying a few extra days to help time our next stop.

Road/Site Condition
The road coming is dirt and gravel. There is no washboard and it is easy to drive on. There are two main areas directly off County Road 48. However, from what I was told, there are many spots throughout the side/back roads to the left. I believe they can be accessed from the first main area or if you keep driving down 48 and turn left it circles around and they are apparently some spots. The two main areas are on the left side of the road. The first one is very close to the paved road and the other is about a mile away. Both are easy to access. We ended up staying at the second area. This area is wide open which was great for our solar. It was not too crowded when we arrived on a Sunday afternoon, but this is a very popular spot, so you are going to have neighbors. Most of the better spots were taken, but we were able to park behind a small row of trees on the left and had a great view of the mountains. There are areas to setup on the right and left side of the entrance “road”. The area is grassy, but surprisingly level. We had no trouble leveling. I would say 5-6 rigs of any size could fit on each side comfortably. At one point, we had more than that near us, but they were all Xscapers and knew each other. They graciously let us join their gatherings and we had a great time. Now we are Xscapers because we joined while staying here! Even with a large crowd, everyone was respectful and observed “quiet hours. It helped that most had solar, so generator noise was minimal.

Scenery
The area is beautiful. There is a great view of Mt. Elbert. The town of Leadville is a cute little mountain town. There are also several lakes and tons of hiking nearby.

Cell/Internet Access
Our cell phones are AT&T and we have AT&T and Verizon hotspots. We had 2-3 bars of Verizon, but it was unusable for me. The data was there, but it was very slow. The booster did not help either. AT&T was great. We had 2-3 bars and the data was speedy. However, the weird thing on AT&T was sporadically, we would lose all signal completely. It would typically last a few hours (one time was almost an entire day) and would randomly come back. We found that if we were out at the site, the city of Leadville was also out. Inconvenient if you have specific times you must work while on the road. Thankfully, I have a flexible schedule and could work around the issue. It was somewhat random, but we did notice it mostly went out in the late afternoon and it happened a bit more frequently on the weekends.

Amenity Access
The City of Leadville has an awesome dump/water station at the sanitation station as you come into town. It is about 5-10 minutes from the site. It is $5 to dump and $2.50 for water. There is a self-pay box, or you can pay inside during normal business hours. Some of the nearby National Park Forest campgrounds have water spigots. I’m not sure you can get water without camping there, but we did. Biggest issue was where to dump trash. All the dumpsters in town we either locked or had no household trash signs. We ended up dumping trash at the Shell’s car vacuum trash cans (our trash bags are small) a time or two. We also found a dumpster near the Silver Dollar National Forest campground that did not have a sign on it, so used that a time or two as well. The town of Leadville has a grocery store, Family Dollar and gas stations that have just about anything you would need while staying. I would recommend visiting Melanzana on the main strip in town. Neat, American-made shop. We did not visit many museums, but there are plenty to choose from. The lady at the Visitor Bureau was very nice and will give you any information you need on the town.

We stayed here for 11 nights at the end of July and beginning of August 2019. We were camped with some friends, and had a wonderful time. The area is large and open, with plenty of level spots to camp.

Leadville is a lovely little town, with most of the amenities we needed for our stay here - including a dump station, albeit not free.

The only point really worth noting is regards the cell signal. Verizon was slow to the point of being almost non-existent. AT&T on the other hand was blazing fast....until the cell tower died. It did this several times during our stay - one time just for 20 minutes, but another time almost for an entire day.

AT&T: 60.2Mbps down / 32Mbps up / 65ms ping
Verizon: 0.55Mbps down / 0.01Mbps up / 155ms ping

Assuming you can deal with the possibility of the cell signal suddenly disappearing (the library in town has very fast WiFi apparently), then this is a great spot.

This site sits on a plateau above Leadville and is surrounded by Mountain views. Short 1/4 mile on pretty good gravel road leads to very level area with several established campsites with fire pits.
Using our Weboost we have 4 bars of 4g on Verizon and could stream video. Also 3-4 bars in At&T on the phones.

Not many campers at this time of year and it was very peaceful

One con was that previous campers are not burying human waste or picking up behind dogs.